The typewriter museum may be closed down but the typewriter talks go on unabated. Another 2½-hour typewriter presentation took place this morning at Melba (named in honour of Dame Nellie) in Canberra. This was the 57th since the first at the National Library of Australia for the Literary Festival in 2007. They include two in Melbourne (I Am Typewriter Festival, 2011) and one each in Sydney (Australasian Forensic Document Examiners Conference, 2013) and Hobart (The Collectors, 2008). So that's more than nine years now of carting carloads of typewriters around the country - in this latest case just 25!
We had a lot of laughs while discussing some of the funnier aspects of typewriter history. But the most amusing incident was when I got a gentleman in the front row to demonstrate the tautness of the mainspring on an Imperial 50 demountable and the drawband suddenly snapped in two in his hands. That's a first!
This time I was even able to sneak in a brief peek at typewriter art and typewriter erotica:
The first such talk, at the National Library in 2007.
4 comments:
Looks like fun. I note many white hairs and bald pates, but it's good to know that youngesters like Jasper Lindell are also lovers of our machines.
I recently got invited to speak at a branch of the Cincinnati library in late August. I hope I get such good turnout.
What a wonderful event.
Thanks for posting all the nice advertisements.
Those commercial advertisements in German are A D O R A C U T E xD xD xD
What made this talk a little more interesting than others was that in the audience were gentlemen who had been in the printing trade and had used Varitypers and IBMs as typesetters, as well as others who were keenly interested in the QWERTY layout, so question time raised the opportunity to discuss a range of such issues. No matter how many old typers you take along, Richard, someone is bound to ask about the golfball - that's been my experience from 57 such talks anyway. I guess the IBM, as opposed to other machines, remains a little fresher in the memory?
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