This is my third Olympia, and second SM3, which also happens to be a 1958 model. That part wasn’t intentional. I purchased this machine because it was green, a color I’ve been chasing for a while. The seller didn’t post a photo of the typeface, but I had a hunch there might be something special under the hood.
Turns out, I was right.
The slugs read No. 83. Underneath, a smaller AR marking. Two tiny numbers and letters stamped into a small sliver of metal that lead me down an interesting path.
Olympia made most of its own type, cataloged under its own numbers: Modern Pica No. 67, Senatorial No. 71, and so on. But factories placed special orders with outside type foundries too, and this slug wears one of those outside marks.
One of the largest suppliers for those special orders was Ransmayer & Rodrian, a Berlin outfit formed in 1926 when Alfred Ransmayer and Albert Rodrian merged their two type-slug businesses into one. Everyone in the hobby just calls it RaRo.
RaRo kept both names on its output after the merger. An “R” mark means the Ransmayer side made it. An “AR” mark means the Rodrian side did, and in RaRo’s own catalog, that line is abbreviated “Ro.” Which means a slug stamped AR 83 reads, in RaRo’s numbering, as Ro 83.
A different 1958 SM3, listed in The Typewriter Database with a serial number close enough to have come off the assembly line in the same run as mine, has an identical marking. Its owner catalogued the typeface as “Boston (Ro 83)” and noted it looks close to Olympia’s own Senatorial typeface.
RaRo published its type styles in numbered catalogs for decades. I have one, a 211-page edition dated April 1980, every type style RaRo still sold indexed by number.
Ro 83 isn’t in it.
The index runs Ro 82, then Ro 84. Nothing sits between them. Twenty-two years passed between this machine and that catalog. Ro 83 may have been discontinued during that time, or it could’ve been an Olympia exclusive that simply wasn’t listed in the catalog.
The details of Ro 83 may be lost forever to history, as I can’t find any definitive source of information on it.
Machine Record
The Marketplace listing started at $500, another seller pricing off what eBay wants for these and hoping to do as well. Nobody bit. After two weeks it dropped to $250. I offered $50, low enough that I expected nothing back, and the seller accepted it.
At first I thought the slugs were a mistake, but r/typewriters set me straight. I learned typewriter makers didn’t always cast their own type slugs, and sometimes bought it from a different manufacturer.
As for the rest? The machine is just like my other 1958 Olympia SM3.
