Typecast: Buy Nothing Christmas

 

 

Nice, isn't it? Completely untouched - not even so much as an initial of the original owner. This is probably what will happen to my own inadvertent agenda collection a few years hence!

 

The clerk at the thrift store was amazed that I found this and wanted to purchase it (before he did, I suppose). "Magnificent!", he said. And I wholeheartedly agree, it really is quite a cool find.

 

The pages are easy to take out because the whole book is made up of smaller leaflets stapled together, so I can take out a whole folio sheet without too much trouble. I plan to use these for typecasting.

 

The back pages have space to list one's budget and expenses, take notes, and preview the calendar for 1968. None of that address book stuff. 

Script typecast courtesy of Adler Tippa, purchased in the UK about six weeks ago: 

Typecast: Relentless reinvention

I'm probably being too harsh here, idealizing the days of typewriter innovation as a time when products stood still long enough that you could take a good, hard look at them. Arguably, we've had 45 years to examine the Hermes 3000 and conclude that it's fantastic, while the iPhone is still only about four years old (and has gone through a new version every single year).

I think that there might be some genuinely great life-improving innovations out there that I would love to discover (it's 2010, after all), but between keeping up with the constant flood of new slightly-modified gadgets and trying to get back the 6539 hours I spent configuring Windows Vista to operate at an acceptable speed (it never happened, so I gave up and went over to OSX), I am just left numb from it all and want to never open another shrink-wrapped blister package of unmet expectations.

As a palate cleanser, here are some pretty pictures of typewriters:

 

 

Happy Thanksgiving weekend, everyone!

Variations on typewriter keyboard layouts

My attempts to keep our TPM (typewriters purchased per month) at a respectable low (one to two, ok maybe three maximum) have been successful so far, and October and November have been relative dry spells compared to this summer. Whew. This new-found asceticism, however, has not stopped me from browsing the offerings in local markets. This has been a particularly good month for foreign keyboards, and we have come across a Russian Swissa Piccola:

 

And an Arabic language Erika Daro (labeled Optima, for some strange reason):

This last was offered by a seller who actually spoke Arabic and kept addressing me as "Habibi". Some sort of story there, obviously, but I didn't stick around too long to find out.

We've been fortunate to have a range of keyboard layouts represented in our collection, including a US QWERTY, UK QWERTY, Italian QZERTY, French AZERTY, German and Swiss QWERTZ (with at least three different variations for Swiss-German, Swiss-French, and German), and Spanish QWERTY.

 (An Italian QZERTY keyboard on a Hermes Baby - undressed for cleaning in this picture. The most aggravating thing about Italian QZERTY and French AZERTY keyboards is that you need to shift to type numbers! Apparently there are so many accents in the language that the whole top row is devoted to special symbols.)

Even with the exact same language, there can be subtle variations - a catalog from Olympia detailing their range of keyboard layouts (which was reproduced in Beeching's Century of the Typewriter) shows at least six different versions of the Swiss-French keyboard alone. 

(A Swiss-French keyboard on a Japy Script spotted in the flea market over the summer.)

All the other languages have several versions as well, and one wonders how they kept track of all of them, or why they needed so many in the first place. Besides the addition of an occasional "1" on a keyboard for a script typewriter, I cannot imagine the advantage of switching about the arrangement of the symbols and accents. 

During our summer visit to the typewriter museum in Lausanne, we spotted a few more different layouts, including a Greek-French AZERTY:

another Russian keyboard, this time on an Olympia Splendid 66;

 and an Olympia SM-3 in Hindi (sorry about the fuzzy picture):

More pictures from the museum here.