9 Comments »

1. Wow, that’s crazy. Are all the letters capitalized or did you use the shift?

   Comment by Justin — April 4, 2010 @ 10:32 am

2. The letter keys are all caps-only. The couple of smudgy parts are where I hit the shift key out of habit and the blank part of the slug struck the paper.

   Comment by olivander — April 4, 2010 @ 11:07 am

3. Large caps… intriguing. Clearly used where clarity was needed.

   Possible military, telegram, or journalism use?

   Any special characters to give a clue?

   Comment by 77writer — April 4, 2010 @ 3:33 pm

4. I must admit, given the title, I may have expected something altogether different from this post. But then, I have the internet.

   Other’n that, though, know that once again that the featured typer is the one I covet the most.

   Comment by Mike.Speegle — April 4, 2010 @ 10:33 pm

5. I half-remember some conversation on one of the typewriter Yahoo groups about this face: I believe it was used for academic purposes, like putting together school materials for early readers (think “Fun With Dick and Jane.”) Chances are this hung out in a school office somewhere, right near the mimeo machine.

   Comment by mpclemens — April 5, 2010 @ 1:06 pm

6. Thanks for keeping me in mind, Alan.

   My first thought was maybe some kind of screenwriting function, but it’s too big for that.

   I agree with clemens on the kids book thing. When I was in middle school, we wrote and illistrated silly little kids books as a project for the elementary kids. My mom (a lifelong secretary and skilled-as-heck typist) volunteered to do the typing. My teacher dropped off at my home a typewriter with a similar typeface for her to use. I’d forgotten that until clemens’s comment.

   But so about your machine: when you *shift* you get NOTHING? That seems odd to me.

   Comment by duffymoon — April 5, 2010 @ 4:23 pm

7. That machine almost certainly worked for a TV station; second-gen TelePrompters used a camera scanning scripts fed under its field of view by a variable-speed belt drive; video from that fed monitors hung off the front of the studio cameras. (By the end of a long newscast, the “Prompter” operator had a big, messy stack of scripts at the fed end of the belt). This was every bit as big a kludge as it sounds. A nice, fat typeface was a huge help: if the thing was just zoomed in on normal Pica type, every jitter and bobble would be magnifed, too.

   The job is still done much the same way, only now the words scroll on a computer. The person at the controls has to pay attention to how fast the talent is reading — or they *should* be paying attention. Ahem.

   (If you find a machine that’s all caps but normal type size, that’d be a radiotelegrapher’s “mill.” Often seen in military setups. Sure wish I could find one).

   Comment by Roberta X — May 9, 2010 @ 2:52 am

8. Thanks for the info. It had crossed my mind that it does in fact look like TelePrompter typeface. The typewriter came out of a construction company’s offices, though, so who knows what they used it for or how they got it?

   There were a few Depression-era typewriters that typed all-caps pica. The Royal Signet and Remie Scout are two of the more common. Unless you want a bone-fide radio mill with the slashed zero, one of those might be the next best thing.

   Comment by olivander — May 9, 2010 @ 8:30 am

9. A construction company? The plot thickens!

   –I own a Remie Scout, one of the most minimal, with no front frame. Love it, need to clean it. I’ve found a Conora Four or Remington speedliner is nice for “copying” (as it is called) radio code, as they’re smooth-operating.

   Comment by Roberta X — May 11, 2010 @ 12:31 pm

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