This Month:  Portables that aren't for the next Hemingway

Many people are contacting me about this, or that author who "supposedly swore by Royal portables," or else "used nothing but Hermes typewriters."  Some of this is true, some is not; many authors changed machines over time, or else owned several.  If you continue this to the extreme, you'll find that just about any major brand of typewriter was "sworn by" by some or other published author.  What you will NOT find is a listing of machines that none of them would EVER have used.

In general, it is fairly safe to say that all of the smaller, flatter machines suffer from the detriments of high impact feel.  This means that a great deal of the impact of the type slugs with the ribbon/platen can be felt in the keys, often in a sharp but tinny way.  This is usually due to the fact that the mechanisms in the vast majority of these machines were designed to be as simple as possible -- which brings up a very important point.

Originally, the very small and flat machines were built with much the same quality as the larger machines, with complexity scaled down roughly comparably to the scaling down of size and weight.  In other words, manufacturing quality was still high, and the design was deliberately engineered to give the best possible feel considering the size of the machine.  Machines such as the small Hermes and Smith-Corona fit this group, although the later plastic-bodied machines suffer from reduction in cost.

Not associated with these machines are the later and more common machines which fit the same size envelope but are intended as basic typewriters.  One very common example of this would be the range of Silver-Seiko portables, very often seen in the Royal brand name (with timely names such as Jet, Mercury or anything else "sixties") but also found as Silver Reed.  This machine had no pretense to support any earlier customer image of quality; it was intended to be a low-cost high-access typewriter that could be made in Japan and shipped around the world, still being sold at a profit notwithstanding the shipping costs.  This it was; and, as such, it was not the finely tuned specimen that most authors would choose.  It often ended up as a "starter" machine -- that first typewriter for a student, which might even go off to college.  One who wished to really turn out copy would inevitably switch to something else.

This is an important thing to remember for those buying machines now.  There are loads of machines out there which can produce DECENT copy, but for those who wish to produce things at a high rate of speed, or of perfect alignment, much more machine is needed.  Many experts on such issues can be found at The Portable Typewriter Forum, wherein this topic is frequently discussed.  Use the link on the left to reach it.