Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Identify Those Typewriters: Tom Wolfe and "Kingdom"

Hi all -- Happy New Year. We'll start 2013 with a puzzler -- what's the typewriter shown on the typing side of (reportedly) Mr. Tom Wolfe in this photo?


(click to embiggenate)

Tom -- a different Tom! -- posted this in the Tom Wolfe topic from last fall:
What typewriter does Tom Wolfe use? It looks kind of like one of those Underwood Five machines from the 1960s. But not exactly.
On his excellent page, Richard just lists "Underwood" but no model. What say you, Scholars of the Sphere?

If that one poses too easy for you, the wife and I have been watching Stephen Fry's "Kingdom" on Netflix in the evenings -- it's a veddy English "gentle" lawyer drama. Part of the set dressing features a large blue standard machine with an extra-wide carriage, perched up on top of a bookshelf -- you get glimpses of it now and again. I would expect it's a British brand of some kind, though to my novice eyes, it also looks like an Underwood, though I'm sure I'm biased by my own 1960's blue version. I'll see if there's a way for me to grab a screenshot of it somehow.

 A glass of new year cheer raised to the correct identification of these machines!

6 comments:

notagain said...

It looks to me like one of the later Remington Standard machines but I can't find a pic of the model. Maybe I saw it on shopgoodwill or something. interesting photo though.

Ted said...

argh. someone needs to learn how to use the size attribute of image tags. :P

mpclemens said...

Whoops, sorry Ted. I've scaled it down now and made the image clickable.

Richard P said...

I'm baffled by this machine.

Scott K said...

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say that it is an Olivetti standard or some type. Like everyone else, it looks 'familiar', but not quite. The angular construction is similar to that of the Facit, but it is just far too big to be one. I'm looking at the name label, and seeing something like the late era Olivetti and Underwood labels.

Ted said...

Am I going to be the only one who guesses Olympia SG3?

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