Polt is also a typewriter enthusiast. He has written a book on typewriters in the twenty-first century, maintains a website on typewriters, and is a former editor of ETCetera, The Journal of The Typewriter Collectors’ Association. He appears in the 2016 documentary California Typewriter. He founded Loose Dog Press, a publishing house devoted to books of interest to typewriter users and collectors.
Polt also runs a literary society devoted to American writer Harry Stephen Keeler.
Works
As author
Heidegger on Presence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025)
Evertype: A Novel (Cincinnati: Loose Dog Press, 2025)
Time and Trauma: Thinking through Heidegger in the Thirties (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2019)
The Typewriter Revolution: A Typist's Companion for the 21st Century (Woodstock, VT: The Countryman Press, 2015)
The Emergency of Being: On Heidegger's "Contributions to Philosophy" (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006)
Heidegger: An Introduction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999; second, revised edition, 2025).
As editor and co-editor
Richard Polt and Jon Wittrock (eds.), The Task of Philosophy in the Anthropocene: Axial Echoes in Global Space (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018)
Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (eds.), After Heidegger? (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017)
Richard Polt and Gregory Fried (eds.), A Companion to Heidegger's "Introduction to Metaphysics" (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001)
As translator and co-translator
Martin Heidegger, Being and Truth, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010)
Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2000; 2nd edition, 2014)