In short: Hermes 3000 is named after a typewriter. The Hermes 3000 is a portable typewriter that Paillard built in Yverdon, Switzerland, from 1958. Sylvia Plath wrote "The Bell Jar" on her mint-green Hermes 3000, Jack Kerouac's last typewriter was one, and Larry McMurtry thanked his Hermes 3000 on live television at the 2006 Golden Globes. We chose the name because the machine stands for something that matters to us: a tool that helps you write and never writes for you. And because it may soon get a successor you can touch.
Type "Hermes 3000" into a search engine and you will often land on a green typewriter first. That is not an accident; it is the point. Here is the story behind the name.
The machine
The Hermes 3000 came out in 1958 as the successor to the Hermes 2000. It was built by Paillard in Yverdon on Lake Neuchâtel, the same company that made the Hermes Baby. It was a portable: flat, heavy enough not to wander while you type, light enough for a suitcase. Most came in a pale green that collectors now call mint or seafoam.
Typewriter enthusiasts count it among the best portables ever made. For us, something else counts: what was written on it.
Who wrote on it
| Who | What | Record |
|---|---|---|
| Sylvia Plath | "The Bell Jar", 1961 | bought her Hermes 3000 in Boston in 1959; auctioned in London in 2018 |
| Jack Kerouac | his last typewriter, work on "Vanity of Duluoz" | sold at Christie's in 2010 for $22,500 |
| Larry McMurtry | screenplay of "Brokeback Mountain" (with Diana Ossana) | Golden Globes acceptance speech, 2006 |
| Eugène Ionesco | among its owners | – |
Sylvia Plath bought her mint-green Hermes 3000 in Boston in 1959 and wrote "The Bell Jar" on it in 1961. The machine stayed in the family after her death until her daughter Frieda Hughes put it up for auction in 2018.
Jack Kerouac wrote on a Hermes 3000 in his last years, including work on "Vanity of Duluoz". Christie's sold it in 2010 as his "last typewriter".
Larry McMurtry gave one of the finest acceptance speeches any writer has given. Winning the 2006 Golden Globe for the screenplay of "Brokeback Mountain", he thanked his typewriter first: his Hermes 3000, "surely one of the noblest instruments of European genius", which had kept him for thirty years "out of the dry embrace of the computer".
Eugène Ionesco, master of the theatre of the absurd, was among its owners too.
Why a typewriter, of all things?
McMurtry's line about the "dry embrace of the computer" touches something we take seriously. A typewriter does not write for you. It suggests nothing, corrects nothing, distracts you with nothing. It does exactly one thing: it puts your own sentences on paper, one keystroke at a time.
Hermes 3000 is AI software, and that is not a contradiction. The AI reads along, gives feedback, finds contradictions and keeps track of a three-hundred-page book. How much it writes is up to you, from feedback only to active help. In the end the book should sound like you, not like a machine. The old Hermes is our yardstick: a tool that serves you, not one that takes your place.
The typewriter even lives on in a number we work with every day. The German standard page (Normseite), which publishers use to measure a manuscript, has 1,800 characters: 30 lines of 60 keystrokes, the format of the typewriter era. More in our article on the standard page, publishing's hidden unit.
And the Hermes Baby?
Its little sister, the Hermes Baby of 1935, has a legend of its own. It was one of the first truly portable typewriters and travelled with many writers through the twentieth century. Our name follows the 3000, though: the machine on which the books were written that brought us to this project.
Soon something you can touch?
Software can do a lot. One thing it cannot do: protect you from your own screen. Next to the manuscript wait the browser, the inbox, the phone. The Hermes 3000 never had that problem. All it could do was write.
We are tinkering with an idea that starts exactly there. We are not saying more yet, only this much: it could become something you put on your desk, that can do nothing but write, and that still knows your book in Hermes 3000. If it comes to something, you will read about it here first.
Frequently asked questions
Where does the name Hermes 3000 come from?
From the Hermes 3000 portable typewriter, built by Paillard in Switzerland from 1958. Sylvia Plath and Jack Kerouac, among others, wrote on it.
Is Hermes 3000 related to the typewriter maker?
No. Hermes 3000 is book-writing software by HybridAI GmbH in Cologne, Germany. The name is a tribute to the typewriter, not a link to its maker.
Which typewriter did Sylvia Plath write "The Bell Jar" on?
Her mint-green Hermes 3000, bought in Boston in 1959. It was auctioned in London in 2018.
What is Hermes 3000 today?
Writing software with AI for novels, non-fiction and life stories: the AI knows your book's characters, places and plot, gives feedback and takes you all the way to print-ready typesetting. The first 50 standard pages are free.
Try it with your own book. You will not need a green typewriter.