Traveling with a friend

London typer swap

Piotr Trumpiel of b4cksp4ce (no relation to D. Trump).









Here is the event from Piotr's perspective.

View from the top of St. Paul's Cathedral this afternoon:

Type-out weather

(color enhanced -- and yes, I know our porch is desperately in need of paint)

(Actually, this may be a pre-Champion model.)

"Continental" Arabic Erika (read more here)

Here's a very interesting blog post from someone who visited Najjar Continental in Beirut and made some fonts from the typing of Arabic typewriters.

J'aime le pouvoir des mots écrits à la machine à écrire!

According to this blog, a Hermes 3000 is (or was) available for public

use at Shakespeare & Co. I didn't spot it -- maybe it was in the upstairs area

where I didn't venture, or maybe it was obscured by the mob. (There

is a queue to get into the bookstore and you can barely move once in.)

(Yes, that's my arm sticking into M. L'Héritier's eye. This was a big ad on the side of a kiosk. 

The subtle name of the magazine is Winner.)

Remington 2000, photo altered from an Etsy listing:

At least there's evidence that the French are hip to hipsters:

Adopteunmec.com (Adopt a Guy)

Andrea Haenggi

Rob Neuwirth

The travel typer

My taxi to the airport should be arriving in half an hour. I thought readers might be curious to know which typewriter I'm taking to London for a month (because, of course, leaving without a typewriter is not an option).

Some machines in the running were the Empire Aristocrat, Olympia SF, and Scheidegger Princess-Matic.

But in the end, I'm taking a Groma Kolibri.

Why? Well, I've long been fond of this model for its looks and its good design. But the main reason is that it's very flat. It fits in my book bag along with my laptop, iPad, notebook, and much more. (Plus, Robert Messenger recently proved that the Kolibri is a good travel typer by taking it to New Zealand.)

My flattest typewriter of all is this Gromina:

This is also known (in my mind) as the Groma Air.

Why didn't I take it? Because it has a German keyboard and because the Kolibri has a more satisfying and effective mechanism. Notice the much flatter typebasket and segment on the Gromina, made possible by a clever geared-typebar mechanism. Clever, but not as strong or fast as the completely different mechanism on the Kolibri.

Stay tuned for some Kolibri typecasts from London.

Groma T from '53

Postscript: a German collector alerted me that my newer machine is not a model E. The model E was a prewar version of the model N with no ribbon color selector, and is quite rare. According to this collector, my green machine is a fourth-version model N. But more recently, AmsterdamAssassin has assured me that this is a model T. See his comment below. (Why can't manufacturers clearly mark their models?)

This is my 1938 Groma N for comparison:

The use and abuse of a Kolibri