Bill and I unearthed another treasure of typewriter dealer ephemera the other day, digging up a Shipman-Ward Office Machine Dealer’s Line Book from 1954. I had a chance to haul my laptop and a portable scanner over to MTE yesterday to scan relevant portions in. Previously, when I scanned in the old NOMDA books, I concentrated exclusively on the Age Tables for typewriters and left everything else out as extraneous to my primary goal of obtaining the age lists. For this line book, I scanned in almost the entire thing, plus all the random loose pages that Bills father and grandfather had stuffed into the book.
This means I got scans of a lot of stuff that’s probably not interesting to anyone, unless you’re really interested in lists of trade-in allowances and price lists. So many pages that I’m going to post it in stages. The first couple of “chapters” in the book are Price Lists and Trade-In Allowances:
Bonus Ephemera: MTE Business card from mid 1950's. Love the 4-digit phone numbers :D
The next section for posting will be the actual Shipman-Ward Typewriter Age lists, then (maybe) adding machine age lists, but I might skip those and move straight to the list of Ribbon size standards, platen replacement prices (oh, golly, to live in a day when replacing all the rubber in your typewriter cost about a sawbuck!), formulas for quoting repair work, Accessories sales and eventually I might even post the loosely stuffed ephemera – a stack of paper as thick as the book itself.
In the meantime, enjoy a look at typewriters cost and were traded in for back in 1954! (:
Cool. I’d say used typewriters were bringing pretty good trade-in prices, when you consider inflation.
Mesa must have been a pretty small place in the ’50s, I guess.
Thanks for putting all this stuff up, Rev.
I am amazed at the new manual office machine prices. $200 in 1954 is about $1,600 today!.
The electrics were twice that, making them $3,200 to $4,400 or more in today’s money.
WOW! And every office had one or more! That’s a significant investment.
I’m actually surprised the trade-in prices are so low, in comparison to new.