Further to my post yesterday, today I received from Laurie Cox of the Stroppel Hotel and Mineral Baths in Midland, South Dakota, these images of Julia Talledge at her Oliver No 9 typewriter. It was yet another happy consequence of family members getting in touch with me following an ozTypewriter post. In this case, it was a post titled "Calamity-less Julia, Her Typewriter and The Black Hills of Dakota" which was published on February 4 last year. The post included a newspaper image showing Julia at the Wilge Nursing Home in Mitchell, 175 miles east of her beloved Midland. S ..read more

Of the 2937 posts on this blog, one that I am most proud of was published on March 13, 2019, under the heading, “Betsy Beaton, The Boy With Green Hair and the Underwood 6 Typewriter”. There wasn’t a lot in it about typewriters, but it took many, many hours of research to identify the lady in the photo with the Underwood standard – and her achievements. The end result was  satisfying to say the least. The post opened, “On the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web, I went through an exhaustive exercise of exploring the Internet’s many failings, its virtues and the boundless opportunities ..read more

I’ve been asked to service before sale this 1903 (serial #302981) Underwood 5. It’s history includes a thorough rebuild in the 1920s or 30s by an Elizabeth Street, Sydney, outfit called Typewriter Trading Co. The Underwood is pretty close to being immaculate for its age, but I’m intrigued by the lack of a shift lock key. The right shift key automatically activates the lock, which is a lever with a small black knob on top. I’ve looked at a 1908 Underwood 5 (#231413) on Ted Munk’s database and it appears to have the same arrangement. I also looked into Underwood 5 patents and noted that ..read more

World Typewriter Day was marked yesterday and merely acted as a reminder that Latham Sholes’s earliest patents were barely practical and needed a lot of work before a fully functioning typewriter could emerge. One man responsible for much of that work was Jefferson Moody Clough (1829-1908). The 1916 Encyclopedia of Massachusetts states Clough was also “paid handsomely” to perfect the Hammond and Yōst typewriters. Above is the only known photograph of Clough, the man who deserves as much credit as anyone for the successful launch of the typewriter on July 1, 1874. It was under Clough’s superv ..read more

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Barbara Jill Walters (September 25, 1929 – December 30, 2022) was an American broadcast journalist known for her interviewing ability. Walters appeared as a host of numerous television programs, including Today, the ABC Evening News, 20/20 and The View. Walters was a working journalist from 1951 until her retirement in 2015. She died at her home in Manhattan on Friday, aged 93 ..read more

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A young Canberra lady has entrusted me with the task of working on her great-grandfather's 1927 Erika model 4 folding portable typewriter (serial number 81633). The Model 4 was introudced in 1926, not 1923, as noted elsewhere (the Model 3 came out in 1923). This is a real beauty. And I've got it typing beautifully, too. I did the scan above without putting in new ribbon, and one can imagine how brittle the ribbon has become after being in the machine for probably 70 years or more. From what I've been told about it, I doubt if this typewriter has been used in all that time. The capitals and ..read more

Each anniversary of D-Day, I’m reminded of A.J. Liebling, the more so since having had the extreme good fortune to find in a cut-price bin at the National Library in Canberra few years ago a fabulous New Yorker collection called The 40s: The Story of a Decade. This included a couple of particularly brilliant Liebling articles written for The New Yorker, one about Paris immediately before its fall to the Nazis, the other about his landing at Normandy on Tuesday, June 6, 1944. Liebling pulled some strings to get aboard a large infantry landing craft designated LCIL 88, embarking from W ..read more