Typewriters

It does look better. I think you can say more than "incrementally," since such small improvements have more than an incremental effect when dealing with such small print.

I can't see the touch-up work, but my eyes are not those of a youngster any more. 

The final step (is a project such as this ever truly over?) in the refurb was cleaning the painted areas with some Meguiar's Cleaner Wax. A typewriter refurber online recommend it. It cleans and polishes, although there really wasn't much, if any, dirt to remove. But it did polish it up a bit, including (but not as much) the areas that were repainted with the satin-finish paint.





Larger View

Thanks. It did turn out pretty well. And it was nice that this old typewriter was more or less quite mechanically sound. It was a nice find by my brother.

I think I watched that one last year. Not sure.

The typewriter ribbon that I bought for $20 (including shipping) from Jot & Tittle arrived this morning.

I put it in the refurbished Royal Safari and it was definitely and demonstrably producing darker and more solid type than the cheap-ass one I got off of Amazon.

So I would say the typewriter is outputting the type as it should. There's still no substitute, of course, for striking the keys correctly. I'm still working on strengthening my girly-fingers.

You know you're becoming old when you can reminisce about things that are least likely to interest other people, although this fellow here shares some similar thoughts.

It's sort of like Rick Beato said in that video about music. If it's so easy to obtain ($10.00/month to stream just about anything), you won't value it.

And so it is was typography. We, here, at Reviews-and-Things pride ourselves (at least occasionally) at valuing the written word. The written word has been so debased by a Culture of Deception that no wonder f-bombs and general obscenities are commonly sprinkled into day-to-day conversation...and now even into online articles.

And the weird thing is, as noted in a Wiki article, the advent of "cold type" composition brought on a host of evils for typography. To compensate for the imprecise phototypesetting process, the letters had to be designed with exaggerated elements which were designed to compensate for imperfections induced from duplication and the spread of physical printing ink.





I remember when typesetting on the CompuWriter IV using these fonts (which came on film strips), if you printed out the type at a large size (72 pt.), you'd see these ugly gouges and other exaggerated features of the font. And apparently this misled later designers regarding what good letterforms were supposed to look like.

And then desktop publishing came along and these issues were more or less mute. But the problem then became that the early software did not generally have good features for making the type look good in blocks of paragraphs, etc. There are all kinds of truly artistic and subtle things you need to do to make large blocks of type look good, and especially when used large in headlines. Desktop publishing software just sort of vomited it out there and almost all aspects of the skill of typographer were lost.

And to this day, if you look at headlines, in particular – whether in print or TV – you'll notice all kinds of sins regarding letter-spacing. So, again, we come to this principle whereby if something is easy, it is less valued. And bad kerning (the spacing between individual pairs of letters) can matter:



Today's more advanced software does a pretty good job of either automatically taking care of all the fine details of kerning, letterspacing, etc., or allows you to fine-tune these adjustments. But type on screen (or paper) has become another thing that has been "democratized" or vulgarized.

But back in the day, I can tell you, we did sweat these details. And these machines had all kinds of manual settings for making type look good. And we learned to use them, although not always with the greatest skill. But we tried.

Good points. In that one video, he made similar points, noting, for instance, that buying a tangible album – with art on it, track listings, and other info – was a much richer experience than something digital which is here today, gone tomorrow.

My younger brother has been buying ee two or three used albums at the thrift stores the last week (at 50 cents a pop). It's an eclectic collection. But some of it is very good. Some of it is awful. But we're doing this because that Beato video made us realize that LPs were something special...and still are.


I just finished an album of Rossini Overtures which, of course, includes the William Tell Overture. A very listenable LP.

I still have my Discwasher system for cleaning the records. A couple were very dirty but cleaned up okay. And a few pops and clicks are simply nostalgic.