Underwood

As well as the pair of Boots, i also got this Underwood 315 for Christmas. It's a nice typewriter though the case is a little awkward to get the typewriter in and out! The typewriter is pleasingly beige and white.

A pair of Boots

Two of the typewriters i received for Christmas carry the Boots name, if you are UK based then you may be thinking "Boots the chemist?!" and you would be correct! The pharmacy and healthcare chain also sold goods in a number of tangental and unexpected areas until bean counters with MBAs no doubt told them they could squeeze more money out of the business without such fripperies like music (the first LP i ever bought was from Boots indeed) and typewriters. 

Boots sourced their typewriters from a number of places. The Boots Model 42 is an Erika 42 with an extra name label. Built in the German Democratic Republic. It types pretty well.

Later in the 1970s, Boots switched supplier to Silver-Reed for the PT800 which is a very similar typewriter to the Silverette and WH Smith branded Red Fox. Like those others, it is a wonderful little typewriter. These are numbers 16 and 17 in the collection.

Three new kings...

Merry christmas, nadolig llawen to you all. Santa has delivered three new typewriters to the collection (which seems apt). They are the Boots 42 and PT800 and an Underwood 315. We'll cover them in more detail over the coming days.

KOFA look at this

The latest typewriter to join the collection is here! Number 15 is this KOFA 300. Now, this typewriter is nowhere near as old as some of the others in the collection. The company's website, which looks like it was last updated in 1998, still lists it as available so maybe the typewriter was made in the 1990s. It works pretty well.

Update: i've just noticed the typewriter has the euro symbol so that would indicate late 1990s or early 2000s!

Showcase (4) : WH Smith Red Fox

From the late 1970s is this rather fine WH Smith branded typewriter, the Red Fox. It was actually made by Silver-Reed and is very similar to the Silver-Reed Silverette and SEVENTY typewriters which are also in the collection. One key difference is this typewriter is the red colour of course! The Red Fox works pretty well and has some rather tasteful grey keys.

If you are not UK based then you maybe have not heard of WH Smith before, they are a famous British newsagent and stationery store. They used to be one of the main places to go for office materials and hence selling their own typewriters was, as they say, probably a "no brainer". WH Smith also sold this same typewriter in grey (perhaps for companies who found a red office machine too garish), unfortunately our Grey Fox is rather broken but we will examine that in a future entry in the Showcase series.

Learning to touch type

If you have seen any of my typing videos then you know that i can type quite quickly though not proper touch typing. I have bought this book therefore and am thinking of learning how to type the proper way. I'm not sure how i am going to do this yet, i might document each lesson or just do a summary at the end. Then i might re-record those videos.

Listing the collection

As the collection has been growing fast (ten this year alone and three pending!) i decided it was time to create a listing page for my typewriter collection. It shows which year the typewriters joined the collection and also their status. You can see the page here.

A trio of typefaces

As we established in the post on typewriter forensics, all typewriter models had a unique "fingerprint", even down to the individual typewriters themselves. But how much did the different typefaces and typing quality of typewriter models vary? To demonstrate, i typed the same line of text on three of the typewriters in my collection and the results speak for themselves (yes i know i got the name of one of them wrong!) 

Typing on a Brother Deluxe 1350

Another typing video, this typewriter was the first one in my collection. It all started here.