You can play “Spot The Typewriter” while watching this short and interesting film about letterpress printing. Why doesn’t that surprise me in the slightest? :D Oh, and neat idea for a Typecasting-sized BAROP… Upside Down, Left To Right: A Letterpress Film from Danny Cooke on Vimeo.
Category: From the Desk of Reverend Munk
Typecasts from the desk of the Right Reverend Theodore Munk
The Rosetta Stone: Olivetti Lettera 32 Cracked wide open!
Behold: The Rosetta Stone. Four legal-sized columnar notebooks filled with serial numbers and dates entered into inventory for every new and used typewriter that passed through the doors of MTE between 1950 and 1987. Thirty-seven years worth of handwritten notes in pencil by (from my count) at least five different hands. 138 pages of essentially […]
Brown Plastic Cases are KEY! Smith-Corona Datecodes
I found a 1970’s Galaxie 12 today while doing some light thriftin’ – normally I don’t much like the Brown Plastic Case era SCM’s, but these latter-day Galaxies are usually good machines. Besides, I had to at least look for a datecode. For eight bucks, I didn’t pass up this one, and yep – brown […]
Machines Should Work – People Should Think!
Well, it turns out Olivetti wasn’t the only typewriter company producing trippy acid-fueled industrial films in the 1960s’. IBM got into the game too, and in 1967 commissioned Muppets creator Jim Henson to produce this short film extolling the benefits of IBM office products, including the newly introduced Selectric Composer. A weirder mix of suits […]
Possibly the most convoluted, obtuse and pointlessly time-consuming method for typecasting ever devised by a Typospherian! :D
TWDB Secret Mission – Operation: SCM Datecode!
I’ve been emailing with Jay Respler back and forth the past few weeks regarding a couple of serial numbers on some very unusual Smith-Corona Galaxies and Classic 12’s. During the course of this conversation, he pointed me to a Yahoo thread where he discusses the “SCM Datecode” that is found on many SCM typewriters from […]
Photos from the 6th Phoenix Type-In
And the hits just keep on coming! 1972 Selectric 6251 Composer
My Hummingbird has finally landed!
More fun ephemera from MTE!
So I was at MTE today, wheelin’ & deelin’ for a hummingbird that has caught my fancy, when I noticed a pile of *very dusty* books on a back shelf that I hadn’t pawed through before. Therefore, it’s time for another edition of Ephemera from the Collection of Bill Wahl! This one I snagged for […]
UJTU: The Futura of Typing, and New Mission for Cougar Six-Y
The experiment maybe pays off.
Rhymin’ & Stealin’ 4 Olympia Serial Number Verification
Wow, it’s been awhile since I posted – work’s been whippin’ me like a slave driver and I’ve got typecasts lined up that may never get posted. Today however, I did some crimes for your edification, and I must confess. I went thriftin’ and saw a few typewriters – a 70’s Adler Universal 200 standard […]
Stealth Mode: Cougar Six-Y Continued…
Cougar Six-Y Goes Dark
Cougar Six-Y, Cougar Six-Y, Do You Copy?
I missed out on a Galaxy this week, having been alerted to it’s presence on half price day via Type Snap and the Typospherian Bat-Signal. $10 would have been a nice price to pay for a Galaxy, but I was too broke for even that and passed on it. Today, money came in, so I […]
TWDB Mobile 0.2 is GO!
I figure about half my readers are of the age group that will immediately recognize the obscure 60’s TV show reference I just made in the title of the post. I can be fairly sure of that because Google Analytics tells me that’s the percentage of my readers who are roughly within my generation, age-wise. […]
Underwoods as far as the eye can see!
Tonight there’s an eyefull of Underwoods on the TWDB, but do not adjust your set – everything is fine. This phenomenon is the result of a massive re-organization of the Underwood category and my first attempt to really get in and clean up an entire category by normalizing and condensing Model Names. I’ve done this […]
Say Hello to TWDB Mobile!
Well, half the town was on lockdown yesterday thanks to some loony neo-nazi running around shooting at people, so I had some time to look at the jQuery Mobile documentation and ponder ideas about implementing a mobile-friendly version of the Typewriter Database. Well, you know how it goes – I zoned out and whipped this […]
New stuff at the TWDB!
Stapler of The Week: Bates Model C Brass Wire-Feed
Robert E. De Barth – Bates Brass Wire Staplers Robert E. De Barth – The Hot Rod Bates Model C
The Internets Go Boom this morning…
I awoke from a dream at about 3am this morning, feeling uneasy. As one does, I wandered to the glowing screen to check mail and such, and found that the TWDB was unreachable. First thing I checked was the server itself – doing a remote reboot when I couldn’t get to the admin interface. After […]
The Aristocrat Returns Home and TWDB Hits 3500!
Where Have All The Typefaces Gone?
Adjusting the Space Bar on a 1960 Smith-Corona Galaxie
This Service Manual is now available for download!
Printin’ in the Press Room
Catch #4 of the 2015 Typewriter Hunting Season: 1960 Smith-Corona Galaxie
Catch #3 of the 2015 Typewriter Hunting Season: 1955 Remington Quiet-Riter
Just Visiting: 1946 Royal KMM
TWDB: 777 Manufacturers, 3350 Typewriter Galleries, 1792 Typefaces, 6273 Patents…
Hey, there’s a new feature at the Typewriter Database: Typewriter Patents! Thanks to Richard Polt, who finagled me a copy of Dirk Schumann’s “Patentbase” DvD, the two major chunks of research conducted by Schumann in the 1990’s are now reunited (and it feels so good!) The original Patentbase was put together by Schumann by digging […]
Catch #2 of the 2015 Typewriter Hunting Season: Royal Mercury
Coincidentally, Joe Van Cleave just posted about his old friend, his Royal Mercury, which also put me in the mood to have one. And now there are Six Royal Mercuries in the TWDB. And here’s this one.
5-Series Portables on the Brain…
What colors and typestyles did the 1966 Galaxie Deluxe and Classic 12 come in? So glad you asked…
Pinned “Label Holder” Platens for Corona as late as 1957.
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: […]
Eight Distinct Models of Corona Three, as follows…
I took a trip to MTE today to drop off the books I had borrowed, and pick up a new batch. This time, among the piles I dug up 4 Parts Books from Smith Corona, of particular interest: All Carriage Shift Models (1953 & 1957) Includes: Corona Three, Corona Four, Junior, Zephyr and Skyriter All […]