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.
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.
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.
If you’d like to go deeper into the subject of Webmention, try this article in A List Apart: “Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet“.
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.
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.
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.
Gut reaction time: Which of these is your favorite?
h/t Elisa Cristina Makoon-Singh
