Easily Suede

Aside from the obnoxious wrinkle in the paper, I think it looks pretty good.



And it certainly cushioned the blows, too. And no punch-outs on my paper, either. Now we see how it does in the face of a 30-day marathon typing extravaganza.

Striptease

Presented on a strip of adding-machine tape on a very slippery platen. Looks like it's time to try the brake fluid trick, too. Typewriter images from shopgoodwill.com

From the keys of a Royal 1947 Quiet De Luxe

Confessions

Not time-traveling: actually from May 2012. This machine has been in hiding for a while.

• I didn't need more, dammit! at Filthy Platen

Typed on a little-seen 1947 Royal Quiet De Luxe

Back in Brown

Some photos from during the cleaning and assessment process.

The overall condition of the machine is good: better than I remembered when I scouted it out in the store. It still has a lot of function left in it.

Thanks to the tab mechanism, the back panel of the HH is curved, which makes the machine wobble around when you balance it on its back. It's like a tortoise that's been cruelly inverted in its shell.




I wasn't paying close enough attention last time, as it turns out this is an elite type machine. Not my preferred size, but the face is clean and easy to read, especially now that the slugs have been cleaned out. None of the rustiness impedes the machine's functions.

Summer Project

A digital update, since the machine in question is too cruddy to handle a typecast right now...

My wife spotted it at Salvation Army, and I did a follow-up visit: a Royal HH (standard) with my preferred pica typeface, but in a neglected state of affairs. Everything works, but is under a light layer of grime, gunk, dust, dirt, and in some places, rust. Good bones are underneath, though, just waiting to be revealed again.


Imagine this, but on a whole-machine scale.

The margins lack magic right now, as their rail is too gummy for them to slide freely, but after a quick consult with Alan, Richard, and Ryan -- all known HH owners -- I confirmed that the margins are settable by hand, albeit with some yoga-like manipulations to apply both the margin release button and reach under the carriage.


Not entirely magical yet.

I need another standard machine like I need a hole in the head, but my wife was pretty encouraging of this machine, sending me tempting snapshots from her phone and saying things like "I'm not crazy about you collecting, but now I know a good machine when I see one." And this despite the price and our current household budget-tightening. The manager knows me, though, at least by sight, and he offered to knock 50% off the price. Sold!

After an uneventful lug home, the HH is on the sideboard, waiting for the weather to warm up and dry out for real so it can become my summer cleaning project.

Will it look like Alan's when I'm done? That would be nice, certainly. Check back later and we'll see how the project is going.

Games (Old) People Play

Typed on a 1930s Royal Model "O"

Royal Rising

The view from last November

Wheeled el Beast out of its summering spot last night and have it set up. I think I need to wind on a fresh ribbon and clean out the typeslugs, but it's pretty much ready. Now it's a matter of sorting through my notes to find out if I'm ready.

Drive-Thru Book Review: This One's for the Ladies

The Wonderful Writing Machine
by Bruce Bliven, Jr.
no ISBN, search on AbeBooks.com

I mentioned in a previous post that I met up with the guys filming the typewriter documentary, and that my interview was held in a local bookstore. Well, you have them to thank for this review, since the owner of the bookstore pulled this title off the shelf for me when I went out to talk with him face-to-face about the possibility of using his shop. My copy of this book is pretty beat up: it's a discard from a local library, though it amazingly still has its dust jacket on it. The book was written in 1954, and in the forward, the author thanks Royal Typewriter Company "[f]or complete freedom to explore its offices, factories and files, along with permissions to interrupt its busy personnel with my often foolish questions [...]" That little forward, plus the fact that this was written in 1954, led me to two immediate conclusions:

• The book will be filled with shameless Royal cheerleading
• The book will be filled with the pervasive sexism of the time

In other words, a great read. Of course I bought it and brought it home. Color me surprised, then, when I read all the way through it, and found almost none of what I'd expected. Almost. But more on that in a bit.

What I found, much to my surprise and delight, was a well-written, entertaining, and sometimes funny historical journey through the life of the typewriter, from the first crude inventions, to Sholes and the Remington partnership, through the adoption of the typewriter as a necessary tool of business. There's some hints that the manual, mechanical machine's days are numbered -- a brief allusion to advantages of the electric machine, and discussion of the labor-intensive nature of typewriter manufacture and adjustment -- but this book is clearly a product of the peak of the typewriter age. Classic photos and illustrations are sprinkled throughout the book, with (I assume) Bliven's captions: several photos of pre-Sholes machines, various period photos of "stylish typists" of the early twentieth century, and at the end -- and only the end -- photos from the Royal factory, which surely seemed high-tech and impressive in their day (hand-grinding the segment, for instance. Ye gods.)

Only in the last quarter of the book does Bliven really show allegiance to Royal, and even then it's a smirking one. The hijinks of one of Royal's more infamous marketing guys and his stunt to drop typewriters on parachutes from a plane, for example: that's good reading, no matter what your brand preference. Chapter 11 ("Adjuster at Work") goes on a bit, but as a contemporary caretaker of a machine or two *cough* it's a window into the level of attention that surely went into the big Royal I have at home. Somebody spent a few hours with it, just making sure the N lined up with the A and the O. Somebody in a big factory wing, seated side-by-side with a few dozen other somebodies.

The only cringe-worthy portion of the book is Bliven referring to "the girls" or "your girl" when referring to the typist, but again, this happens later in the book: late enough that it makes me wonder if it was grafted on. (The forward indicates that portions of the book were previously published in Atlantic Monthly and Collier's magazines.) Through the earlier chapters, Bliven is a good deal more equitable, and sometimes sounds downright progressive, even. But taken as a whole, it's fun book, and worth checking out if you can find a copy.

Appreciated

Typed on "Etta," the 1953 Royal Quiet DeLuxe

• ITAM: Deek's modest proposal
  

Who's Ready?

Oh, you know I am...

Seein' Green

I won't even preface this one with excuses, I'll just jump right to the money shot:

Yes, it's another super-minimal function travel typewriter, and it's darn cute, to boot. I got a complement from someone on it's handsome carrying case. ("That's a cool bag," he said, likely not knowing what was inside.) And even my wife thought it cute and surprisingly small, after I skulked back home with That Guilty Look on my face.

I paid too much, but I've already justified that by figuring that I've done well this summer by thrifted and free finds, and shopping at Goodwill is kind of like giving to a charity, and... and... and...

My karmic balance has been righted, I say. Namaste.

Of course, my real purpose was not to be parted from my green by buying something green. But intentions have a way of slipping through your fingers. I also didn't intend to bring home the 2008 copy of Writer's Market, and yet there it was, sitting in my other hand at checkout. I was clearly in a transcendental state and not fettered by rational thinking (as usual.) But my wife's been making noises about doing a little short-fiction writing of her own -- little hope of swaying her to typers, as of yet -- and who knows? Intentions are slippery things. It can't hurt to have a net ready in case one of them jumps in the boat.

Digital Versus...

From my 1932 Royal

Unexpected

Do You Know Where Your Muse Is?

Typecast from my 1932 Royal portable.

The Novel (Nascent Form)



Norma Jean models my stories-in-progress.

• Download your NaNo 2009 web badges
• This is the kind of encouragement I'm talking about
  

On Noodling

Production note: I was trying to emulate Joe Van Cleve's color-wash technique, but had little luck getting the wax to transfer to the page. My color wash of diluted fountain pen ink made the page a lovely mushy blue, but no letters. So, I fell back on the method demonstrated by his grandson and just scanned the wax paper outright, boosting the contrast in Gimp.

At Last

Update: for those having trouble getting a clear impression (*cough* Speegle *cough), here are some detail photos of the paper used for this typecast. I tweaked the "levels" on the above pic to boost the contrast a bit, though I'm not sure that was necessary, since you can see the lettering on the other side bleeding through.

Touchstone, albatross, or punchline?

Wow, sorry about that sudden bleakness at the end. I've a birthday coming up, and I think that I'm beginning to feel it, despite my protests that I'm not. Here's that first typecast, by the way. My speed and accuracy have improved, although I still rush this old machine more than it wants to be rushed.

Postpartum Care

Written on my early-30's Royal portable with a cranky escapement.

Terror from the skies

Brain-dump box redux: GTD and Royal thinking

For a year now I've been using David Allen's Get Things Done methodologies at work to keep myself on track with the various projects I've got going (few of which require a typewriter, sadly.) One of the tenants of the book is that your brain will hold on to stuff (ideas, to-dos, names and numbers) until you file it away into a system you trust, and that you can sit there in a blocked-up state not getting any new stuff in your head until you've emptied it out. This is a powerful feeling, emptying your head, and one that helped form the idea of my NaNoWriMo brain dump box.

We just crossed an end-of-the-month, which is my cue to dump out the box and sort the cards within into story stacks. I've very clearly got a story framework for November, as its the only one that has more than two or three cards in the box. The 2008 story had about twenty cards in it on Friday when I emptied the box to review this weekend. Three of them were hand-written -- scribbled, really -- so I opted to retype them on my daughter's Royal, thus giving me the excuse to play with it some more. Perched on her narrow chair, I whipped through the cards in short order, and then started thinking... you know, there was that backstory idea I had... better start a card. thunka thunka thunka thunka Oh, and that one idea I had about the villain. thunka thunka thunka thunka Hmmm, wasn't there something about the secondary character? thunka thunka thunka thunka Say, that gives me another idea... thunka thunka thunka thunka thunka thunka thunka thunka

With the brain unstoppered, the ideas flowed. I've nearly doubled my stash of ideas for this story, even coming up with devices that will [gasp] tie parts of the plot together in sensible ways and [gasp gasp] give the characters motivation for their actions. I had to grab an adult-sized chair from the kitchen on my way back for hunting down more blank cards since I'd used up the meager supply I'd brought home. When I finally was pried away from the machine to make dinner, I was still not deplete, and wound up scribbling on new cards while waiting for the pasta to cook.

Much has been said about how writing on a computer causes you to think on the screen, not in your head, as if the virtual page has some sort of thought-sucking abilities, or more likely just encourages lazier writing out of its impermanence and ease of infinite revise-ability. I have to agree with this. There's certainly nothing novel to me about have hands on a keyboard, since that describes my typical work-day. I've tried plotting and outlining on the computer before, too. Maybe I just don't trust the computer (true) but I've never had that same kind of rush of ideas with the PC that I did yesterday. It makes me wonder if my poor brain is still carrying around the baggage of last-year's novel attempt.