So. A few years ago now, I decided I was done being on public social media. This has generally been good for me, but I realized the other day that it kind of leaves me without an outlet for a lot of the creative work I want to do.
And then my immediate next thought was "wait, isn't that supposed to be the point of a blog?" I've wanted to Have A Blog as a thing to do for a while, but I've always struggled to consistently find anything to post about, because I guess I have some idea in my head about what a Blog Post ought to be like that I don't feel like I can live up to frequently. I'm not sure why it took me this long to realize that's silly and what I should do is post whatever random thing I'm working on, but that's how it goes sometimes.
So here's the plan: I'm going to commit to posting something on here once a week, probably on Fridays, that I consider to be art. I'm not going to make any commitment to genre, medium, style, length or quality; this blog is not intended to be "about something" and I fully reserve the right to phone it in. I have a couple posts queued up in advance, so I'm hoping that'll at least get me over the hump into "posting regularly" rather than making yet another blog with one post that's about blogging.
Anyways, I figure I'll go ahead and tell a little story here in the first one. I want to say "to set the tone" here, but that's explicitly not the point. This is one of the posts that appears on this blog.
This Olympia SM4 (click for larger image) was my workhorse typewriter throughout high school. I wasn't particularly nice to it at the time, because I wasn't really aware that a SM4 with a script typeface was, like, worth money, so when it developed the common issue SM3s and 4s get with the bushings that hold the body to the machine chassis wearing out, I just took all the body panels off. Then I lost them. Then I left the machine (still missing all the covers) on a shelf at a relative's house for eight years after becoming estranged.
About a month ago, I was finally able to get it back. It was completely covered in dust, still latched into the bottom half of the case whose top half was lost before the typewriter even came to me in the first place, still with the piece of wire tied around the frame to stop the spacebar from popping up that interfered with the X key (normally, the spacebar is retained by the front of the body).
It also still worked just as well as it did when I left it. All I did was blow the dust off, and that's apparently all it needed. Put a new ribbon on and I was typing pen-pal letters on it the next day. I wasn't quite happy with that though, so with the help of a friend from the online typewriter collectors' community (of course there is such a thing), I was able to get the case and body panels from a parts machine, and now it really looks like it ought to.
As I said, this typewriter has a script font. RaRo 75 was used on a variety of different machines throughout the '50s and '60s (including the Hermes 3000, examples of which fetch astronomical prices), and I think it's one of the nicer monospace fonts around. I've been having a lot of fun using it for correspondence.
It really uses every available part of the type slugs. Those tall capitals are actually more than a quarter-inch tall, which means that they take up over half the ribbon height, and therefore this machine can only use a single-color ribbon.
It's kind of a shame since I like having the two-color option for a couple specific use cases and therefore I can't use this typewriter for them. More on that in a future post, though, if that's what I decide to do.