What's that, readers? You know what a Stradivarius is but you've never heard of a Blickensderfer? Well, the Blickensderfer company of the US made typewriters that as objects seem as beautiful, in their way, as the violins and cellos made by the Stradivari workshop.

You can test the validity of this outrageous-sounding assertion (which is mine, not Messenger's) by going to the Blickensderfer-enriched display at the Canberra Museum and Gallery of 102 of the several hundred rare and lovely and historically important typewriters Messenger has collected. The display, From A to Z. Robert Messenger's typewriters, opens this Saturday.

If you struggle with the idea of typewriters as things of beauty then the display will almost certainly convert you. Messenger himself is in no doubt. ''I would think that of all the machines that have ever been made, [the typewriter] is probably the most attractive,'' he enthused yesterday.

Yes, the loveliest typewriters have a seductive mix of form and function. Made to do work (they are tools, really) they somehow manage to look like works of art too.

The CMAG display is only a fraction of Messenger's whole collection.

''About eight or nine years ago I set out to find models of the first two typewriters I ever used [one he was given, as a child, in 1957, and the second he used when he began work as a newspaper journalist in the mid-1960s]. Well, I did discover those models on eBay but [laughing] I discovered eBay at the same time! Sadly for me those two typewriters very quickly turned into 902, so it's a fairly vast collection.''

Jewels of the displayed 102 include Miles Franklin's very own typewriter and of course a divine Blickensderfer.

''Miles Franklin's own typewriter is a typewriter I rescued from New York. It only cost me $37. When it arrived here, how I came upon the Miles Franklin connection is that I discovered it was sold in Pitt Street in Sydney in the early 1920s. I put my thinking cap on and wondered who could have bought a typewriter in Pitt Street, Sydney, and taken it to New York? Miles Franklin's name popped into my head. I went down to the National Library and they very kindly dug out original typewritten manuscripts by Franklin and these were then taken to forensic scientists and compared with pieces I'd typed on that typewriter. And we found a perfect match. So that was a real needle in a haystack thing. The way that a typeslug will hit a piece of paper … leaves a distinct fingerprint. So you can match them and many famous criminal cases have come down to this [for example by enabling the tracing of typed ransom notes] so, yes, people have gone to the gallows for using a particular typewriter!''

Messenger is sure visitors to the exhibition will become Blickensderfer besotted.

''It is a brilliant machine. For example it even has a little ink pad at the back. It doesn't have a ribbon. The ink is still in there. Any of the printers you may have today attached to your computer, they're not going to last 117 years, I'll guarantee. But this one still works.''

See From A to Z: Robert Messenger's typewriters exhibition at the Canberra Museum and Gallery. The exhibition continues until September 16.