oz.Typewriter: From Rio de Janiero to Ulladulla: The Remington 15 Portable Typewriter

It seemed entirely appropriate that on the “Magical Mystery Tour” my wonderful wife Harriet went to so much time and effort to plan and organise for my 74th birthday this week, we should find on our travels an extreme rarity among portable typewriters – a Brazilian-made Remington 15. I can find only one other example of the 15 online, one which appeared a year ago on the “subreddit for typewriter fans”, r/typewriters (and it has an orange base, like the Remington 25). Richard Polt featured a dark blue Sperry Rand Remington 10 on The Typewriter Revolution blog in November 2014 – a model Miguel Ángel Chávez Silva had picked up for Richard in Mexico City.

These Brazilian Remingtons (10, 15 and 25, as well as the electric portables 611 and 612) were designed by Richard Horace Penney (1937-1996) for the Sperry Rand Corporation in 1969 and made by Remington Indústria E Comércio de Sistemas Para Escritorio (Remington Industry and Commerce Office Systems) SA in Guadalupe, Rio de Janiero, some time between 1986-89. This range of years is suggested both by the inclusion on the keyboard of the 15 (and I think the 25 as well) for the Brazilian cruzado (Cz$), the currency of Brazil in those years, and by the history of the company, which was abandoned by Sperry Rand in August 1989 but continued by its workers from 1990-94. The 15 also has ‘dead’ keys and its keyboard covers such diacritics as the acute, circumflex and grave accents, as well as the tilde and the cedilla to denote stress, vowel height, nasalisation and other sound changes in the Portuguese language.

On our way from our “base camp” at Mollymook - a gorgeous seaside village on the South Coast of New South Wales - to Nowra on Tuesday morning we stopped in the town of Ulladulla and were walking up a narrow street back from the main thoroughfare when I looked into an antiques shop window and there was the Remington 15, sitting on a bottom shelf patiently waiting for me to find it. Given the great care Harriet took in ensuring everything was just so on our very special trip, I am tempted to imagine she had planted it there. The shop owner, a Māori lady called Moo, couldn’t give me any details about how she had come by the Remington 15, other than that her young sons had tested it out by writing some obscenities. However it came to be in her possession, Rio is an awful long way from Ulladulla – as the crow would fly if it could pass over the South Pole, at least 8600 miles!

The Remington 15’s mechanical design, and its performance, reminded me more of the 1959 Carl Sundberg-designed all-metal Monarch range of Remington portables rather than Sundberg’s later 1960s Cycolac-cased line (Envoy III, Starfire, Riviera, Ten Forty etc). These were made at Den Bosch in Holland, after Remington pulled out of Glasgow in Scotland in February 1963 because of industrial disputes. The Remington 15 feels more a solid and steady machine to type with. Many typewriter enthusiasts have remarked on the likeness between the Remington 15 design and the 1968 Stefan Lengyel-designed Monpti, made by Zbrojovka Brno NP in what was then Czechoslovakia (I must confess the Cz$ symbol on the Remington 15's keyboard had me thinking Czechoslovakia as the country of origin for the Remington 15, before I could find evidence to the contrary inside the machine). Happily, the Remington 15 has the ribbon colour selector switch as a wheel in the same position as the Monarch line, while the Monpti and the Dutch-made Cycolac Remingtons have a ridiculous, troublesome switch up near the ribbon vibrator. The indent on the left side of the Remington 15's keyboard is where the tab wheel is situated on the 25.

The Remington 15’s designer, Richard Penney, does indeed cite the Monarch in his patent references, as well as George H. Kress’s 1964 design for the Royal Empress standard, Norman Bel Geddes’s 1950 design for the IBM Model B and Russell G. Thompson’s 1942 design for the Remington Rand Noiseless Model 10. But I suspect that Penney was as much influenced by the great Henry Dreyfuss, who in 1945 designed the Royal Quiet DeLuxe. After all, Penney worked for Dreyfuss from the late 1950s through the 60s, and together, Penney and Dreyfuss designed the Remington 25 electric typewriter in 1969. Penney later joined industrial design company Peter Schladermundt Associates. Schladermundt, of Bronxville, New York, was an architect and industrial designer who had been a partner of Bel Geddes and an associate of Dreyfuss. In 1973 Penney also designed the Remington Rand SR101 golfball typewriter and a Sperry Rand copying machine, as well as an automatic typewriter control console.

Richard Horace Penney was born in Evanston, Illinois, on February 13, 1937, the son of renowned artist Julia Penney (née Joseph, 1911-2003). Julia was one of the founders of the Greenwich Art Centre in 1956, while a member of the Silvermine Guild of Artists. Richard attended Brunswick School in Greenwich and graduated from the School of Art and Design at Syracuse University. He also studied painting at Colombia. On July 20, 1962, Richard married Alexandra Dracos, a graduate of Bronxville School and Smith College (MA degree in Studio Art and Criticism, Hunter). Between 1962-64 the couple travelled extensively throughout Europe observing industrial design in a range of Continental countries. Richard, who also worked for General Aniline & Film (GAF) designing such things as the View-Master, died on June 30, 1996, at Southbridge, Massachusetts, aged 59.

Arlington, Massachusetts-born Alexandra Penney (right, 1939-) is an American artist, journalist and author. She became assistant editor at Vogue and wrote a weekly column at The New York Times Magazine. She was the author of the 1981 best-seller, How to Make Love to a Man, which was on The New York Times best-seller list for more than a year. In 1989 she returned to Conde Nast as editor of Self, where in 1991 she conceived and created the Pink Ribbon, an international symbol for breast cancer, in honour of the magazine’s founder, Phyllis Starr.

Penney earned a substantial amount of money from her writing, almost all of which was invested with Bernie Madoff in the 1990s. From December 2008 Penney wrote a series of posts on The Daily Beast titled “The Bag Lady Papers”, in which she chronicled her experiences and feelings in the wake of the Madoff scandal.

By an odd coincidence, Richard Polt posted on his The Typewriter Revolution blog about his Sperry Rand Remington 10 (above) on November 16, 2014, just four days after the bankruptcy of Remington Indústria E Comércio de Sistemas Para Escritorio had become complete. Proceedings are started on June 21, 1983, when Remington requested of Judge Mario Guaraci de Carvalho Rangel that it be allowed to continue operating. Eventually, in 1989, an issue of wage arrears emerged and Remington withdrew and allowed a group of employees to manage the company. The self-management process was effective from 1990-94. At one time Remington had employed 2500 workers. Production activities ended in 1995. There’s a very interesting history of the company (in Portuguese) here.