The Death of Hunt N. Punchus, the Bout of the Birds and the Royal Signet Typewriter

Gimbels was a 13-story, 700,000 square foot department store at the corner of Sixth and Smithfield in downtown Pittsburgh. In the early 1930s, it had some pretty imaginative advertising people working for it. When the “Depression Era” Royal Signet portable typewriter came on to the market, in mid-July 1932, the Gimbels “mad men” went to work with added fervour. They created a character called Hunt N. Punchus, who today we might call Hunt N. Peckus. Punchus, they said, “was the eldest son – and black sheep – of the fine old Type Right family, connected by marriage with the Royal Family”. And by that they didn’t mean the one Meghan Markle has since wedded into, although the Gimbels folk did say that Hunt N. Punchus had eventually been disowned by the Royal Family, just as the sassy Californian lassie might soon be. But getting back to Hunt N. Punchus, “His death was caused by young Royal Signet, whose Touch Typing Cards proved fatal to the old scamp!” As clever as this single-column ad - with its humorous little engraving - may have seemed at the time, it was actually at odds with the main thrust of the Royal Typewriter Company’s publicity campaign in marketing the new, more widely affordable model. The Signet was, as other Gimbels teasers pointed out, an inexpensive machine specifically designed for the use of beginners – particularly those “who find the shift key bothersome!” Now there was a very different way of advancing the cause of a typewriter; try to imagine the Sholes & Glidden being sold as a machine lacking the “bothersome shift key” (notwithstanding the fact the shift key, bothersome or otherwise, had not been invented back then). With the caps-only Signet, a feature apparently deemed worthy of mention in adverts was the Monoface type, a sans serif font (on the machine I once owned, it was in italics).

At its launch of the 7lb 8oz Signet, Royal was following very closely on the heels of Remington, which had put its cut-back, cut-price Remie Scout and Monarch Pioneer models on the market in the third week of May 1932. The Remie Scout range included a caps-only typewriter like the Signet, but one that lacked the front portion of the frame. The Scouts, weighing just under 9lb, sold for between $19.75 and $29.75 and some were advertised as “practical for the school child”. With the Signet, Royal included in its targetted market people in a higher age group, and priced its machine at $29.50. Given these types of typewriters were expressly designed to meet market needs while the world was in the grip of the Great Depression, and features were eliminated to bring the retail prices down as low as possible, the nationwide newspaper advertising by both Remington and Royal ironically seemed to be without constraint. For example, Royal promoted the Signet with full-broadsheet page, heavily illustrated advertisements, something very rarely seen for any other machine in the history of the typewriter. The impression gained was that Royal was gambling heavily on the Signet, yet it would appear fewer than 20,000 were ever made in 1932-33, before the Junior was introduced.

Coming across an interesting series of comic strip-style magazine adverts for the Signet today, I was reminded that it’s more than eight years now since I posted on “The Big Battle of the Little Birds: Remington Bantam versus the Royal Signet”. The Bantam came out in mid-October 1938, more than six years after the Signet, but I thought my “rumble” in what was then the jungle of my kitchen was a fair contest between two similar machines. What’s more, the older Signet won. But I put stripped-back Remie Scouts up in other contests, and I still pine for their wonderful, snappy typing action. At one time I had what must have almost been a full set of “Depression Era” portables typewriters. They all went to a good home and by sheer coincidence I have been contacted in the past week or so by the man who was back then the new owner, my friend Ray Nickson. I lost touch with Ray when he moved to the US some years ago. He is now in Fresno, California.

My typecast in 2013

One of the young winners of a $100 cheque from Royal was

George Crouch Cowan (1914-1996) of Charlotte, North Carolina.