These Boots Were Made For Typing: Ongoing Usefulness of Typewriters (2)

London-based shoemaker, the wonderfully creative and talented Emily Botterman, made these stylish typewritten boots in 1998, when she was just 18. Emily, who blogged under the title of "The Botterman Empire", used a Canon Starwriter 30 typewriter. Among many other things in her extensive and impressive CV, Emily was involved in making boots and shoes for movies such as Russell Crowe's Robin Hood and War Horse. These 13-inch high Crowe-Hood boots sold at auction at the end of July:

Emily explained her approach to making typewritten boots: "They were the first of three pairs I made as part of my craft subject in my final year at high school. We were given a prompt for that first project, which was ‘still life’. I can’t remember how I arrived at it, but I chose to interpret it along the lines of: When things are tough, there’s still life, full of beauty and opportunity etc. So I collected quotes I found, inspiring, comforting etc, and decided to print them into the boots.
"The word processor had a very small basic screen and it allowed the user to format, edit, change font [and] font size before printing out the page. I think I spent a long time playing around, with formatting the quotes so they would fit into the shapes of the boot pattern pieces. There was some trial and error, especially as each pattern piece had more than one quote, therefore more than one opportunity for things to go wrong!

"The leather was very thin and fit through the machine’s paper feed OK, with a piece of paper behind it, but there were some leather-paper jams! The machine did end up making a different humming noise that it did before I started!
"Once the leather was all printed, I had to be very careful while I was making the boots to keep the leather clean and to not smudge the printing. I think I must have sprayed it with some sort of fixative. I also had to be careful because the leather was thin and would rip easily."

The boots with some of Emily's lasts and tools. Below, Emily illustrates some of her processes in bootmaking:

The Ulysses Typewriter: Rescued Back From the Sirens

This typewriter has had almost as many lives as Charlie the Typewriter Guard Cat. It’s now basking in its fifth coat of paint. It started out, it transpired (after I’d laboriously peeled back the many layers), black, then was remodelled in crinkle grey, then it was repainted a light shade of green (which was its colour when I found it abandoned in a dear friend’s garden shed some 10 years ago), then white and finally (now) zinc. If this seems a bit like the emperor with his new clothes, you’d be right, because the typewriter has been naked quite a bit, too.

It’s an old Underwood, of course, but I’ve taken it upon myself to rename it the Ulysses. I suspect it has changed its appearance so often that it might have lost some of its original character along the way. So perhaps a name change is in order, perhaps not. Well, I’ve gone ahead and done it anyway, and the purists can condemn me to hell in Hartford if they so wish.

Ulysses is a highly appropriate name, in my book (and not because of James Joyce’s unreadable book of the same name, since Jimmy didn’t use a typewriter himself). No, this typewriter is named in honour of the man his fellow Ancient Greeks called Odysseus, the legendary king of Ithaca (where Underwood Noiseless portables were once made). Ulysses was also the father of Telemachus, who gave his name to Mill typewriters. He is the hero of Homer's epic poem the Odyssey, being most famous for his eventful 10-year nostos (“homecoming”) from the decade-long Trojan War. Given this Ulysses typewriter has had an eventful 10-year history with me, the renaming is indeed apt.

Most telling in the new name, however, is that, in the latest episode of its many and varied adventures under my supposed care, it was rescued from Sirens who, unbeknownst to me, had been using it as a garden ornament. Thus it had been exposed to the elements for many months, and by the time I snatched it back, had turned into a complete rust bucket. Needless to say, it wasn’t working. But it is now.

And thus one day it might still be able to type the story of its namesake’s own escape from the Sirens. Of how Ulysses passed between the six-headed monster Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis to land on the island of Thrinacia, where he hunted down the sacred cattle of the sun god Helios, who threatened to take the sun and shine it in the Underwood, sorry Underworld. As punishment, Ulysses was shipwrecked and washed ashore on the island of Ogygia, where Calypso compelled him to remain as her lover for seven years. He eventually escaped by enlisting the help of another typewriter, one Hermes. Well, that’s the edited down version, anyway.

Other than that, the Ulysses is now destined for a career in demonstrating to folk the difference in the typerod engineering design and typebar action between an early Remington and the “visible writing” Underwood. When I hold them both “bottoms up”, it’s clear to audiences how Wagner achieved the second and final great breakthrough in the development of the typewriter. The early Remington displays the first breakthrough, the shift mechanism.

By the way, did you know you can now buy brush or spray-on chrome? But it’s expensive, at $US299 ($A415) for the kit from Alsa at https://alsacorp.com/shop/chrome-products/264-brush-on-chrome.html?fbclid=IwAR0hL-5V8-ieIfF8iBomxoavWkDg4sA1qIEQ1DthICOIh11cv-6qtNqXe_8

Wayside Treasure: 1937 L.C.Smith Model 8 Typewriter Easy Pickings in Manuka

It's getting to be just like the good old days, back when I had a regular supply of typewriters given to me by Canberran readers of my newspaper column. In the past week I have acquired three "new" old typewriters to play with. I was home by mere minutes yesterday afternoon - after a long lunch in the city with two journalist friends, one of whom I've known for more than half a century - when one of daughters-in-law called. Emily Hansen-Messenger said she'd just been told a typewriter had been dumped on a street in Manuka. I hopped straight back into the car, drove a few minutes away to Bougainville Street, and there to my considerable delight I spotted an L.C. Smith sitting among fallen gumtree leaves on the nature strip beside the road. Even from my car, a few feet away from the typewriter, I could tell it was in good condition.

As I found it.

Apart from anything else, it was a good excuse to put the Underwood 5 restoration job to one side - after 16½ hours' work, it was starting to drive me a little crazy anyway (the carriage on what used to be called a "begging dog" typewriter is refusing to "sit" properly, no matter how many times I say "sit"). So once I got the L.C. Smith home I immediately began the task of tidying it up. The serial number is 1286425, which I'm assuming means it's a 1937 model 8.

Interestingly, it was sold by the Australian Typewriter Company in Sydney, a firm I'd not previously heard of and about which I can find absolutely nothing from online newspaper scans.

This morning I did a bit more cleaning up and touching up. The only problem I had was with the drawband. This was properly attached at both ends but the mainspring had sprung, which is mysterious to say the least. Maybe someone had managed to reattach it, but hadn't known to reset the spring first? Not surprisingly, when I took the drawband off at the spring end, the band disintegrated. So I had to jury-rig another one, and after several attempts to prevent it from dropping off when the spring casing moved downwards, I was finally able to get the L.C. Smith typing beautifully:

Not bad for a gorgeous, 81-year-old typewriter that had been thrown away, but is now looking almost like new:

Underwood Typewriter Dating

I spent the best part of eight hours yesterday working on restoring an Underwood standard. I've had the machine for about 10 years now - it has had a very chequered life, even in that time. I've never been able to completely satisfy myself whether it is a Model 5 or 6 (it came to me with no decals at all). And the serial number of 4117741-10 suggests a 6 with a 10-inch carriage and 1932 as the year of production. But yesterday, while taking it completely apart and cleaning it up, I was surprised to notice this date on a metal clasp at one end of the padded typebar rest arc. It clearly states August 18, 1903. Has anyone come across one of these date stamps on a typewriter part before? It's hard to believe a part made in 1903 was still being using on Underwoods almost 30 years later.  Anyway, I'm ploughing on with the restoration today and still weighing up whether to apply another paint job - by my estimation that would be at least its fifth repaint - or leaving it naked. Paint is the preferred option, but we'll see. I'd say that without a doubt it has been "remodelled" at some point; it started out as black, then had a crinkle grey finish and then a light green shade. Watch this space ...
PS: Ted Munk sussed it very quickly. It's the patent date for the Underwood standard typebasket, patented by Louis Myers (later co-founder of Royal). Thank you Ted.

Ongoing Usefulness of Manual Portable Typewriters: Scriptwriting on the Hoof

This video shows the enormously gifted Australian artist Zoë Barry using her young daughter's Brother manual portable typewriter (the "Goldie") to write script notes and cue cards while being driven into Melbourne for the start of a new season of her unique participatory theatre work, The Boy Who Loved Tiny Things.

Zoë is the director of The Boy Who Loved Tiny Things, which celebrates wonder, caretaking and story-making through a mysterious collection of small items. The work was inspired four years ago by a then nine-year-old Minnesota boy, Østen Lowe Burkum, left, who loved to notice, collect and protect tiny things. Østen's father is a well-known musician who met and played with Zoë while touring Australia.

The Australian performance is a collaboration between acclaimed children’s theatre company Drop Bear Theatre, visual arts collective The Seam, and Zoë, and it features an enormous array of precious items. The typewriter, small and light as it is, is not among them.

The "Goldie" was another sort of collaboration - between myself and Zoë's mother, the Canberra jewellery and glass beads maker Harriet Barry, as a birthday gift last year for Harriet's grand-daughter.
Zoë is not just an inimitable cellist and renowned teaching artist and educator, but a musical director and adviser, sound composer and designer, creator and devisor, performance maker and an actor and performer. Such an incredible range of skills - and typewriting on the hoof, too! Wow!

Just two of the cards typed in the car, with the "Goldie" on Zoë's knees.

Zoë has performed with Jon Cale, Meow Meow and Missy Higgins, among many others. She is the solo cellist in Christian Wagstaff and Keith Courtney’s House of Mirrors (see image below). Her performance highlights include seasons at the Lincoln Centre (New York), the John F. Kennedy Centre for The Performing Arts (Washington DC) and the Edinburgh International Festival, as well as tours through Asia, Greece and Russia.

Zoë is a member of the Letter String Quartet, presenting programs of new works for strings and voices and commissioning composers to push the sonic possibilities of the string quartet. Her composition credits include feature films Animals (just announced as screening at the Sundance Film Festival in the US), The Infinite Man and Ukraine is Not a Brothel (Venice Film Festival; winner, Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Best Documentary), co-composed with Jed Palmer.

Zoë, right, at The Boy Who Loved Tiny Things.

Zoë's scores have been heard around the world, from the Sydney Opera House to the National Centre for The Performing Arts, Beijing. Her works continue to tour nationally and internationally. Zoë has also been a teaching artist with The Song Room for 10 years, specialising in creating music and performances with children from trauma backgrounds and those newly settled in Australia. She is director of Harmony in Strings, an innovative program focused on improvisation, composition and joyful music making in Melbourne, and was lead teaching artist, pedagogy and practise, with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s The Pizzicato Effect. To top it all off, she knows how to use a manual portable typewriter.

The cards were handwritten before the typewriter was put into service.

A Very Different Looking Olivetti Lexikon 80 Comes Back From the Dead

This is a very different Olivetti Lexikon 80 than the one I was given on Thursday morning. Different because it obviously doesn't have the same round, black Lexikon 80 keytops - the ones on this refurbished machine are from a discarded Olivetti Lettera 52, and they're being temporarily employed because the Lexikon I was given had quite a few keytops missing. Different, also, because it's not the seriously faded taupe colour it was (or at least appeared to be - in parts it was hard to tell) when I first glanced upon it, looking oh so forlorn on a kitchen stool on Thursday. (This colour is called Deep Ocean, in case you're wondering; I did toy with the idea of a darker shade of taupe called Jasper, but went with the grayish-blue). But, most importantly of all, this one is so very, very different because it is now in perfect working order. 

As I indicated in my last post, about work done on the Remington Compact portable given to me by Jack Palmer, the Lexikon looked at the time to be potentially an absolute nightmare. Resurrecting it from the dead turned out to be not quite as hard a task as I thought it might be - but it still took the best part of two days' work. Yet again I am regretting not taking "Before" photographs - I was too eager to get on with the job, and started taking the Lexikon completely apart without thinking of taking photos.
This was undoubtedly the most unprepossessing restoration project I have ever taken on. I gave myself little chance of bringing the Lexikon back to life. But it was given to me as a gift, so I figured I might as well at least try. And taking it completely apart was the first step. Nothing on it worked. The margin setters were rusted to their bar, the typebars were rusted together, the key rods were rusted and unmoveable, the drawband was, as I suspected and soon found, shredded, and the carriage simply wouldn't move in any direction. This Olivetti had, like Monty Python's famous Norwegian Blue parrot, gone to meet its maker, was bereft of life, had kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible.

The outer signs weren't good - what there was of paint was, as I said, seriously faded, there were red and white paint spots across the front, the front section was bare metal (the paint had either been chipped or worn away), and on top of the ribbon spools cover was a most unappealing red "SOLD" sign - goodness knows what it might have fetched in this condition. Happily the sticker was old and dried and it just fell off. That was a promising start to proceedings. But the carriage section was richly laced with rust all over and needed a lot more elbow grease.
Once the casing was removed, however, the really serious problems emerged. Dead spiders, bugs, large lumps of thick matted lint, acres of dirt - and that was just for starters. There was rust everywhere. This was the filthiest typewriter I have ever encountered - and take my word for it, I've seen some filthy typewriters in my time. Yet the more grime and muck I found, the more determined I became to clean it up.
Yesterday was mostly spend on disassembling, repainting and getting the carriage, margin setters, keys and typebars to move properly, as well as degreasing, lubing, cleaning and removing rust. Today was mostly about attaching a new drawband (which also meant fashioning a new grip on the right end of the carriage), putting on the temporary keytops (a few don't correspondent with the typebars, as you will see from the scan below, but all will be well when I get replacement Lexikon keytops) and reassembling the machine. I removed the tab keys and bar from above the keyboard as I don't use such things.
What a good feeling when, finally, the Lexikon 80 started typing beautifully, as a Lexikon 80 should:

Just a few little touch-up jobs left to do, such as the spots for the ribbon colour switch, though since we can only buy black ribbon in office supplies shops in Australia, I might not bother. The important thing is that I can now type away happily on this machine because, as far as I'm concerned anyway, it's now a fully functioning Olivetti standard. The transformation from the machine I collected on Thursday is, even if I say so myself, remarkable, and I guess a salute to the durability of old Olivettis.  

This typewriter is BACK in the land of the living!

Seeing Stars with a British-Assembled Remington Compact (Model 2) Portable

Royal Society fellow, astronomer Jack Arthur Brecknock Palmer, could see through the mists of distant time to when the planets of our Solar System were formed, 4.6 billion years ago. But he couldn't see back six years or so to remember who it was who regularly used to write about typewriters in The Canberra Times. So he emailed my former editor, Jack Waterford, and Jack II forwarded Jack I's kind offer of two typewriters on to me. That was on Monday afternoon. By this morning both machines were in my loving care, sitting on my new, you-beaut typewriter workbenches.

The first one I tackled (the Olivetti Lexikon 80 is going to be an absolute nightmare!) was a 1929 Remington Compact portable (No 2), assembled in Britain from US-made parts. When I first contacted Jack Palmer about picking up his typewriters, he simply said it was a "Remington portable". I allowed myself to think this would one of the Glasgow-made early 1950s machines, and started thinking about what colour I would paint it. What a pleasant surprise to find it was one of the shiny black pop-up typebasket models.
This little treasure sat inside a very badly battered case - Jack had the bits of it strapped together with a three-inch wide white belt. So, at least outwardly, the signs weren't great. I have seen some of this wonderful typewriters so badly treated they have been left in a truly dreadful state. But once Jack took this portable out of its case, I could instantly see it was in pretty decent shape for its age.

Jack, a one-time lecturer in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Manchester in England, explained that he had bought the typewriter in Scotland in the 1950s to write his university thesis, titled "The Origin of the Planets" (for which he got top marks). The Remington was obviously at least second-hand, if not third- or fourth-hand, when he acquired it, given it was assembled in 1929. I was anxious to find out exactly when it was first sold. The serial number was difficult to decipher under some corrosion, and at first I thought it read "6V287273". This confused me to the point that I hurriedly contacted Richard Polt in Cincinnati for guidance. We soon worked out it was actually CV287273. The Typewriter Age Guide listed the CV line - C for Compact and V for the No 2 Model.
After getting it home, and giving the Remington a closer look, I realised it needed some quick TLC. The insides and back mechanism were coated with cobwebs and very thick balls of lint and dust, signs of at least 60 years of neglect. The typebasket couldn't pop up because of the left side guard was twisted out of shape and was sitting under the top of the ribbon spool. In situations such as this, the arm which holds the ribbon in place more often than not damages the paintwork on the top of the spool, but this can be easily repaired with the right paint.

The carriage lever was loose, having sprung a screw.  In a typewriter workshop, where there are many hundreds of spare parts, typewriter screws abound, so I guess it wasn't a 1000-1 shot that I found the right-sized screw at first pick. And that got the Remington fully functional.
The two things that I can't fix are the paper bail rollers, which have flattened out from sitting on the platen all these years. But that's really a minor thing and I'm thoroughly delighted with the way this typewriter now looks and works. I have to say that for a machine nearing 90 years of age, and obviously much neglected over the past six decades (since banging out a major thesis), this Remington is in remarkably good order. That says a lot about the design, engineering and manufacture of the time.

The Typewriter Steals the Show at Canberra's National Capital Orchestra Concert

Canberra’s National Capital Orchestra performed Leroy Anderson’s 1950 composition “The Typewriter” during a concert under the direction of conductor Leonard Weiss at the John Lingard Hall, Canberra Grammar School, yesterday. Percussionist Veronica Bailey (née Walshaw, seen at the typewriter below) "played" my poppy red 1971 Adler Gabriele 25 portable typewriter. It was brilliant!

The hall was packed for the concert, called "Melodies for Kids: A Musical Tour of Favourite Melodies". Although the children were held spellbound by the performances  - which included pieces by Tchaikovsky, Grieg and Sibelius - they were even more greatly appreciated by the hundreds of adults in the audience.  Apart from "The Typewriter", the pieces included "March" and "Dance of the Reed Flutes" from The Nutcracker, "Dance of the Swans" from Swan Lake and "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from Peer Gynt. Charles Hudson (seen seated bottom left below) narrated a traditional-style children's tale which, according to his story, was written on a typewriter by "Miss Scribble" (Veronica Bailey).

At the end of the concert, children interested in music were encouraged to meet orchestra members and take a close look at their instruments - in some cases even to play them. However, by far and away the greatest drawcard for the youngsters was the typewriter, and even long after the musical instruments had been packed away, children were still milling around Veronica Bailey as she explained the workings of the typewriter to them. The typewriter literally "stole the show"!

The Wedding Typewriter Gets a Solid Workout

The Olivetti Valentine got plenty of use at my son's wedding yesterday, ending with an hilarious limerick writing competition (the results of which I won't be scanning here!). The typewriter was passed around while wedding photographs were taken, and everyone killed the time by joining in the typing fun. Reading out best wishes telegrams is, of course, no longer a part of wedding receptions - I don't think telegrams exist any longer, do they? Apart from the loss of the necessary machinery and the service, the traditionally bawdy wedding telegram would no longer be considered PC (as if it ever was!). Anyway, best wishes messages for the happy couple were typed and provided on technology even older than the telegram:

The Wedding Typewriter - a Valentine!

My youngest son Martin is getting married tomorrow, to Laura James. The wedding will take place at Tuggeranong Homestead, where Charles Bean from 1919-25 typed the first two volumes of the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-18. Instead of a Corona 3, the portable which Bean first used, it seems more appropriate on this occasion that the typewriter is an Olivetti Valentine: 

'The Typewriter' Comes to Canberra

Leroy Anderson’s famous piece “The Typewriter”, composed in 1950 and the theme for one of the late Jerry Lewis’s most watched comic efforts, will be performed in Canberra for the first time next Sunday.

The typewriter to be used will be my poppy red Adler Gabriele 25, which I refurbished earlier this year.

The typewriter will be “played” by one of Canberra’s top percussionists, Veronica Walshaw, above, principle percussionist with the Canberra Symphony Orchestra. Veronica will be playing with the National Capital Orchestra as a guest soloist specifically for this piece. 

The NCO first tried out a “playable” typewriter which belongs to the 97-year-old father of one of the orchestra members, but found the machine wasn’t fully functional. So Steven Strach, timpanist and percussionist with the NCO, came to me for help. Steven, a forensic document examiner by day, was the man who organised my typewriter workshop at the Australasian Forensic Document Examiners’ Conference in Sydney a few years back.

My first thought for “The Typewriter” performance was the poppy red Adler, but I offered two other machines, including an Oliver 5. And after Veronica also tried an Olivetti Lettera 32, she settled on the Adler.

There will be two performances on Sunday at the Canberra Grammar School, John Lingard Hall, Red Hill. Each will feature a theatrical component to “The Typewriter” piece.