PP – the TYPEWRITER Factory

03-Oct-201628-Jan-2017

Picture Perfect [4]

The Screen-Typer

Typewriters are often featured in the artwork used by film and television production companies to promote themselves, which makes sense given it is after all a natural connection: What better than a typewriter to represent screenwriters and their artistic efforts?

These animated corporate logos using a typewriter are usually run within the opening frames of a film that you’re about to watch, or during the fleeting final seconds of a television program that has just ended. And more often than not the typewriters are not literal images of a specific model, but rather a creative embodiment of a non-specific model.

Two of my more favorite typewriter adaptations are those used by Primrose Hill Productions and K/O Paper Products. The Primrose version, a skeleton clacking away at a tombstone-like machine confers the loneliness of the writing process, while K/O’s take pushes a different theme, the transfiguration of a standard typewriter by a four-handed keyboard to represent the power of collaboration in writing.

Four-handed Underwood

11-Sep-201628-Jan-2017

Picture Perfect [3]

Not postage stamps, but stamps none-the-less, these colourful little oddities are but a few of their kind that are found when such paraphernalia happens to be on your radar. Decorative stamps with zero postage value are curious little things: you lick ’em and stick ’em, and off they go on whatever you’ve affixed them to.

Presumably, the majority of such stamps would have found their way onto envelopes, but were they promotional items produced by each respective manufacturer to embellish their correspondence with, or were they sold by a third party to typewriter retailers or perhaps even enthusiasts? Looking at them now, I also have to question if they were period pieces that reflected contemporary models, or commemorative products that were made decades after the fact.

About the only thing that I do know is they’re fun to look at, and I’m sure for some aficionados also fun to collect. They are in themselves little works of typewriter art, but that doesn’t mean I would go so far as to stick them on the living room walls.

A Stamp of Approval

12-Aug-201628-Jan-2017

Picture Perfect [2]

Remington Rodeo

As absurd as the concept is for a rodeo rider to use a portable typewriter on the back of a bucking bronco, imagine how foreign it must have all seemed for Swiss typewriter buyers who faced the localized version of Remington’s American ad.

Selling typewriters internationally no doubt posed many challenges for manufacturers, and it’s easy to imagine how many of the ads created using culturally skewed themes ended up being lost in translation. Was it a cost-saving measure for Remington to re-use the same artwork the world over, or just simple ignorance to global diversity?

This example of the artwork used to promote the Remington Portable by a typewriter retailer in Lausanne, Switzerland, (it’s now the site of a chocolate store), loudly praises the ultra-portable model, and lists its virtues as robustness, speed, compactness, and it being well-featured. Of course it would have to be all these things – and more – to be effective on the back of a wild animal, not to mention to be able to survive such a stunt.

07-May-201628-Jan-2017

Picture Perfect [01]

Sexy Swede?

It might not exactly be an example of typewriter porn (yes, collectors actually use the phrase), but this postcard that features a model seductively draping her arm around a Swedish-made FACIT T1 is a curiosity.

The T1 is not exactly an attractive machine, and it makes one to wonder if the postcard shouldn’t have been titled Beauty and the Beast.

You would think that the card, which is postmarked July 1962, was a promotional item from Facit, but it doesn’t have the company name anywhere on it. If this was supposed to be a form of advertising, it wasn’t a very effective one. And if not advertising, does it suggest that there was actually a demand during the ’60s for postcards that featured women posing with typewriters?