In the course of this weekend I acquired two more typewriters. The first one, a Smith-Corona Model 88 Secretarial, was purchased from a somewhat local seller via Facebook Marketplace. He ended up being able to deliver the machine to me at work on Friday afternoon.
There are some issues with the tab and margin settings, but I’m sure that if I actually read the manual and do what it says I will have a better understanding of how to move the right levers and press the right buttons, all in the right sequence. But my goodness, look at this beautiful machine! She will clean up just fine.
When I brought her home, I really didn’t know where I was going to put her. She sat on the dining room table for a while, then moved to the coffee table in the library. It’s not the best place, but I’m definitely running out of room for typewriter display and storage.
On Saturday afternoon I met up with a friend who hinted that she would have a “weird surprise” for me. We sat in a coffeeshop and talked for hours about everything and finally had to leave when we noticed that the owners were closing for the day. (Next time we’ll definitely have to try the coffee.) She was getting into her car when we both remembered about the weird surprise.
Someone had set out this little typewriter case in downtown Milwaukee, labeled thusly. How could she not pick it up and take it to a new home? And how could I not take it in?
This machine was built in Korea in 1988 or 1989, as the American market was shifting towards electronic word processors and home computers. Somehow it ended up in the American Midwest, broke its right platen knob, cracked and popped off the key to the right of the spacebar, and became irrelevant to its owners.
I have the broken pieces and I’ll ask someone more experienced than I am to put them back on. In the meantime I have fixed the ribbon setting (in the photo it’s still set to red, not black) and done a little typing test to assess the key action and have a look at the typeface. This Safari III is a little trouper weighing just 10 and a half pounds without its lid.
But where is it going to go?
One of the features of some of the more clever manual typewriters is the half-space. It’s a way to make room for a correction as an alternative to retyping the whole page. You erase the mistake and then have a way to fit the correct word into the space you have left. You hold the spacebar down, then type the next letter before you let the spacebar up. Then a longer word fits into a smaller space without looking obviously scrunched. It’s like a tight kerning before there was word processing software that did the kerning automatically.
I wish I could do some half-spacing around my house. If certain items could take up half their usual shelf space, I could easily slide two more typewriters onto the shelves, the tables, or…wherever. In lieu of that magical happenstance, some of these typewriters will need to find new and more spacious homes.
Project updates: This week, as research for Black Walnut, I listened to a lot of bluegrass music, then switched to a CD set I bought online called Music of Coal: Mining Songs from the Appalachian Coalfields. All of the (48!) songs are related in some way to coal mining, strip mining, unionizing, Mother Jones, and/or black lung. They sometimes tug at your heartstrings and occasionally just run you over with heavy-duty machinery.
Well, you really shouldn’t have been standing there anyway. My mother’s family comes from an area where these kinds of things are talked about all the time: strikes, mine disasters, being killed by a train. Stuff happens, life goes on, and you have to make a living somehow. The area of focus on my story doesn’t have mountains but it does have some very hilly places, some of which are labels as strip mines on my county map.
I didn’t move forward on the other project at all this week. I kept thinking that I would just sit down and take care of one last task with my library copy of Development of Mathematics, but so many things were happening that I just didn’t make the time. Next week, next week.
I did finally start a short-term project that I had planned to do over spring break, but it expanded and became more complex until I had to figure out how to reschedule it on my own terms. I don’t get time off during spring break anyway — nor for “summer vacation” either — so it’s more of a state of mind than any time away from work. I’ll just say that this is a movie-review project and leave it at that for now. I will be working on this in the background, as it were, and when I have finished it I will share the link to my work. That will probably be sometime in August.
Knitwise, I made one row of progress on the Habit-Forming Scarf this week. I should be able to do more next weekend while I’m watching sessions for the Grand Prix of China.
Chocolate Sheep 
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