A Royal Fair Trade

I picked up the typewriter you see here, an Olivetti, from Matt McCormack at Ace Typewriter the other day.

It was part of a spur-of-the-moment trade that took all of two minutes to negotiate. Matt and I are easy.

I proposed a two-for-one deal. I would give Matt a black, crinkle-finished, Depression-era Royal portable in pristine condition along with a gray Remington Model 5 portable. In exchange I would get the Olivetti, a Linea 88, which I admired for its lyrical bulk and Italian pedigree.

Matt rejected the Remington saying that it would only end up in his basement, a kind of typewriter bone yard. He has never liked Remington 5s. The escapements go bad, he said, usually because of chipped teeth. I won’t go into the significance of chipped teeth along a typewriter's escapement bar except to say that letters, to say nothing of words, do not follow in orderly fashion when escapement mechanisms fail.

As it turned out, the Remington 5 I was offering for trade was just fine. Matt still didn’t want it. But, never mind, he offered a simple straight trade — the Royal for the Olivetti.

So what did I get in this Olivetti?

As you can see, it’s a standard, not a portable, but because much of it is plastic, it’s remarkably light. It has a clean Italian crispness to its design. Olivetti got that down cold, witness its Lettera machines, universally hailed for their simple elegance.

What Olivetti didn’t get was ergonomics — ever. You have to attack, nay, pounce on, the keys to produce even the most mundane phrase. The pinkie stretch to the shift key is at human anatomical limits, and returning the carriage requires the heft I reserve for the weight machines at the community center.

But I’m not complaining. The typeface is a modified Courier with a Euro-design edge to it. I can’t quite place it, but it lends a cool Italian flair to whatever you write.

As I snooped around to the back of the machine here in my office warren, I discovered that while the machine's design was Italian (circa 1966), its manufacture was British. In the words on a label, “Made in Great Britain.” The label doesn’t say where in Great Britain but because of my inherited affinity for Wales, I like to think of its being assembled in Llandudno, Conwy or Llangollen — however unlikely that may be.

On the very same label announcing the Olivetti’s British manufacturer as “British Olivetti Ltd.,” is fine print. I fetched my magnifying glass, Holmes like, to decipher it. To the right of an honest-to-God Royal Crest are the words “By appointment to H.R.H. the Duke of Edinburgh Office Equipment Manufacturers.”

Imagine, an aristocratic typewriter, right here in Portland, Oregon, right here in this commoner's cluttered office. Astonishingly, I had traded Matt a Royal for a Royal.

I call that a fair trade.

Failed forensics on "The History Detectives"

The History Detectives may turn out to be the Inspector Clouseaus of typewriter sleuthing.

On last night’s episode of “The History Detectives,” one of their gumshoes set out to find out whether a typewriter, a Corona #3 to be exact, had in fact belonged to famed World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle just prior to his being killed by a Japanese sniper on an island near Okinawa.

A “writing forensics” expert’s compared typed impressions of a date in a letter written by Pyle just before he died, with those on the same date as typed on the Corona said to be his last typewriter. The typewriter is owned by Eric Warlick of Portland, whose grandfather won it in a poker game from a man who claimed to have been with Pyle when he died.

Based on the comparison, the expert concluded that the typewriter was not the one used to write Pyle’s letter.

The evidence: the number “1” looked different in the two dates.

Closed case.

Not so fast, say several members of the Portable Typewriter Forum, to which I happen to belong.

While the Corona has a number “1,” it is rather awkward to use. You have to depress a figure key, similar to the “CAP” key below it. With the “FIG” key depressed, the typist hits what is normally the “Q,” to get a “1.”

To avoid that typing anomaly, many typists simply used the lower case letter “L.” Indeed, many early typewriters had no number “1” so the typists were accustomed to using the lower case “L” as a substitute for the number "1."

That may be what Pyle did on his Corona, out of habit or convenience or both. But when the "history detective" typed the date on the typewriter, he used the FIG key to get the number “1,” and the forensics expert mistakenly concluded that Pyle’s letter was written on a different typewriter.

The fact is that the jury is still out.

I happen to have a Corona #3 (see photos) and indeed the number “1” and the lower case “L” are strikingly (no pun intended) different (see below). But both dates were written on the SAME typewriter.

And yes, if I had used several brands of typewriter, as Pyle did, I’d find shifting with the FIG key a pain and simply resort to using the “L” as a "1." (Note, in the photo above, the “FIG” keys – one on each side – and the “Q/1” key.)

Even if the episode on Pyle’s typewriter got viewers to a questionable “destination,” the trip was fun, including a stop at Ace Typewriter in North Portland where Matt McCormack had the chance to show off his typewriter chops.

The program will be rebroadcast tomorrow, Wednesday, July 18, at 11 p.m. on Channel 10.