UPDATE: I was reading Curtis A. Scaglione’s “Guide to Antique and Vintage Fasteners” today and noticed the patent for this stapler, which matches the last patent stamped into the bottom of the Presto Deluxe: 2,399,761, invented 1940, patented 1946. I wasn’t too far off in my reckoning! Hey, even more info on the Presto Stapler […]
Happy Typewriter Day 2014!
Thriftin’ Report: Weird Ko-Inkydinks
So yesterday I did a round of thrifting, and came up dry. So I went to the Press Room to work on an annoying sticky typebar on an SM-8, only to get a Typosphere Bat-Signal from Key Snap about a Lettera 25 he had just found at Deseret. I had been there only a couple […]
Public Typewriting: Your Right, Your Duty!
here’s another one for the Typosphere Propaganda office. Remember that meme? :D oh, and yet another…
How To Date Your Brother (typewriter), Part One: The Serial Number and how to interpret it.
Update: ProfessorC’s Non-Selectrics
By now you’ve gawked at the trailer full of Selectrics that my pal ProfessorC has obtained, now marvel at some of the other stuff. The non-Selectrics he wants to unload pretty quick, as-is. He’s only interested in Selectrics, and wants to refurbish all of those. Here is a partial list of the manual machines he […]
Selectrics by the Truckload!
So a bit ago I got an excited email from ProfessorC, he who is a young Jedi Master of Selectrics, and who has a restoration of a rare and incredibly complex IBM Composer under his belt. He told me of a trove of Selectrics and parts offered to him by a fellow in Arkansas who […]
Thriftin’ Report: Western Auto Typewriter, Toyota Yarn Baller and IBM Balls…
1980 Western Auto logo? I know I say 1970 here, but I’m beginning to think that Brother switched the JP-1 to black keys from white and lost the paper rest and metal carriage shell sometime in the late 70’s. If true, it means we would be able to figure out what decade (roughly) a JP-1 […]
New Olivetti Serial Numbers found!
I was contacted this morning by Enrico Morozzi, a typewriter collector in Italy who is a member of the Typewriter Database. Mr. Morozzi had recently obtained a very nice Studio 42 from an ex-Olivetti employee, and the typewriter was accompanied by a sheet of paper which he kindly re-typed out and sent to me, along […]
My Friends, and things I should remember about them: 1949
Wordless Wednesday: A trip to Bill’s
The Week In Thriftin’ – North Goodwill Learns Thier Lesson!
Stapler of the Week: 1938 Ace Pilot Model 404
Found at a Goodwill for $2 a few weeks ago, the Ace Pilot is a simple-looking, but feature-rich stapler. It has a unique anvil with a flip-up staple splayer rather than a two-position anvil that clicks into the two positions. It also features a ratcheted striker mechanism unique to these chrome Ace staplers, that makes […]
Avoiding Half-Price Day at Goodwill, and The Rewards Thereof…
Tape Deck of the Month: 1962 Webcor EP-2104 Microcorder
Stapler of the Week: Swingline Speed Stapler 3 (1940’s?)
Brother Serial Numbers Unified for all models?
So, I paged through the bulk of the Brother documentation, and it looks like I have pretty good coverage of Brother models between the late 70’s to the early 90’s, very heavy on the 80’s. Good news for Brother Electric appreciators. This documentation extends up to the WP series word processor line and at least […]
A Brotherly Bonanza
Interesting, eh? I was at MTE today poking around at stacks of old service manuals (a large leather-bound Victor Calculator Service Manual binder caught my attention, but it turned out to be filled with the service manual for a Smith-Corona Electric), and Bill mentioned that he had 2 boxes of old Brother service manuals that […]
Paper Calculators: The Lightning Calculator, 1932 and the Color Helm, 1940
I loves me some paper calculators, yessir. My first one I remember was a simple slider that did multiplication and came out of a box of cereal in 1970-something. The idea of a computer constructed out of paper fascinated me immediately, and I wore that cereal box calculator to shreds as a kid. Later in […]
Pinhole Camera Day: Better Late Than Never!
The Process
I needed to run a test film roll through the Canonet 28 on Saturday to test for light leaks and make sure the exposure was working right, and while I was at it, might as well shoot some 3D squigglies with the Nishika N8000 so I’d have 2 rolls to develop. That meant rolling up […]
1970’s Canon Canonet 28 Rangefinder in the $2 Camera Bin…
I did all the testing I could without a battery in the store, and knew it needed new light seals. Everything else worked fine in it’s manual modes. When I got it home, though, a fresh battery wouldn’t kick on the light meter or make the camera work in it’s primary “auto” modes. I did […]
Google indexing our typecasts as text? It could happen real soon.
And now here’s the transcribed text of this typecast: Ok, so the question occasionally comes up about the GOOGLE indexing our typecasts as text, when they are typewritten and scanned as inages. For the most part, typecasters are split between two groups in attitude regarding whether or not we actually want Google OCR-ing our posts: […]
Passing Up The SM-3 for a Nishika N8000 Makes the Gnome Dance!
Well, ok, do you guys remember this post a couple of months ago, where I passed up an overpriced Nishika 3D camera in the glass case and was rewarded with a cheap Royal Model O typewriter in the electronics aisle? Well, the exact reverse happened to me at that same Goodwill today: I passed up […]
Pencast: 1920’s Conklin Endura, My Great-Grandfather’s Fountain Pen
Happy Easter, Typosphere!
My friend Erin has baby chickens and apparently they like the little blue Corsair I gave her the other month. It seemed appropriate to share this on Easter. (:
A Stats and Traffic post
This is going to be one of those stats and traffic posts, so if you don’t like graphs and speculation, look away now. I confess to not having bothered looking at my stats for several months until Scott K posted a very interesting conversation not too long ago about his stats and how he analyzed […]
Fun with the Anscoflex II Pseudo-TLR
The Anscoflex II seems to be a pretty popular “toy” TLR, due to the huge viewfinder and spiffy design. Lots of reviews and posts in photo blogs: http://camerapedia.wikia.com/wiki/Ansco_Anscoflex https://sites.google.com/site/contraptionsinphoto/ansco-anscoflex-ii http://danielleruth.wordpress.com/2011/02/23/anscoflex-ii/ http://westfordcomp.com/foundfilm/anscoflex/ http://junkstorecameras.com/anscoflex.htm http://connealy.blogspot.com/2012/08/anscoflex-ii.html http://mwpfilm.blogspot.com/2011/03/anscoflex-ii.html http://phil-are-go.blogspot.com/2010/02/anscoflex-camera-hideously-beautiful.html http://shootfilmridesteel.com/?p=133 http://www.jollinger.com/photo/cam-coll/cameras/tlrs/23601_Anscoflex2.html http://malcolmchalmersphotography.weebly.com/2/post/2014/01/anscoflex-built-to-last.html http://tazmpictures.com/site/?p=2468 These pages review the Anscoflex II and mentions an interesting technique where you shoot pictures with […]
Oh yeah, and I Updated the Look of the Blog too..
Adventures of the Typospigeon: Part 1
A-well-a, everybody’s heard about the bird. Bird, bird, bird, b-bird’s the word.
The Typospigeon’s first stop
The Ballad of the Second $2 Garmin GPS
Fun links for infos: The Garmin Nuvi 1450 LMT at Garmin.com Nuvi 1450 Manual GPS Insight, a fleet tracking service Nick Beland’s post showing off his typewriter artwork rubber stamps
Fun with Atomic-Age Electro 35
The TWDB so far, Visualized in Tableau
Ok, well this trend of making nifty circle charts out of your collection data seems to have caught fire, and you guys know how I am about jumping on the latest Typospherian trend, so here you go: Learn About Tableau This is a chart showing the best-represented manufacturers in all the gallery entries of the […]