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.