Category: From the Desk of Reverend Munk
Typecasts from the desk of the Right Reverend Theodore Munk
Nelson Hawks and the American Point System
From May 1985 Upper & Lower Case magazine, the trade magazine of the International Type Corporation
This Typecast Brought to You by the Letters: UN-11-L
This Typecast Brought to You by the Letters: AR-8-M
Crank #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6 and #7 – Read at your own risk.
Victor Adding Machine Age List – WOMDA 1973
For Victor Adding Machine freeks, the Victor Serial Number Age List from the Western Office Machine Dealer’s Association 1973 Line Book. Enjoy!
This Typecast Brought to You by the Letters: CG-6-M
A Good News Day
There was a man in the land of Uz…
Now when Job’s three friends heard of all this evil that was come upon him, they came every one from his own place; Eliphaz the Temanite, and Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite: for they had made an appointment together to come to mourn with him and to comfort him. And when they lifted […]
UJTU: Randomness
FreeDOS, a free, open-source MS-DOS clone OS Microsoft Word 5.5 for DOS, free download from Microsoft
Rounding out Baby Wedge Week: All The Brother EP Series
Thermal Baby Wedges, boy I’ve sure been on a kick all week and having a lot of fun. For the record, I still haven’t run down a set of batteries – these thermal babies really seem to sip the juice. I poked the only other collector I know of who owns one of these Brother […]
IBM Model 85: A Weird Mashup Indeed
Quick, name an IBM Typewriter that takes normal 96-Character Selectric III typeballs monospaced in 10 and 12 pitch, and *also* prints in proportional spacing using special “round dot” proportional typeballs? Give up? How about if I told you it was a weird mashup of the IBM Selectric III and the Wheelwriter? Yeah, it’s sort of […]
Spot the Typewriter: Avalanches
Can you find the typewriter featured in The Avalanches “Frontier Psychiatrist”?
Fear and Craziness on the Freeways
The *only* bright point in this whole week is that nobody (so far) has been seriously hurt. We can only pray that this doesn’t change.
More thoughts on Thermal Baby Wedges: Ephemeral, Schmephemeral!
Sharp PA-1050 Typewriter – Baby Wedge Week Continues
Sharp PA-1050 Typewriter User Manual
Brother EP-20 Dot-Matrix Portable Typewriter – Welcome to 1983!
I think this kind of typewriter is the portable of the future… – Martin Goldshine, executive vice president of Silver Reed America Inc. (1983) NEW TYPEWRITERS JOIN THE COMPUTER AGE (NY Times, September 1983) Brother EP-20 Typewriter User Manual
They’re After Me Lucky Charms!
Briar Levit on making Graphic Means from Briar Levit on Vimeo.
How to use a Selectric Composer Font Ball that has a broken top
The font elements for Selectrics come in 3 basic types: First Generation (Rabbit Ear): 1961 to about mid-60’s. 88-Character Selectric I/II elements only. These are the simplest design, just a bent wire held in place by a plastic half-cap. You pinch the rabbit ears to open. Delightfully easy and super-durable. They almost never break. Why […]
How the Gacillia Nut saved me a sh*tstorm of grief…
Hey, it’s been a slow summer, so when an email comes in promising a high-dollar job for what looks like simple HTML formatting of existing content, I give it consideration despite the prospective client’s atrocious command of the language. Not *much* consideration, though. Sounds suspiciously like a certain Nigerian dialect common to form letters distributed […]
Eleven Dollar Galaxie Deluxe – who could pass that up?
This machine at the TWDB.
Mechanical Calculator: 1963 Underwood-Olivetti Summa Prima 20
Couldn’t resist this one when I saw it on the shelf at Deseret for $3 a few weeks ago, so I snatched it up. The thing was *filthy*, but seemed to be intact, although it was so gummed up that the lever wouldn’t pull. I’ve currently got it working now, but it still needs another […]
Why it is impossible to keep cat hair out of typewriters…
Polaroids: 10 Years Expired
I found a pack of Polaroid 600 film the other day at Deseret, and having had no luck getting a vintage 1981 pack I found some time ago to work, I was only mildly hopeful that this pack, which expired in 2005 might actually work. I dug up my One Step Flash and tried it […]
Raybestos Manhattan: The Space Age – The Age Of Reliability
Ahh, 1961 – how optimistic America was at the dawn of the Space Age, especially a certain leading manufacturer of Asbestos products called Raybestos Manhattan. I found this one at the last record show that Wayne Butane dragged me along to a couple months ago, and the guy at the booth had it marked at […]
Smith-Corona Presents the greatest success story in Portable Typewriters…
Tom Robbins’ Remington SL3 Typewriter from “Still Life With Woodpecker”
… was as far as I can tell, a work of fiction. It doesn’t exist and never has. This was surprising to me, as it seems commonly reported as fact that Tom Robbins used a Remington SL3 to write “Still Life With Woodpecker“. Wikipedia proclaims this and even Richard Polt’s “Writers and their Typewriters” page […]
Nothing good is ever easy: Timelines and TWDB Part 2
Well, after 3 tries at finding a visualization library capable of timeline display that is both simple and flexible, it ended up being kind of a Goldilocks situation – Google’s libraries were too dependent on off-site resources and couldn’t do point data display (like a single date such as “company formed” or “merged with so-and-so”), […]
Timelines in TWDB
So, I was playing around a bit with various APIs last night and found out I could utilize Google’s Visualization API to do stuff like this fairly easily, given data changes I’m planning for the TWDB. How useful would you think this sort of thing might be?
First Look: TWDB World eBay Typewriter Hunting widget
I’ve been at a loss lately how to get the eBay listing widget that is set up on various places on the desktop version of the TWDB to work on the mobile version. Part of the problem was that getting Javascript to run properly in the DOM-lunacy that is the jQuery Mobile framework is at […]
Breakfast At Tiffany’s: Paul Varjak’s Typewriter
UPDATE: Brian asks below in the comments why I call this machine “red”. The simple answer is “it looks red to me”, but it’s an important question that deserves further examination. He owns a machine of this vintage which he describes as “dark orange”, so the question would be twofold: 1) is the color shown […]
IBM Typecasting Circa 1968
Here’s a gem of a paragraph, pulled completely out of context from the 1968 edition of the “IBM Journal”. This issue was composed of articles from the team that developed the IBM Selectric Composer, and the articles explain in painstaking detail the entire design philosophy and describe the minutia of every unique mechanism of the […]
New Spring in Mothra’s Step, the arrival of Monster Zero, and DIY Composer Ribbons
Unraveling the Royal Quiet De Luxe – Part 5: Reprise – The End of the Royal “A” Model?
In part 4 of this series, I guessed the appearance of the Silver-Seikos and Adlers in Royal’s lineup in 1970 to be the death knell for the Portugese Sabres. This turns out to not be the end of the story after all. In the comments, Mr. Royal himself Nick Bodemer mentions that he’s seen advertisements […]
Unraveling the Royal Quiet De Luxe – Part 4: The Colorful End of the QDL, and What it Became
I’ve been a bit hesitant to type up this fourth and last post detailing what I’ve learned of the history of the QDL, because I’m sad to get up from the immersive bath I’ve taken into the Royal portable serial number lists & galleries and say goodbye to the venerable Quiet De Luxe. The line […]
Unraveling the Royal Quiet De Luxe – Part 3: The Post-War Royal Portables (A, B and C Models)
With the end of World War Two, Royal starts up “A” and “C” Model production right where they left off in 1941. The 1946 “Quiet De Luxe” and war-hero “Arrow” models are snapped up by a typewriter-starved public, and you can have any color you want, as long as it’s black. The middle-market “Aristocrat”, un-needed […]