Typewriters

These are the typewriters I now have.

First up is an Olympia that was given to me as a high school graduation present by my parents. It is a manual typewriter using standard ribbons. It is "portable" in the same way that a BAR was portable; it's one heavy machine. I now have it at Ye Olde Salte Mine for the occasions when I need a typewriter for forms and labels and things like that there.

I was probably one of handful of kids who showed up at college that year with a manual typewriter.[1] Dad said that he gave me that one because it was far less likely to be stolen. Mom said she thought that he did so because he was cheap. It was good for science papers as I could roll in a sheet of letter paper sideways for typing in the headers of graphs.

I do not have a proper typing pad for the machine, so I chopped up a mouse pad.

This is a Remington portable that was in Mom's basement. It was apparently cleaned at one time and then used little thereafter as the ribbon is still good and the typefaces are clean The white stuff around the arc of the typefaces is aluminum oxide; it is corroding right there. When I tried it out yesterday, it double-spaced on some of the letters, so that "were" looks like "w ere".


I have removed the ribbon reel cover for this shot. One of the drawbacks of this typewriter is that it does not use packaged ribbons. Apparently, one has to feed a fresh ribbon onto the rolls. That had to be messy.



This is a Royal portable that I bought at a yard sale years ago for $5. All it needed was a new ribbon.



Fortunately, it will take a generic ribbon. I used it at Ye Olde Salte Mine for awhile, until I did a draft of a lease on a Blumberg form and my boss said that it appeared as though it had been typed in the 1940s. That's when I brought in my Olympia with a bit more modern typeface.


I suppose that, for appearances' sakes, I should get the dual red/black ribbons. But I've never had a use for the red ink ones. They were probably used for typing up financial reports. I was using a ribbon that had correcting stuff on the bottom, until I realized that the white correcting shit was flaking off into the guts of the machine.[2]

[1] Kids with money paid other kids to type their papers for them. There were also a few kids with money who had IBM Selectrics (the "ball writers") with proportional fonts. I think those typewriters were very costly back then.

[2] Yes, I know about the rumors that Sarah Palin (voted "Most Likely to be a Vic on C.O.P.S.") is going to divorce Todd and then she is moving, with her spawn, to Montana. Spare me, OK?