To Type, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth...

First Aid for Typewriters is an article in the May 1941 issue of Popular Science which gives useful tips on keeping your typer in top shape. For tips on how an EXPERT cleans a typewriter, we need to jump to March of 1949: here. And heck, while I’m linking to fun typewriter stuff, here’s an […]

The Hermes page has been completely overhauled and updated: http://typewriterdatabase.com/hermes.41.typewriter-serial-number-database Patria/Swissa page updated with some numbers for Swissa: http://typewriterdatabase.com/patriaswiss.44.typewriter-serial-number-database The Hermes, Swissa, Adler and Royal pages have all been updated to include the factory original platen diameters for various models. This should be helpful if you need to get your platen re-covered. (:

ahh yes, I went back to Ace Hardware and got some more of those rubber bushings in a slightly larger size, which work perfectly as replacement feet for the gull-wing cover Hermes Rockets.

Heh, it’s funny how the starting paragraph of this article written in 1988 is almost word-for-word similar to articles being written on the subject today: Pittsburgh Press: “Just Your Type – Typewriter Survives America’s romance with high-tech office equipment” Jul 29, 1988

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: In the Museum Victoria Library there is a book by the Office Machines and Equipment Federation called “Typewriter Age Guide“, published in London in December of 1973. The OCLC number is 741742118. The information contained in this document is potentially invaluable to the Insurgency. You are instructed […]

On a side note, while studying the 1962 Schramm Line Book today, I noticed that part of the technical listings for each model of typewriter included the exact width and diameter of the platens offered for the machine. I will be attempting to incorporate this valuable info into the TW-DB wherever I can, as one […]

Had a nice birthday surprise in my inbox this morning – Georg Sommeregger heard my plea for more serial number info for Hermes, and kindly sent me a copy of “H.F.W. Schramm, Liste der Herstellungsdaten deutscher und ausländischer Schreibmaschinen, 11th edition, Hans Burghagen Verlag, Hamburg 1962”, a comprehensive German-language age list, an earlier version of […]

I have a quandry. I have only two sources for Hermes serial number dating that I’m studying for corrections to TWDB. My problem is that they both claim to be lists of Jan 1st numbers for the years represented, yet they seem to be a year off from each other, and neither wholly agrees with […]

Part Two of this series is the “chapter” on Typewriter and adding machine age lists and serial numbers: Coming up next: Part 3: Ribbons, maintenance charge rates, platen and feed roll replacement and rebuilding rates.

Bill and I unearthed another treasure of typewriter dealer ephemera the other day, digging up a Shipman-Ward Office Machine Dealer’s Line Book from 1954. I had a chance to haul my laptop and a portable scanner over to MTE yesterday to scan relevant portions in. Previously, when I scanned in the old NOMDA books, I […]

An astute reader of my last post on the update to the Royal page noted that George Sommeregger had published a list of Voss serial numbers and dates on his site which could be used to update the TW-DB Voss page. Here’s his table, translated from German to English: Easy enough, his early numbers match […]

Whew! I’ve finally finished updating and correcting the TW-DB numbers for Royal, and what a mess that was. Pretty much all of the dates were wrong – at least a year off, and sometimes more in some cases. I suspect that most of it probably came from a typo that Mr. Schumann might have made […]

Here’s the video. The USB Typewriter makes a couple of appearances. Just watch the whole thing.

There’s a discussion in the PTF about another copy of Clarence Leroy Jones’ ‘Typewriter Mechanical Training Manual’ having popped up, and how this copy differed from existing versions like the one at The Classic Typewriter Page. This caused me to go look up the linked versions and prodded me into pondering what other Typewriter-related ephemera […]

TW-DB has been an excellent resource for typewriter collectors for many years, but is apparently no longer maintained. A year or so ago, I had an email discussion with some other collectors who had tried to contact the owner and had failed, and who were concerned that the site might disappear along with all of […]

Sears is and was a multinational brand, and so when I checked out the Canadian Sears-Simpson Christmas catalog for 1957 on WishBookWeb, I was not terribly surprised to find Tower-branded typewriters offered to our northern neighbors. What did surprise me is the machines they branded as Towers: A Tower-branded Patria? and what is that second […]

Sorry for the cold-war-era-style pieced together shot, all I had on me to gather this valuable info was my camera phone.

I stumbled across a neat resource this morning while searching for data on Tower-branded Smith Corona typewriters; WishBookWeb is an exhaustive source for Christmas catalogs, mainly from Sears, but also for other mail-order companies. They don’t have *every* catalog, but they have enough for me to start my journey. The journey starts in 1947, when […]

The post on Tom’s blog about the Tower President he’d recently serviced.

I got a text yesterday from a friend of mine named Owen, who has caught the Typewriter Bug. I believe it started from a discussion about the USB Typewriter mod kits and his idea that it would be fun to set up a typewriter with a burner smartphone or an Arduino board to automatically Tweet […]