Mystery Solved! It's a Piccola Corona

Herman Price Collection

Further to my post about Derrick Brown’s short-lived dilemma with his Corona 3  ... Derrick has been doing some thorough digging and is satisfied he has found the answer:
It turns out it is a Piccola, with a Corona frontispiece. Which means it's a very early Corona 3, as Richard Polt suggested, but with a peculiar design that has come to be more associated with the Piccola. At least that's how I understand it, for the time being ...

It was sold by an American eBayer as a Corona 3.
Herman Price, at the Chestnut Ridge Typewriter Museum, tells us on his web page http://www.hpricecpa.com/typewriterinfo6.html
that the Piccola is “the German version of the Corona 3. It was also offered in the earlier Standard Folding version. Both versions are very, very hard to find, even in Europe. This is … one of the first Coronas produced.”

Using images from Herman’s vast collection, Paul Robert, at the Virtual Typewriter Museum, http://www.typewritermuseum.org/collection/index.php3?machine=piccola&cat=kf
explains that the Piccola went into production 100 years ago, 1912, the same year as the Corona 3. It was made by Piccola Schreibmaschinengesellschaft GmbH, Berlin.

Paul writes, “Piccola was the name used by a Berlin company to market the earliest version of the folding Corona 3 [in Germany]. Only very few of the machines were sold and this variant of an otherwise common machine is extremely rare.
“The first Piccola that was advertised had the shape of the earlier Standard Folding.”
Compare the images below of Herman's Piccola with those from Derrick's machine on the previous post: