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.
One Response
The timing of this article is amazing. I have wondered where that TWDB entry got the name “Boston” from for at least a year since I first ran across it originally and still no source has been found.
I just got a 1958 SM3 w/Ro 83 that is very close in serial to that entry (mine is 499 later) so was most likely made at the exact same time, which is cool. Serial: 1329225
Ro 83 wasn’t exclusive to Olympia, I have owned, and seen at least one other, Torpedo 18b with the typeface. They used a 2.6mm pitch (9.77 CPI) instead of the 2.3mm pitch (11.04 CPI) that Olympia used. Same slugs, just different spacing for some reason.
My 18b was from very late 1960 (serial: 1201888), but Olympia I believe had already stopped using it by that point so unsure when it may have been discontinued. The last entry for Ro 83 I can find on TWDB for an SM4 was mid 1960 (https://typewriterdatabase.com/1960-olympia-sm4.13562.typewriter), past this it is all senatorial. The other 18b that I know the serial for that has Ro 83 is 1253519, which Darwin over at Raymond’s Office Machines has/had at one point. Which was made at some point in 1961. Given it also doesn’t exist in the RaRo catalogue from 1970 on Ted Munk’s site, we know between 1961 and 1969 it was no longer offered for some reason.
We know that Ro 85 was designed for 2.5-2.6mm pitch, Ro 87 was designed for 2.1-2.3mm pitch, and from my findings Ro 83 was available between 2.3-2.6mm pitch. Maybe that overlap was part of the reason? But also it was slightly different than 85 and 87, so unsure if this hypothesis is even relevant.
Anyway, excited that someone else was also curious and has attempted to find something about this supposed name. Now if we could only find a RaRo catalogue from 1960 to really confirm the name given it 100% existed on multiple machines that year.
Rambling over lol.