Forget-me-not at the home store

One of those pre-printed, antique-style home decor items. This appears to be nearly identical to this source, and perhaps it will become standard piece of clip art like this old Olympia that I've since seen on rubber stamps for sale at the craft store. Has anyone in the 'sphere started amassing a collection of old advertising art like this?

The assembly is certainly a fiction, since the text underneath the typewriter appears to be copy from a gardening catalog advertising Forget-me-nots.

Everything Skeu is Old Again

For those Apple iDevice caretakers who are mourning the replacement of their textured, shadowed UI with the new candy-colored iOS 7 retinal riot, I present an island of skeuomorphic calm:



Space-age plastic woodgrain, spotted at Goodwill. Those who do not learn their design history are doomed to re-implement it!

Typespotting: Olympia International Arabic Electric

Apologies for the atrocious photo quality, but spotted this monster today -- an electric Olympia standard model (SG... something?) with an Arabic keyboard. Very neat! Even has the dual cloth- and carbon-ribbon system inside.

Yes, Ted, I did get the serial number, too. :-) Don't know the age or model, but if I had to guess, I'd say a 1970's electrified SG3, just based on the body style, the logo, and the paper-injector lever (cut out of the bottom photo.)

ITAM Temptations

In the spirit of Adwoa's jealousy-inducing trips to well-stocked Swiss flea markets, I thought I'd celebrate my self-restraint and post some of the local machines that have been coming up on our local Craigslist and have not come home with me. The moral here is "you can't save them all (but you'll want to.)"

This monster shows up under a "RARE ITEMS TO BARTER" heading, which is never encouraging. Rare-ness is only partially true, in my opinion: the seller usually thinks it means "worth a lot of money" whereas I see it as "you don't see them very often any more, but they were made by the tens of thousands." Rarer still is the desk that could accommodate that wide carriage.

Another wide-carriage monster, which has those oh-so-desirable keys that send crafters into fits. I already have four standard machines -- four! -- and honestly don't have room for them all. Two of those four are Royals, and at this point I've pledged that the only other one I'll consider bringing in is an Olympia SG1.

Like Adwoa and her sewing machines, sometimes you see the same old friends pop up over and over. This old IBM electric comes up every month or two. The seller isn't sure that it works any more, and electrics as a rule scare me a bit. I saw one of these in person once: it was an impressively heavy piece of machinery. Now I know why all the mid-century office desks where made of heavy-duty steel -- they had to be.

This photo pains me the most, as it was a last-second "all of these will go to the dump tomorrow!" post. In the shadows on the left... do you see it? Yes, it's an Olympia SM3 case. Sigh.  Those machines are my favorite portables, which is evident by the fact that I own... three? four? I'm not even sure, which shows how far the sickness has progressed. Sadly, this is a couple of cities over from my own, and I don't have time to battle the traffic and head out there to rummage.

I did save one of my own SM3s from a similar curbside fate a few years ago, and it was well worth it. I am consoling myself with the lie that it's probably a rusted old heap although I know it's not.

This is one of a series of lovely photos of this machine: the seller did their homework and lists the likely correct year of this machine as a 1938. So pretty! Also: so expensive! For a while they were asking around $350 for this. Egad. I have nearly the same machine, bought for less than a tenth of that price. Mine also has the hinky Royal left-margin issue and a crumbling ribbon-advance gear. Lovely to look at, I'll grant you that.

One last one to share: this isn't a Craigslist posting, but is in fact my own sighting, a two-tone Underwood "Quiet Tab De Luxe" in pretty good shape at my local thrift store. This is very tempting, especially on the heels of all those machines seen above. I'm hoping some soul will come across it and adopt it, as it's in good shape, types evenly, and even has some bits of ephemera with it (cleaning brush, manual, touch-typing guide.) And if not? Well, maybe I will need to find room for it, in celebration of ITAM and in tribute to the ones that got away.

Crazy

(Photography note: the keys are white-on-black, not gold as they appear here. The light was less-than-ideal in these shots.)

Maybe it's a little unhealthy, but I really can't stop looking at this machine. Some of it is giddiness over getting it at a price I can agree with, part of it is just for it typing so darn well right out of the case, except for some hangups now and then that I'm attributing to rails in need of cleaning. I don't have very many black-lacquer machines in my collection, but boy is this nice. And the basket ("floating") shift is a treat, especially with that lovely key design.

Yes, I've gone a little crazy. Haven't we all been there, basking in the warm afterglow of a new acquisition?

Catch a Wave

One side-effect of finding this machine is that I'm incapable of remembering the model name properly. It is truly "Tropical" as I eventually stated. You can see it among the other Olivetti machines on Will Davis' site. Imagine the name badge says "Hermes" and you'll have it.

Also, this typecast topic got away from one of my original points, which was the documentary being filmed right now by the crew from LA. After some back-and-forth trying to get me to find a location, we met last week in a local used-book store, and I managed to sweat and mumble my way through a series of innocuous but otherwise mind-blanking questions ("What's your name, and what do you do" and "What's your first memory of a typewriter.") If I make it into the final product at all, it will be a testament to their editing skills. I know that folks at the L.A. and Phoenix type-ins met Gary and Chris and praised them for their professionalism and unobtrusiveness. They were particularly patient with me the entire time, despite me trying (and failing) to not stare at the one customer who hung out and watched the first half hour of the interview.

True to form, I managed to not even think to grab a crappy cell-phone photo of the experience. If you happen to get contacted by these guys, please do your best to be courteous and polite to them, so they can get some usable quotes out of the experience. And pick someplace air-conditioned, so you don't look like Nixon sweating his way through a debate.

Typed on "Lennon", a 1972 Hermes 3000 with only a slightly confused heritage