I don’t usually publish
comments from anonymous readers, but I received one on Saturday which was
sufficiently intriguing for me to bend the rule. The person wrote, “Thank you
for writing the story. I was given a Sears Adventure typewriter in 1973 from my
uncle. It took me forever to figure out what model it was. I ended up going
through an online version of the Sears Wishbook from 1973 to figure it out.
Your story added to my memory of the typewriter.”
The
“story” this reader was referring to appeared on this blog on May 18, 2012, and
concerned a toy typewriter which had influenced Mario Bellini’s design of the
Olivetti Lettera 35. Oddly enough, the toy typewriter in question, the Sears
Adventure, was actually an effort to duplicate Ettore Sottsass’s design for the
Olivetti Valentine – case and all.
The
anonymous comment led me to look through online Sears Christmas catalogues,
particularly to see how the Adventure was advertised. It wasn’t in the
1973 Wishbook, but in the 1972 catalogue (the patent for the design, by Frank
C. Fusco and Bill Gold and assigned to Louis Marx & Co, had been applied
for in August 1971 but not issued until January 1974). Most interestingly, the
Adventure only ever appeared in ONE Sears Wishbook – unlike almost all other
models of that period. That makes me
think that either Sottsass or Olivetti itself objected to the Valentine
lookalike, perhaps claiming it was an infringement on Sottsass’s design, and Sears responded by promptly taking the Adventure off the market.
1972 Sears Christmas Wishbook ad
Looking
closely at the trends in toy typewriter advertising in the Sears Christmas
Wishbooks in the 17 issues from 1964 to 1980 was revealing. There was a clear dwindling in the
emphasis Sears put on toy typewriters during that time, as the ads dropped
from more than two pages to barely a half page, and eventually from full colour
ads to sepia tone (probably for the first time in more than 20 years). At the
same time, there was also obviously a period from the mid-60s right through to the
late 70s when Sears put a great deal of faith in toy typewriter sales at Christmas.
Many passing fads in Christmas toys are detectable, but toy typewriters remain
stable until the advent of toy computers.
Getting back to the
Adventure, it was a toy typewriter that Richard
Polt alerted me to when it came up for sale on eBay in the US in 2011.
Both of us instantly recognised it as a blatant take-off of the Valentine. I just had to buy it to compare it with the Valentine. The absolute giveaway was the distinctive case which came with
the Adventure, which is almost identical to the Valentine's. But Fusco
and Gold referenced another toy typewriter, one that the two of them,
along with Norman C.Gold, had designed and assigned to Marx in
1966. It was marketed as the Montgomery Ward toy typewriter as well
as a Marx toy typewriter. In turn, that earlier Fusco-Gold toy
typewriter design was referenced by Danforth Cardozo Jnr
and Geoffrey E.Grieb when in 1969 they assigned to Litton Business
Systems the design for the Royal Apollo electric typewriter.
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