I have a quandry. I have only two sources for Hermes serial number dating that I’m studying for corrections to TWDB. My problem is that they both claim to be lists of Jan 1st numbers for the years represented, yet they seem to be a year off from each other, and neither wholly agrees with the current TWDB info. Here they are:

From NOMDA Blue Book 7-1961

From NOMDA 1984

I sure could use a third source to check against to figure out which list is actually correct for the years. While these lists are informative (for instance the NOMDA 61 list shows the mysterious Hermes Regent that Richard Polt was curious about some time ago), I think perhaps an actual European list for Hermes might be what I need to solidify the question of what year-set I should be going with. Can anyone help?

UPDATE: Georg Sommeregger has provided me with a copy of “H.F.W. Schramm, Liste der Herstellungsdaten deutscher und ausländischer Schreibmaschinen, 11th edition, Hans Burghagen Verlag, Hamburg 1962″, which is a more recent version of the famed Reference 13 which Dirk Schumann used as a primary reference for most of the TW-DB data. Schramm’s numbers and dates suggest that NOMDA ’80 is the correct year-set for Hermes – or more accurately that the NOMDA 61 numbers are probably end-of-year listed rather than Jan 1 numbers.

Having this source is very exciting, as it’ll allow me to verify the lists for most of the other pages that originally were built using Source 13. That should keep me busy awhile (: