I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history.
I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
 Since October 7th, my blog has now drawn 17 generative AI comments on posts which have made it past spam filters. Their comments and questions have been fairly natural sounding, but are bland restatements of the posts themselves. All the websites and email addresses for these comments have been AI-related software and services or companies promoting AI in some manner. This will surely get worse…
Acquired5 x 8(Hunt Manufacturing Co., Lit-Ning Products Division)
8 5/8 x 5 3/4 x 4 1/8" exterior dimensions
putty color
This seemed like a nice way to enter the exciting world of 5 x 8″ index cards.Â
A pittance of $5.00 at the local thrift shop also included a full set of Universal Paper Goods Stock No. 58-25 card dividers with both alphabetic and numeral printing.
I ordered a segment pick from Bremerton Typewriter Company several weeks ago.
The segment is the arched piece near the center of a typewriter where every typebar passes through on its way to the platen. Decades of ink and paper dust can pack into the grooves there. Thatâs why an old machine can fe...
Anthony,
I’m glad you finally managed to get your own segment pick from Paul at Bremerton Typewriter. They’re really quite lovely and clever. I will say that oddly, since I bought it, none of the typewriters I’ve gotten since are terribly gummed up as badly as a stretch of them I had gotten before and which were the reason I bought the pick in the first place! The luck of the repairman I suppose…
I must also admit that you seem to be another new member of the typosphere I’ve noticed who has Webmentions on your site! Kudos on that.
I went searching at Star Typewriters yesterday for a nice mid-century Adler Universal.
As if he knew I was coming, Helmut had this lovely Royal/Triumph-Adler R 700 sitting right up front on the counter. It’s essentially a Royal-badged version of the Adler Universal 200 which was manufactured under the Litton regime. It’s a solid standard with some nice speed hiding under the hood. Helmut has added some nice touches of what he calls “lipstick” to zhuzh it up.
Thanks for your reply Ted. Iâm putting some text here in the case that your site filters out img tags the way most WordPress comment sections do. Clicking through to my site will provide the photo of the typed response if this is the case. Tom has a snippet of code which may help this if you need it. Once youâve got some kinks worked out, itâs not half badâĶ It might require even more intention that sitting down at a typewriter though?!
As I was scrolling along yesterday, a post about the lovely Professional Elite typeface popped up in my feed on Reddit. It linked back to Tom Fasano’s website, so I read the original there. I noticed a syndication icon at the bottom and stopped dead in my tracks! Had I run into a fully featured IndieWeb website in the wild?!?
I peeked at the code and saw a Webmention endpoint hiding in there and nearly fell over. Webmention is a web standard that allows any website to talk directly to any other website as if they were social media peers on the same platform.Â
I immediately fired up my new-to-me 1959 Olympia SM3 which also has a Professional Elite No. 41 typeface to dash off a note to Tom and his typewriter. I posted it to my website as a typecast reply. But most importantly, my website sent a webmention (think @mention/notification) to Tom that I had replied to his post. Voila! My reply was in his comments section just moments later, as if by magic. I’ve only done this a few times as there aren’t many typewriter collector/typecasting bloggers out there who’ve added the technology to their sites yet, but this certainly opens up a new space for typewriter social networking by way of the web rather than just via post.
The careful observer will also notice that because Tom syndicated his original post to Reddit and included a syndication link, he’s getting replies from Reddit back into his website via Webmention using a service called Brid.gy. So if you want to type up a reply to his post, or even this one, and post it to the Reddit thread you can participate that way (if your website doesn’t have the capability yet.)
Who else in the typosphere has a website that supports webmention? Let’s start a chat.
A new use for your typewriter’s @ key: to send @mentions by typewriter on the web!
Usually I’m so busy chatting and marveling when I visit Helmut that I totally forget to take a few photos. Fortunately someone stopped in for some ribbon on a Hermes yesterday, so I took a moment to document some of the density of typewriters in Helmut’s spectacular typewriter shop. I only got photos of about half of the space, but tried to cover all the various refurbished machines ready for sale. Generally not pictured are the client machines for repair.
If you’re looking for a really great refurbished machine, then this is the place to stop in and try out almost anything ever manufactured.
I have to admit, even for an experienced collector, this shop is overwhelming, so perhaps do yourself the favor of browsing what he’s got listed online to make a shopping list before you go! Without some prep you could easily spend a week here and not see everything much less try out a tiny fraction of what’s on offer.
Hot take: Is it just me or has the word “snappy” ceased having meaning within the typosphere?
I’ve heard “snappy” applied to the best typewriters, the worst typewriters, and nearly everything in between. While almost everyone uses it with a positive connotation, the noise of the depth and breadth of machines it’s used to describe has drowned out any signal of actual meaning for me.Â
I hear someone say that a “typewriter is snappy”, and it translates to me as the tautology that a “typewriter is typewriter-y”. Yet I know the difference between the action of an Olympia SM3 versus an Olivetti Lettera 32 are as markedly different from each other as a Remington Quiet-Riter is from an Olympia SG1. Even a freshly cleaned, oiled, and properly adjusted Royal KMG with a brand new platen is dramatically different from that same machine just out of a barn after 77 years of dust collection, cobweb accumulation, and abject neglect. Yet I know people who would call both of them snappy without a moment’s hesitation.
I get the feeling that many are attempting to use the word to describe the “action of the machine” rather than just the noise it makes or the “voice” it presents. One might say some sound flat and tin-y while others are solid and sonorous. One might describe a typewriter with a new platen as having the velvety sweetness of a romantic crooner. These words all get at something. They strive to touch the soul of the machine and how it functions. Snappy as an adjective to describe a typewriter has lost touch with the soul of typewriters. We need some new words!
What other words could we use to better describe the “action” of a typewriter’s key levers and typebar assemblies? Words that give more depth and actual meaning to the joy of typing on the wealth of machines that one might run across in the wild?
If you were to put these new words onto the perpendicular axes of speed (fast versus slow) and a measure like key travel distance (deep versus shallow) where would they sit? Are there other axes we should consider plotting the “soul of a typewriter” on to better situate descriptive words of typewriters, their condition, qualities, and how well they work? Maybe we include an axis of “press” from soft to firm? How might we verbally quantify the touch and feel of the keys and how they respond to the variety of typists? How might we better capture the engineering of a machine and how well it has been maintained? There are miles of distance between the performance of a Hermes 3000 and the typewriter-like simulacra known as the Maplefield Classic Portable Manual Typewriter. We need some words to help convey this to someone who lacks the personal experience.
I’ve got some ideas already, but I thought it would be more interesting to put the idea out to the creativity of the community to see how far we might expand the universe of the idea first.
What better words could we be using to expand the experience of the space?
I often see typewriter enthusiasts “debating” over which is the prettiest or best typeface, and often, they’re making their judgement on one machine they happen to have or really wish they had. Rarely are these judgements made with multiple typefaces on the same page for easier direct apples-to-apples comparison, so I threw together a small sample from a few in my own collection.Â
Gut reaction time: Which of these is your favorite?
Phrase of the year: “emotional support typewriter”!
What I wouldn’t give to have some popular cookbooks like Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking, Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, Better Homes & Gardens’ New Cook Book, Brown’s Good Eats, America’s Test Kitchen books, or Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street published as recipe cards in 4 x 6 inch index card format.Â
While their book formats are lovely and lend themselves to lean back aspirational food content, they’re not so great in an actual kitchen. If all the content was on the front of the card, perhaps with those aspirational photos on the back, and a reasonable tabbed index and packaged for sale in a nice cardboard card index box , I’m sure my kitchen life would be far better.Â
Can one of the recipe giants produce something as functional for use in the kitchen as their recipes?Â
If they wanted to go crazy, they could also:Â
offer a deluxe wooden card index with a thin, angled notch on the top to hold the recipe as an easy display while cooking;
print the cards in high quality in such a manner as to make them liquid/splash proof or alternately include a reusable plastic sleeve or two for covering the cards while in use in the kitchen;
add all their “methods” information on individual cards in a separate section;
number them to allow for cross-indexing them to related recipes or methods (color or textual effects like bold, italics, underlining could also be used to cross-reference these)
Some quick examples in the space:
There are a handful of publishers doing this in the cocktail space.Â
Some of the weekly food-in-a-box services like Green Chef and Hello Fresh publish 8.5 x 11″ card stock recipes that come with their food deliveries
Other than these and some magazines that occasionally publish one or two recipe cards, is anyone in the food space already doing this at a bigger scale anymore?
I’m slowly closing in on a completist collection of Royal standard typewriters.Â
Here’s most of my collection so far. Only a few major must haves left, but also still a few to finish refurbishing. Seven are fully refurbished, though two still need some small tweaks; all type but two need some reasonable work, and the rest need a full clean/oil/adjust.
From bottom to top, left to right: 1935 H (with 5 key decimal tabulator), 1935 KH, 1936 KHM; 1945 KMM, 1946 KMM-18 (with a 10-key decimal tabulator), 1950 KMG-P; 1950 KMG-E, 1955 HHE, 1954 HHS (pica double gothic); 1957 FPP (cameo pink smooth), 1961 FPE (sandstone), 1959 FPP (sea blue smooth); 1960 FPE (light green smooth), 1961 FPS-18 (clarion double gothic, pearl light gray smooth).
Anyone with a nice Royal 10, please inquire within.
Two new additions to the Royal FP collection this year give me most of the major colors. Anyone want to join me for a type in?Â
1971 was a year of change. It brought out boxier typewriter designs like the dense plastic body shells of this French manufactured Hermes 3000 and a very similar, but rarer Sears Newport, which was manufactured by Messa in Portugal.
Serial Number: 7084044
Hermes Epoca typeface, 10 pitch, slugs: SNO, 6 lines/vertical inch, portable, bichrome, segment shift, tabulator, U.S. keyboard with 44 keys and 88 characters
light green plastic body, grey-ish cream colored plastic keys
Manufactured in France
Purchased from from Jan M. Macho in Pasadena, CA. This was the personal typewriter of his father John J. Macho, Sr., an ÃĐmigrÃĐ from Czechoslovakia who was in regional sales for Paillard in America and sold millions of Hermes typewriters.Â
Jan Macho, Sr.’s grandson Chris Macho eulogized his grandfather on Instagram:
This is a Hermes 3000. My grandfather, Jan Macho, “Deda” to me, made a living and a small fortune as an exec at Hermes Typewriter Co., and he sold a million of these. I admit, I don’t think of him as often as I should, and it takes hints like these in the wild to remind me of him. Fuck me, he was just so legendarily amazing, kind, generous, and plain THE SHIT in how he carried himself (and now I’m tearing up as I write this). I mentioned him and the Hermes thing to the people at this place here and they gave me a beer. So here he is, still hooking me up from the other side. Love you, miss you Deda.
Generally his typewriter is in solid condition aside from some cosmetic issues in the rear body plastic possibly due to heat exposure. It’ll need a full C/O/A and some new rubber, but will be resurrected to be a spectacular little portable typewriter for a few more generations.
I was so enamored of the provenance of the typewriter that IÂ barely managed to get through a preliminary check of the functionality before buying. I completely didn’t even notice the Epoca typeface until I got it home. Somehow I’ve always been the bridesmaid when it comes to Hermes machines, but it seems I’ve jumped right over the bride title straight to princess.
Anthony Hereld (noctisadversaria.com)
