To Type, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth...

Whoo-doggie! If you’re wonderin’ why I haven’t posted in awhile, it’s because I been busy. Doin’ what? Well, first I was gathering material for a little project called Operation: OOPRAP – which looks to be nearing completion of Phase 001, and then I got distracted by this: Yeah. It’s gonna be a monster of a […]

Yesterday the Typewriter Database hit typewriter gallery #6000 in the relentless march to , well, eventually most of them. If you were there and paying attention to the gallery count in the main menu, you might have noticed something else new: Yep- new Typewriter Repair School section. I figured out a way to extract high-resolution […]

New service manuals at TWDB, you’ll want to check ’em out! Parts and Service Manual – Olivetti Lettera 22 Parts and Service Manual – Olivetti Studio 44 Parts and Service Manual – Olivetti Lexicon 80 Adjustment Manual – Olympia SM – 1955 AMES Basic Training Manual for Standard Typewriters – 1968 Adjustment Manual, Smith-Corona “6-Series” […]

Following a lose thread from the last set of updates, specifically the designs of W. P. Kidder, there’s a few new links forged in that chain, starting with the Noiseless: The Portable numbers are an educated guess, since there were only about 6500 made over about 2 1/2 years between its introduction in Nov 1921 […]

“And Satan Appeared in Kansas City…” A collection of news clippings from 1891-1908 tracing the activities of one Wesley (AKA: William) H. Bennington in the years up to his first *five* typewriter companies. For the first 3 years of his active political life, Bennington appears to have been a well-liked and active member of his […]

This weekend at the TWDB was mostly about more research into the details of Molle and Bennington. I made a rough stab at laying out a serial number list for Molle, and immediately more info and analysis from our friends Mark Adams and Tyler Anderson flowed in, allowing some very nice fine-tuning to that list. […]

Well, this one wasn’t bad, though I did all the grunt work of hunting down sources before I found Robert Messenger’s blog post from Jan, 2013 where he’d already done most of that grunt work. Turned out to be a good thing, as I turned up just a couple bits that prolly weren’t available when […]

Sometimes you whack the pinata and all kinds of tasty stuff comes out. Such is the case of the “was it ever even built?” Bennington and Xcel, where we left off a couple of days ago smugly munching our Scooby Snacks — when Agent Polt dashes by and tosses a letter on Bennington letterhead, from […]

Hey kids, want to solve a mystery with me? :D Cue soundtrack (scooby doo) Here’s the mystery: On yesterday’s Fox page update, we see a note on the failed attempt by William H. Bennington of Bennington Typewriter to take over the ailing Fox Typewriter concern in 1922. Well, there’s a thread that needs to be […]

Yep that chain from yesterday still had a few links to forge. It’s noted that the Victor Index is sometimes grouped with the World index, as both were made in Boston at about the same time. Because it was mentioned and needed to be linked, I made a page: Then, because a name variant of […]

So, this weekend I made a few more updates to the TWDB. This time, rather than be inspired into a research frenzy by an uploaded rarity, it was a basically a diceroll that decided what rabbit hole I was going to go down. I had just written my last blog post on Friday evening and […]

Oh, look at the manufacturer pages by last modified date at TWDB:     We’ve been busy this month, and specifically this past week or so, as Tyler Anderson and I took a poke at refining the Williams Typewriter Serial Number Page. Before, it looked like this: And now it looks like this: Nice, eh? I’m spending […]

The TWDB hit its 5000th Typewriter Gallery today. Congrats, Typewriter Hunters!

This post about a Gossen Tippa from BillM over at Fountain Pens & Typewriters prompted me to take a look at what the TWDB says about the Gossen Tippa, to see if I could improve on it and solve the mystery of the production year of Bill’s machine. TWDB is sourced from the 1955 Herstellungsdaten, […]

The Typewriter Database is doing well at the end of the third year of the Five-Year Plan. Traffic has nearly doubled between July and October of 2015, and we’ve blown past 4500 Typewriter Galleries. That’s about 500 fewer than where I wanted to be at the end of 2015, but we could still manage 10,000 […]

Well, after 3 tries at finding a visualization library capable of timeline display that is both simple and flexible, it ended up being kind of a Goldilocks situation – Google’s libraries were too dependent on off-site resources and couldn’t do point data display (like a single date such as “company formed” or “merged with so-and-so”), […]

I’ve been at a loss lately how to get the eBay listing widget that is set up on various places on the desktop version of the TWDB to work on the mobile version. Part of the problem was that getting Javascript to run properly in the DOM-lunacy that is the jQuery Mobile framework is at […]

In part 4 of this series, I guessed the appearance of the Silver-Seikos and Adlers in Royal’s lineup in 1970 to be the death knell for the Portugese Sabres. This turns out to not be the end of the story after all. In the comments, Mr. Royal himself Nick Bodemer mentions that he’s seen advertisements […]

I’ve been a bit hesitant to type up this fourth and last post detailing what I’ve learned of the history of the QDL, because I’m sad to get up from the immersive bath I’ve taken into the Royal portable serial number lists & galleries and say goodbye to the venerable Quiet De Luxe. The line […]

The Quiet De Luxe “A” Model that Royal introduced in 1939 had direct parentage in the “A” Model “De Luxe” and the short-lived 1938 “Quiet”, but it looked like neither one.  Royal had consolidated all four of it’s 1938 higher-end models into just three variations of a single brand-new design: The “A” Model “Quiet De […]

Ahh, the Royal Quiet De Luxe, AKA the “QDL” or the “Model A”. It’s the most popular typewriter among the TWDB’s Typewriter Hunter members by the number of galleries entered (100+ so far). The TWDB’s Royal Serial Number page is also the most popular page on the site by a long shot, among those users […]

Behold: The Rosetta Stone. Four legal-sized columnar notebooks filled with serial numbers and dates entered into inventory for every new and used typewriter that passed through the doors of MTE between 1950 and 1987. Thirty-seven years worth of handwritten notes in pencil by (from my count) at least five different hands. 138 pages of essentially […]

I’ve been emailing with Jay Respler back and forth the past few weeks regarding a couple of serial numbers on some very unusual Smith-Corona Galaxies and Classic 12’s. During the course of this conversation, he pointed me to a Yahoo thread where he discusses the “SCM Datecode” that is found on many SCM typewriters from […]

So I was at MTE today, wheelin’ & deelin’ for a hummingbird that has caught my fancy, when I noticed a pile of *very dusty* books on a back shelf that I hadn’t pawed through before. Therefore, it’s time for another edition of Ephemera from the Collection of Bill Wahl! This one I snagged for […]

Wow, it’s been awhile since I posted – work’s been whippin’ me like a slave driver and I’ve got typecasts lined up that may never get posted. Today however, I did some crimes for your edification, and I must confess. I went thriftin’ and saw a few typewriters – a 70’s Adler Universal 200 standard […]

I figure about half my readers are of the age group that will immediately recognize the obscure 60’s TV show reference I just made in the title of the post. I can be fairly sure of that because Google Analytics tells me that’s the percentage of my readers who are roughly within my generation, age-wise. […]