WARNING – ANGRY POLITICAL RANT FOLLOWS: By now you’ve probably read an article or two about the absolute disaster of painfully obvious voter disenfranchisement and outright primary election-rigging that happened a couple of days ago in Arizona. 800,000 voters in Maricopa County where I live were forced to spend all day waiting in lines at […]
Category: From the Desk of Reverend Munk
Typecasts from the desk of the Right Reverend Theodore Munk
Mini-Wedge Redux: Brother EP5 Electronic Typewriter
SSW Universal Surveillance 03-18-3016: The Emperor Has Been Abandoned…
UJTU: The Revolution Marches on
It’s an interesting thing to watch something you have long thought of as a very niche interest, in this case a love and interest in old manual writing machines, burgeon into a cultural phenomena. Today I learned that the Typewriter Revolution has spread to other parts of my state, and an article in the Prescott, […]
Sighted: 1934 Woodstock 5
Not the sort of grab I’d make at that price, but had to snap some sightings photos and get the serial number. 1934 Woodstock 5, with a great old “Robert E DeBarth” dealer sticker, and that guy is still around recovering platens and doing repairs! :D 1934 Woodstock 5 @ The Typewriter Database
Musical Marble Machines: From Ray and Charles Eames to Wintergatan
Constant readers of this blog may remember last year when I posted some short films about Ray and Charles Eames and their fabulous “901” Warehouse workspace. One of the films features a large “Marble Music Machine” built by the Eames which used thousands of marbles gravity-fed to drop into xylophone blocks to constantly play a […]
Election 2016: a Rap, but not a Wrap
Feelin’ the Bern today after Super Saturday:
SSW Universal Surveillance 02-27-3016: Orange Crush falters and falls back as Grey appears…
Feb 23 Drone Kills ############################################### 1 cuadBelle 91,427 Enemy Drones Destroyed 2 Julionics 66,465 Enemy Drones Destroyed 3 Rakkasan 60,958 Enemy Drones Destroyed 4 Salen 51,957 Enemy Drones Destroyed 5 BabylonHoruv 45,509 Enemy Drones Destroyed 6 ThatKat 43,557 Enemy Drones Destroyed 7 grimdel 32,942 Enemy Drones Destroyed 8 aces44 23,454 Enemy Drones Destroyed 9 crashnburn11 […]
SSW Universal Surveillance 02-25-3016: Orange Crush absorbs the hits
Typewriterdatabase hits 5000 Galleries today!
The TWDB hit its 5000th Typewriter Gallery today. Congrats, Typewriter Hunters!
PaleoComputing: 1981 Osborne 1 CP/M Portable Computer
I don’t really intentionally collect old computers, I really don’t. However, when Bill Wahl called me up and said “Someone left an old computer here because they didn’t want to throw it away, and I thought you might want it. It says Osborne 1 on the side. Come and get it out of here.” Well, […]
UJTU: Homes designed by Ettore Sottsass, a Typosphere Blog goes away, and a taste of Politics…
I saw this article in my newsfeed today, and it surprised me to find that Italian typewriter designer Ettore Sottsass had designed houses too, with over 20 homes in his portfolio. I figured this would be an article that Ton Sison would dig, so I went to his blog (i dream lo-tech) to post it […]
Triumph Perfekt: getting it off the case base and replacing the bad bits.
Perfekt, or almost, anyway.
Second Score of the 2016 Typewriter Hunting Season: 1962 Triumph Perfekt
The Silence is Broken…
Neo Inevitability and a great 99 Cent Bag-o-Pens
Well, this is certainly a surprise, especially after reading Joe Van Cleave’s blog post where he discusses his reasons for liking his old Alphasmart Neo. I’ve had a pair of Alphasmart Danas for a few years and have liked them quite a lot, but they tend to eat through batteries faster than I’d like when […]
First Score of the 2016 Typewriter Hunting Season: 1974 Adler J5
Gossen Tippa Serials Updated!
This post about a Gossen Tippa from BillM over at Fountain Pens & Typewriters prompted me to take a look at what the TWDB says about the Gossen Tippa, to see if I could improve on it and solve the mystery of the production year of Bill’s machine. TWDB is sourced from the 1955 Herstellungsdaten, […]
Aristocratic Monkey Spanking, the Revolution and Secret Society Wars Cycle 19
It is by Will alone I set my Mind in Motion It is by the Ink of the Ribbon that Thoughts Acquire Speed The Fingers Acquire Stains The Stains Become a Warning It is by Will alone I set my Mind in Motion. SSW Universal Surveillance Secret Society Wars
Kyle’s IBM Selectric Composer – an Heroic tale of desire fulfilled!
What follows below is the story of New York artist Kyle Void and his quest to obtain a working IBM Selectric Composer. This quest was a long, arduous and expensive journey for Kyle, fraught with disappointment and dead ends. His perseverance and willingness to throw absurd amounts of cash at the problem won through in […]
Happy Day After Thanksgiving!
Drink from the well of yourself and begin again… -Charles Bukowski
Typewriters in the Press Box in 2015!
@Vice Sports It looks like an IBM Personal Wheelwriter, a bit hefty to be lugging into a press box, and also has a correcting lift-off ribbon, so why the White-Out?
Relic Writing Machines: Western Collector, September 1969
When the modern typewriter collector looks back on the habits of the breed over time, he notices that up until the turn of the 21st Century, collectors had zero interest in machines made later than World War 2, and in many cases had little interest in machines newer than about 1930. I have a theory […]
This Typecast Brought to You by the Letters: BA-11-M
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description “hard-core pornography”, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that. United States Supreme […]
TWDB: A gettin’ near the end o’ the year report
The Typewriter Database is doing well at the end of the third year of the Five-Year Plan. Traffic has nearly doubled between July and October of 2015, and we’ve blown past 4500 Typewriter Galleries. That’s about 500 fewer than where I wanted to be at the end of 2015, but we could still manage 10,000 […]
Taming The Tinny Typing Sound of a Brother JP-1 Typewriter
This Typecast Brought to You by the Letters: P-11-M
Kyle in NY’s Composer, Restored by ProfessorC Selectric Composer 88-Character Proportional Num Font Qty Name Size Style ———————————————————————————— 4022 AR-8-M 0 Aldine Roman 8 B Medium 4023 AR-8-I 0 Aldine Roman 8 B Italic 4055 AR-8-B 0 Aldine Roman 8 B Bold 4020 AR-10-M 1 Aldine Roman 10 Y Medium 4021 AR-10-I 0 Aldine Roman […]
The Green Hornet unlimbers!
Dr. Benway: You’d better help this friend of yours get off the yellow stuff. It’ll kill him. Bill Lee: How do I get him to kick? Dr. Benway: Kick? Bill Lee: H-How do I get him off it? Dr. Benway: Oh. Mix it with this. Gradually increase the percentage of black without telling your friend… […]
Baby Wedge Redux: Brother EP-44
For your edification (and because electronic baby wedges *need* user manuals, unlike most typewriters) I present to you my PDF scan of the Brother EP-44 User Manual. Enjoy!
Come on, ring those bells…
Drago’s margin bell is finally working 100% again (probably for the first time in decades, actually) – after examining every millimeter of the rather Rube Goldbergish margin bell system of my Underwood #5 and finding nothing specifically faulty. The problem in the end was probably one of design, as the flippy arm (#20 in illustration […]
On the Acoustics of Church Baptism Pools
1987’s version of No Laughing Matter: Nate Stiffler (drums), Ted Worthless (guitar, yeah that’s me), Scott Roman (vocal/synth), Rod Glaze (bass). From at least the late 1970’s, the church I was raised in had a very progressive view of youth ministry. That church community launched several bands over the decades, with NLM being just one. […]
Drago and a nice scan of an Underwood #5 Pica Paper Scale
Words are Winged: Tuning an Underwood 5
This Typecast Brought to You by the Letters: AR-10-M
Ok, so like when I was twelve, I ran away and decided to live on the streets of Hollywood…
How to restore the paper scale on an IBM Selectric
This past June, I was corresponding with our friend ProfessorC about an original blue-trim 1962 IBM Selectric that he was in the process of restoring. The topic of our discussions was the condition of the front stainless steel trim pieces (stainless steel was only used on the very earliest Selectrics, later years saw a switch […]