When I saw these pinned platens in the 1957 Smith-Corona Parts Manuals, they tickled a memory of Mark Adams discussing such pinned label-holder platens found in 1930’s Remington Portables. I did find one mention of such a Corona platen in Scott K.’s blog. For those interested in such contraptions, here’s a data point for you: they were sold for the Corona 4 (except “X” and “Jr.” models), the “Smith-Corona” floating shift and the Sterling (A1 and A2) and Clipper (C1 and C2) machines as late as 1957, the date of this parts manual.
Sure would be nice to be able to buy new platens at those prices. I’d not get any of mine recovered.
I just picked up what I believe is a 1960 Smith Corona Galaxie that has one of these label holder platens. The serial number is 6T260781X. It looks like that 4M739-AS platen pictured above.
Nice! I suspect the late Super-5 and Galaxy platens would interchange, although I haven’t tried it. I’m not really surprised to find these features on later machines, but I would bet they are pretty rare on machines from the 60’s-70’s. By the 80’s I’m sure most businesses bought computers and trackfeed printers to replace label-holder typewriters.
Nice find! You should upload it to typewriterdatabase.com (:
I saw that this type was available for the Corona 3 folding also