How Illegal Immigration Saved My Life

Filed under: Project 88, Rants, Typecast, politics — olivander August 21, 2009 @ 9:13 pm

Typewriter: Fritz, a 1903 Remington Standard No.7

4 Comments »

  1. Based entirely on the typeface, I kept waiting for the part about vampires.

    (“My great-great-grandfather was a stowaway on a ship out of Transylvania, and he hid down in the ship’s hold, with the undead and practicers of the dark arts…”)

    Also, this: Please remain where you are, Alan. The Dept of Deportations will be there to pick you up momentarily. It may be tough for them to determine which fraction of you represents your citizinship-thieving ancestory, but they’ll find it, excise it, and deport it. Good day, sir.

    Comment by duffymoon — August 22, 2009 @ 7:23 am

  2. I. Love. That. Typeface. Good LORD that’s gorgeous.

    As the great-granddaughter of a Basque fortune-teller with three or four invented pasts, I’m right there with you. If she hadn’t set sail, I might be reading palms off the back of a wagon right now.

    Legal immigrant? Nothing about that woman was legal.

    Comment by monda — August 22, 2009 @ 10:16 pm

  3. Duffy, heh.

    I mean, how do you explain why they even *made* a typeface like that? Seriously? Any theories? I mean, being expensive as typewriters were, who would have said “hell– I’ll take the Transylvanian font.”

    Yeah, as witnessed by the noise being made by various crazy people about red herrings like Obama’s citizenship and whether extending health care to people in their 20’s is analogous to Nazi mass murder techniques, it’s clearly about race for a lot of these people.

    Comment by Strikethru — August 25, 2009 @ 8:35 am

  4. Strikethru (may I call you “-”?), I have a theory about that typeface. Here in the northern plains, where German and Norwegian immigrants made up a large percentage of the original settlers, one can easily find old books, in German, printed in fraktur typeface. Most of them are prayer books (Lutheran, natch), and most of them have the imprintations of long-gone printing houses around Minneapolis. I’ve found them with copyrights well into the 1910s, which tells you just how long German and Norwegian remained dominant languages in the smaller communities.

    My guess is that this typewriter was used in one of those specialty publishing houses. Although some folks on the Typewriters Yahoo group disagree, Liste der Herstellungsdaten gangbarer Schreibmaschinen and Die Schreibmaschine und ihre Entwicklungsgeschichte say that the Remington Standard No.7 was marketed in Europe as No.6, which would mean that by virtue of its label, this No.7 was made for the American market.

    If you look closely at the machine’s photo, you’ll see that the bottom row contains I, V, and X, which I presume to be for making Roman numerals, possibly for introductory page numbering. A person couldn’t type a Roman numeral higher than 49 with this scheme.

    Comment by olivander — August 25, 2009 @ 9:13 am

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