For lovers of literature, the desire to touch, see, or even use the tools of a writing hero runs deep. We are irresistibly drawn to the physical objects - the pens, notebooks, and desks - that connect a writer’s mind to the printed page. This fascination, a kind of literary fetishization, carries the tantalising hope that some creative magic might transfer through these objects into our own hands.

Until the 1990s, this material connection was embodied by the typewriter. Today’s biographers wrestle with inaccessible hard drives and digital files, but for mid-20th-century writers, archives are rich with tangible, typewritten, artefacts. Yet one of the most famous typewriters of all, the machine George Orwell used to complete Nineteen Eighty Four, has mysteriously vanished. And an intriguing thread of the story leads straight to Leith.

Orwell’s typewriter achieved fabled status on the remote Isle of Jura, where a gravely ill Orwell, suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis, ‘bashed out’ much of the novel’s final draft at the farmhouse Barnhill. Identification of the typewriter model comes from a photograph of Orwell at his desk. Though the words on the case are blurred, two visible words on the right-hand side - the upper slightly shorter than the lower - reveal the model as a Home Portable. Most likely, it was a Remington Home Portable compact machine produced in the mid-1930s.

Orwell wrote in a letter dated 15 November 1948: “I am just on the grisly job of typing out my novel. I can’t type much because it tires me too much to sit up at [the] table...” The effort was monumental, and the typewriter was the essential witness to his final, towering vision.

This sense of urgency was recently echoed in Edinburgh through artist Hans K. Clausen and his installation The Winston Smith Library of Victory and Truth, briefly housed at the Out of the Blue Drill Hall. The installation features the same model of Remington, allowing visitors to experience the tactile, forward-driving nature of manual typing; you must simply plough on, unlike the easy revisions afforded by a computer screen. For Clausen, whose work explores the “meaning we bestow on objects,” the rediscovery of the actual machine would be a fitting conclusion.

During Clausen’s talk about his installation, the most tantalising local rumour surfaced: the actual Remington used for 1984 supposedly passed through Edinburgh’s counter-cultural scene before being lost in a pub… in Leith.

Research by Darcy Moore sheds light on Orwell’s typewriter’s tragic trajectory after his death. The chain of possession reportedly began in the 1960s, when Sonia Orwell, Orwell’s widow, gave the typewriter to Jim Haynes, the Edinburgh-based publisher and cultural impresario. Haynes, who worked as an editor for the underground newspaper International Times, knew Sonia Orwell personally, even renting a flat from her for several months.

A photograph in Haynes’ book Thanks for Coming shows a typewriter resembling the one Orwell used on Jura. Haynes reportedly displayed the machine in his Paperback bookshop (on Charles Street), promoting 1984 and other Orwell titles.

The story continues that Haynes, deeply involved in the counter-culture movement, loaned the typewriter to Tom McGrath, a prominent Scottish poet and founder editor of International Times. Tragically, Haynes suspects that McGrath, struggling with heroin addiction, ultimately sold the historic typewriter somewhere in Scotland to fund his habit, leading to the artefact’s mysterious disappearance.

Local lore adds a final twist: McGrath is said to have sold the typewriter in a Leith pub before his death. Haynes himself confirmed that McGrath later lived in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and though Haynes frequently inquired about the machine, McGrath “laughed and said he did not know what I was talking about.”

The connection is striking: the machine that once documented Orwell’s warnings about authoritarianism ended up fuelling a counter-cultural movement, only to vanish amid addiction and misfortune. That its final disappearance is rumoured to have occurred in Leith lends the story a potent local charge.

Beyond its literary mystique, the missing Remington is a fragment of cultural history linking Jura, London, Edinburgh, and Leith. Finding it would not only restore a major artefact to Orwell’s legacy but reclaim a tangible piece of Scotland’s cultural history; an object that helped shape a warning that remains painfully relevant today.

The possibility that this significant piece of 20th-century political and literary history is tucked away in a Leith attic or basement continues to fascinate, turning a local rumour into a major cultural mystery.