The noisy noiseless Remington Premier typewriter

A magnificent Remington 3

On this beautiful evening in Cincinnati, I stopped to pick up the latest machines to be serviced at Urban Legend Typewriters.

Here's a nice two-tone green Remington no. 3 portable:

But what's this?

No color selector lever and no black and red dots on the indicator?

The notches on the end of the platen seem very big ... and the line spacing knob won't move at all.

Have you guessed yet? This is a "Magnatype" machine, with huge 6-pitch type (6 characters per inch).

Such a typewriter can't handle a 2-color ribbon; the top of each character would be black and the bottom would be red. It also has to advance the paper a lot for each line, so the normal line spacing has been disabled. This is an attractive typeface that could have been used for typing easily legible speeches, texts for young children who were learning to read, or signs and labels.

A final interesting detail is the bright gold of the pattern on the cloth that covers the base of the machine, which was revealed when some old rubber cracked away. This must have looked spectacular when the typewriter was new, in 1931.

A reader's thoughts on the Niente affair

Agent of the typewriter insurgency Klaus M. reflects on D. F. Niente's letter.



 


PS: Prof. Niente later contributed some linguistic observations to this blog.