Magic Margin

As if you had to even ask.

A few weeks ago I got a call from one of the administrators at the local community college down the street. Glendale Community College's satellite campus in the North Valley has a beautiful library filled with display cases that are sitting empty. I was asked if I would be willing to put together 12 typewriters to display in the library for the rest of the semester. I jumped at the chance to get my collection out of my home Typetorium. 
We've got the ball rolling and it looks like there also might be a reception and lecture by a certain typewriter-collecting English teacher.
I've been going through my collection looking at what I might want to include in this broad collection. I think I have put together an interesting history of typewriters.
Things are in the planning stages and I'll make sure to keep everyone updated, but I am pleased as punch to be sharing our hobby with a whole new group of people.

I have been the victim of a cold and haven't been reading the news. I remember an interview from Time magazine in 2010 that made me proud to be a fan of the analog. This is the answer to a question about his writing style:
"By hand. Every word is written by hand. Then I'll type it on my electric typewriter. It took me 20 years to buy an electric typewriter, because I was afraid it would be too sensitive. I like to bang the keys. I'm doing action stories, so that's the way I like to do it. I don't have [a computer]. I don't have e-mail or anything like that. I have a fax machine."

It was a few days ago and my son and I were sitting on the floor playing cars. We were having a great time. As the the little Mini Cooper crashed into the red truck a thought crossed my mind; these times are fleeting. My son won't be little forever. Remembering these times is important.
We take pictures and tell stories to save these memories for our future. The archiving of our personal libraries is something I worry about. The world is information-rich, but how much of the information is being stored in a permanent way? This is especially true when so much depends on the digital. Our society has started to believe in the permanence of the digital world. In time I think that this will create a digital oubliette where things you thought were permanent prove to be very temporary.
After being frightened by this possibility, I started thinking about Magic Margin. This blog has been a work of several years. In that time I have created over four-hundred posts, took thousands of pictur…

I just finished typing a letter to Keith Sharon. If the name sounds familiar you might want to check out Mike Clemens' typosphere.net post about Keith and what he is trying to do. Click on this sentence to read it.
It was a few weeks ago that Keith asked me to write him a letter. I promised and put it off. I remembered my promise and was distracted by a new typewriter. I remembered my promise and finally sat down and penned a letter worthy of correspondence.  I even have photographic proof that this letter exists.

Keith is waiting for your letter. He want to hear about the weather, your favorite foods, or how you feel about the Angels. His address is in the photo above. So, off you go. Write a letter and make a new friend.

So, I thought that this post would have been over some time ago, but as I dug further and further into the topic, I could see that there was more than I could have ever imagined. We have all drooled over the Varityper at one point or another. That's a shame because I know– from my vast experience and rugged good looks– that drool really falls short as an ink substitute. Drool'n aside, the idea of cold typesetting typewriters really heats up by typeshuttle. Mostly because of justification which I have mentioned here.  The Varityper later became the Coxshead DSJ an example of which Richard recently acquired in an antique shop. A more drool-worthy machine never existed. I, however, will confine myself to a drier, lesser history of the justified typewritten page.

Let's start, again, with the snippet from Popular Science that started my interest in this topic. I posted it some months back. It details a new device that can be added to a typewriter to make it a justification-cap…

Through my many (three) years of scientific (barely) study of youths and typewriters I have arrived at an optimum number of typewriters for use in an opt-in classroom. 19. Also, the shelves I have hold 19 nicely with room for journal forms. The number is arrived at by a combination of prudence and actual use. So, here are the 19.

With bad photography and all, here are the 19:




















What about all the other typewriters? Well, I keep them in-reserve should anything happen to the ones I have out in rotation. With as much use as these typewriters get, I have been able to come to some conclusions about certain brands and their ruggedness. 
As you can see, there are few Smith-Corona typewriters. They seem to just wilt under pressure. The typebar linkages are openable so those typewriters tend to fail in that one area. All the Smith-Corona Galaxie-like machines currently have a problem with their linkages as a result of this tendency and awa…

After reading a post by Will Davis about a very mysterious Webster, I decided to look at the CTP collection. When I really started looking there were actually quite a few. Many are rebrands, but two are the real-deal.