The Complete Manufacturing Process of a Vintage Typewriter: Archival Engineering Reconstruction—1930–1938 is a 73-page book published in 2025 by Type Space in Portland, Oregon.
Type Space is a beautiful shop and cultural center run by Antony Valoppi with the assistance of Mark Naylor. I recommend the engaging
interview with Antony and Mark recently published by Austin Typewriter, Ink.
The concept of the book is exciting: let's look behind the walls of a typewriter factory in the 1930s, when most of the kinks of early typewriter experiments had been worked out and the production system was perfected. I personally love 1930s typewriters for their quality and appearance, so I was curious to know more.
The bibliography lists a dozen rare internal publications by Royal, Smith-Corona, and Underwood. (Remington is conspicuously absent, and factories outside the United States are not discussed.) These sound like invaluable sources for esoteric information, such as Royal's Escapement and Spacing Calibration Manual and Smith-Corona's Silent Mechanism Design Memorandum. Other items in the bibliography include technical books such as Pratt & Whitney's Precision Milling and Jig Boring Equipment Specifications.
On the basis of these publications, the book divides the manufacturing process into a dozen phases, from "material formulation" to "packing and shipping," with steps such as casting, type slug manufacture, and painting along the way.
Great concept, as I said. But an alarm bell rings on the copyright page: "Interior diagrams, technical reconstruction, and layout Ai assisted."
There's nothing wrong with using AI for layout. But the "diagrams" ... oh dear. Do these look like real typewriter assembly views to you?
Some of the text in these diagrams also strikes me as phony. Were typewriter manufacturers "performing QC test readout" in the '30s?
You may also have noticed that the cover is AI-generated: that looks like a Royal, kinda, but the details are all wrong (the ribbon is too fat, the return lever is not shaped like any return lever ever seen, and so on).
Maybe the reader is expected to understand that these illustrations are just for fun, or are meant as symbolic reminders rather than actual pictures. But they create suspicion and doubt, and sadly bring this book closer to slopbait videos and quick-buck pseudo-books that don't care that they include images of typewriters that never existed and never could. Those of us who do care about typewriters must be careful about misleading future generations who will have trouble distinguishing real pictures of typewriters from surreal pictures of invented machines.
What about using AI for "technical reconstruction"? What exactly does that mean? The inaccuracy of the AI-generated illustrations makes me nervous about the text. Very regrettably from this academic's point of view, the text contains no footnotes or other references that would tie it to particular pages in the original sources. So how can we trust a claim such as "Primer layers were baked at 275 ºF to form uniform adhesion substrates"? Did all typewriter factories, or the three companies listed in the bibliography, specify the same temperature in their painting methods? Maybe. How do we know? Sometimes the text does distinguish between processes used in different factories, but again, there are no citations of original sources.
The processes are often described in technical and scientific language that is beyond my layman's understanding. Example: "Bearing sleeves and rake bushings were machined from 60/40 Cu-Zn brass (UTS ≈ 290 Mpa), drawn through carbide dies and annealed at 752 ºF to maintain ductility." A three-page glossary at the back of the book does help me understand some terms, such as "MPa" (Megapascal, a unit of pressure). The specificity of this language tends to make it sound authoritative and factual, but again, the shadowy presence of AI raises doubts.
How much of this text was generated by AI? The worst-case scenario here is that an AI system was simply fed the original documents and instructed to spit out a book. I doubt it; I expect that Antony and/or Mark put work and research into this. But, once again, how do we know? Their names appear nowhere, and the text refers to itself in suspiciously abstract and passive language: "Detailed examinations are provided across all major production phases."
In addition to the AI-generated illustrations, this book contains six patent illustrations. These are original drawings which are historically significant. But only two of them actually come from the period 1930-1938. What does Alvah Roebuck's 1918 patent for a paper finger have to do with typewriter factories in the 1930s? Most of these patent illustrations seem to have been selected simply for their visual charm, regardless of whether they pertain to the three big manufacturers of the '30s that are supposedly the focus of the book. But there are thousands upon thousands of patent illustrations from the 1930s that are easily available online and might have been selected to connect to the text.
Actual photos of the interior of 1930s typewriter factories are also available, and would have made excellent illustrations. Good sources would include house organs (internal company magazines) and news reports from the day. And people would appear in those photos! A more engaging book would show us some workers and describe their daily jobs. There might be some dramatic episodes: Remington workers, for instance, went on strike several times during the Depression, and the company took ruthless measures against the union.
A concluding statement on "industrial legacy & standardization" provides an effective overview of the achievements of the great typewriter factories. They were precisely planned, highly sophisticated enterprises that poured vast capital into the mass production of useful writing machines.
I have to point out that a false statement slips in, though: "the rise of electric typewriters in the following decades would gradually reduce reliance on purely mechanical precision systems. Electrification ... reduced the need for finely balanced mechanical linkages." No: electric motors just turned a roller or shaft. Everything else was mechanical and needed at least as much precision as a manual typewriter. This includes the IBM Selectric, which is a legendary achievement of mechanical design. The statement in the book is correct only if applied to electronic typewriters, which came to predominate in the 1980s. Something like an IBM Wheelwriter requires far fewer parts than a Selectric, since many of the functions are controlled by chips instead of mechanical linkages. I say this as someone who is no engineer, but it's evident to anyone who has compared an electromechanical typewriter to an electronic one.
On the whole, this book is frustrating and disappointing. It's an excellent concept, but I wish I could have more confidence in its claims, and I'm hungry for real glimpses of actual typewriter factories.
