The great West Virginia typewriter meeting of 2015

A few highlights from today's big meeting.

There was a good crowd this morning for various presentations, including mine about my book:

Our gracious and loquacious host, Herman Price:

All eyes turn to Gabe Burbano, winner of this year's QWERTY Award for excellence in promoting typewriters:

Peter Weil describes his conservation process for his Universal Crandall No 3.

The results:

Bob Aubert showed us a Hammond for use by the blind. Its original owner won a Hammond typing contest in 1904.

This is a poor photo, but you can see the six special keys with raised rings that served as home keys for the blind user:

Bryan Kravitz of Philly Typewriter Repair gave us all copies of a fun brochure on typewriter care that he wrote in the '80s. You can download a PDF of it here. 

Brian Brumfield told us about his experiments casting replacement parts, such as Hermes knobs and Smith-Corona carriage release levers. The general moral: flat parts are easy, complex 3D parts are not.

Dave and Will Davis showed us their "Harry A. Smith" Victor and pointed out that many "outlier" features of typewriters — parts or characteristics that seem surprising for the time when they were made — probably were added when the machines were rebuilt. Just one rebuilder had rebuilt over 300,000 Underwoods by the mid-1920s.

Plenty of typewriters came out of trunks and were swapped and sold before rain came along:

Here's a Remington made in Italy and branded Commodore:

There were several Underwood electrics lying around:

These delicate, feather-light typewriters make excellent laptops:

Above, Ian Brumfield is practicing for the five-minute speed typing competition. We were given a text about Herman's ancestor Henry Francisco, who supposedly joined the army at age 91 and lived well past 100. I managed to edge out Ian by just a couple of words per minute, working on the Purple Prose Producer:

The PPP was also an entrant in the beauty contest, but it didn't get far.

The beauty contest winner was Herman's restored experimental Remington Telegrapher.

Finally, I had a good talk about minds and machines with Oliver fan and fellow philosophy professor Marty Rice, who brought this wonderful ad I hadn't seen before:

That sure is an aggressive writing machine!