Reuters is running a small piece about the continuing (yet still declining) market for typewriters, still used by some organizations to fill out forms or by writers who still love the old machines.
Chuck Dilts, 43, an editor of “ETCetera, the Journal of the Early Typewriter Collectors’ Association,” estimates there are about 600 serious collectors in the United States.Dilts and a partner run a typewriter museum in Southboro, Massachusetts, which features about 800 models.
Collectors generally look for typewriters made before 1920, when the machines became more standardized, Dilts said. “For me, chasing them down is a lot more fun than actually getting them,” he said.
There is practically no collector interest in typewriters built after 1956, when they became electric.
Typewriter’s last word not written yet [Reuters.com]
Image: Reuters/Shannon Stapleton
I have, many times, had to search for replacement ribbons for my typewriters. I’ve found there is some adding machine tape at Office Depot that is almost the same as the ribbon for the smith-corona I like to use, so I can wind that junk on to old spools.
Anyone have a good source for ribbons?
A few years ago I worked for an office equipment dealer in Florida. There was a grouchy old guy who worked in the back room that was probably one of the last IBM Selectric repairmen in the country. Customers drove hundreds of miles to have their beloved Selectrics tuned up or repaired.
We heard stories that for a while in the 70′s you could not hire a professional typist unless you provided IBM Selectrics. People who typed for a living simply refused to use anything else.
The IBM Selectric was indeed the gold standard for electric typewriters, however a lesser-known IBM machine, the Executive, preceded the Selectric and was, in many ways, a far more interesting device.
The Executive offered proportional spacing (an “i” is narrower than an “M” for example), and thus the learning curve was a little steeper for these, as one had to know how many times to hit the backspace key to fix a typo, depending on what character needed replacing.
It was worth it though, for it gave a near “typeset” effect. A variety of (non interchangeable) fonts were available. My favorite was ‘Mid-Century’, a knockoff of Futura. There was another that resembled the more modern Verdana, and probably others as well, though I was never fortunate enough to acquire a new one — mine came from attics, thrift stores and yard sales. They are utterly unrepairable nowadays when they break, and the special single-use carbon ribbons have gone to the land of unobtainium.
Those with ample time on their hands and a knack for mental arithmetic could actually produce justified columns with the IBM Executive, something not automated at the professional level until the advent of computerized phototypesetting years later (the Selectric Composer being a sort of semi-manual exception available to professionals with money to spend around the same time of the regular consumer-level Selectric) and decades later for your average PC user with word processors.
Of course now that it’s brainlessly simple to create nicely justified text, the trend now is for ragged margins. Go figure.
Old typsetters never die. They just decompose.