Uncategorized

Typewriter Art and Glubdrubdrib

Uncategorized

A little typewriter installation art from Simon Patterson and there’s quite a bit going on here. I’ll let him tell you –
“I constructed an enormous wall mounted ‘typewriter’ sculpture: Consisting of a giant keyboard on one wall and painted in the United Nations colours of blue and white were keys spaced out in a line on the other three walls spelling out the typing exercise,‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’, that contains all the letters of the alphabet and therefore, potentially, all meanings expressable in the English language. Above some of the keys, placed apparently randomly, were the names of the permanent members of the Security Council, the present and former Secretary-Generals of the UN and some of the places visited by Captain Lemuel Gulliver – the protagonist of Jonathan Swift’s Gullivers Travels.With General Assembly, the juxtapositions of Jonathan Swift, nationhood and nonesense was a way of playing with the various meanings of the word ‘assembly’. It refers to the General Assembly of the United Nations, assemblage sculpture of the 1960’s and 1970’s, assembling people together in an auditorium/arena or gallery. I wanted to show how side by side with place names such as Lugnagg or Glubdubdrib from Gulivers Travels, UN Secretary-Generals’ names such as Boutros Boutros Ghali or Dag Hammarsköld might also seem like a nonesensical language. You are allowed to laugh.”
Oh my. I believe that’s a politically resonant Olivetti Lettera 32. I could be wrong.
I’m fascinated with the idea that “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” contains the potential for the whole of the English language. I hope no one used his comma key as a coaster at the opening.

Spring Break Heaven is a Typewriter Repair Shop

Uncategorized

I’m a lucky woman and I know it. I just happen to live in a place where there are more than a few old-school typewriter repairmen still plying their trade. While making the rounds with my Tower President, I ran into a local man who told me the place to go for typewriter repair of any unusual kind is definitely Acme Business Machines in North Little Rock, Arkansas.

There is no link to the shop because, well . . . Acme doesn’t have a website OR an email address. They just have a shop and a telephone.

Since Acme is only about 20 minutes from my house, I just loaded up my janky Olympia Socialite and headed out. Three hours later, I drove home with my eyes bugging out and a 1948 Smith Corona Silent in the back seat.

I’m not going to give you a play-by-play right now. I should have taken a camera with me to Acme Business Machines. Who knew it would be such a typewriter haven? I’ve got a return trip scheduled to pick up the Socialite, and you can bet this time the trip will be fully documented. Stay tuned.

I typed on every single machine the owner would let me near, and he just kept handing me paper. When he opened the Smith Corona Silent case I thought I’d burst into tears – it was so beautiful, perfect, NEW looking. After typing on everything in the store, the touch of the Silent was music. Every typewriter site I’ve ever visited touts the old SC Silents as the best typers, but you really must get your hands on one and type a line or ten to fully appreciate the soft insistence of its keys. Line after line the machine functioned as if it planned to live forever, and it just might. This machine is tight and controlled. It has substance.

Of course I left with it.

I typed that night on it for hours and I could have kept going. The trick, as Will Davis at the Typewriter Forum told me, is to get the machine at the perfect height. The keys are more upright, so the machine needs to sit a little lower for comfort. Once I found the perfect table, there was serious typewriter mojo.

I call her Mamie.

Photobucket

The First Typewriter

Uncategorized

I began my collection about two months ago with my first purchase – a 1958 Tower President 12 with cursive type. My daughter instantly named her Agnes Gooch after a character in a 1958 Rosalind Russell film. If you’ve never seen Auntie Mame, you simply must. Immediately.

It took a month for one of my local typewriter shops to get her cleaned up and ready for work. The Ebay seller was a sweet man from Missouri and this typewriter had been his mother’s.

All typewriters have a story – tell yours.

Photobucket

Photobucket

(This typecast is brought to you on Agnes, a 1958 Tower President 12.)

Here goes…

Uncategorized

Welcome to Fresh Ribbon. As I scribbled on my other blog it became clear that my addiction to typewriters was fast becoming a focal point. Since I love organizing things into piles, I figured it was time to start a blog about typewriters.

I’m no mechanic, so this won’t be a place to find out how to fix your machine. It will be a place to talk about typewriter love and writing the way it should be done – without electronic editing-as-you-create and spellcheck.

Since I’ve rediscovered the joy of typing on machines, I’ve done a little research. Some of it is invaluable for typewriter ownership and some of it is just fun. Ephemera and lots of it. There are scads of helpful sites that can walk you handy types through the mechanics, and I’ll start listing those things over there on the left. God bless the handy, I say.

If you run into a site that might be helpful for those just beginning to collect/obsess, just let me know and I’ll add it.

With a little luck, maybe scribbling here and there on this blog will keep me off of Ebay and out of the poorhouse.

(Gas-masked typist can be found here.)