Project Tanker Desk: Part 3

Progress on the tanker desk has been slow. Now that summer has wrapped up, I’m hoping to have more time to devote to getting it finished. Finding the right paint has been the hangup. The original plan was to paint the desk with Rust-Oleum Hammered Verde Green, which embodies the mid-century modern industrial look. As […]

1936 Underwood Universal

Underwood didn’t start as a typewriter company. John T. Underwood built the business supplying ribbons and carbon paper to other manufacturers, chiefly Remington, until Remington started making its own. Underwood answered by buying into a machine, Franz Xaver Wagner’s design, acquired in 1895. Five years later, that design became the Underwood No. 5. It’s usually […]

1938 Royal Model O

Royal’s first budget portable was the Model P, released in 1926. The Model O replaced it in 1932, and for the next three years the two are hard to tell apart without checking the serial prefix. Then, in 1935, Royal restyled the shell. The boxy lines went soft and rounded. A lever above the keyboard […]

1958 Olympia SM3 #2

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 […]

1966 Olympia SM9

I wanted a pre-1969 SM9, because after that, things changed. In 1964 Olympia broke from the carriage-shift design that had carried the SM line since the SM3 and built a new body around a segment shift mechanism instead, the type basket doing the moving instead of the platen. First-year SM9s had off-white keys with turquoise […]

Are Old Typewriters Worth Anything?

So you found an old typewriter in grandma’s attic. Or maybe you came across one for cheap at a garage sale and you want to know if you can make a few bucks by relisting it on Facebook Marketplace. Before getting into what it’s worth, first figure out what you have. The manufacturer name is […]

Project GUNMAN

Sixteen typewriters in the US embassy in Moscow and the US consulate in Leningrad spent as long as eight years transmitting everything typed on them straight to Soviet intelligence, and nobody in Washington knew it. This wasn’t even the first time a hidden object had turned an American ambassador’s own office against him. In 1945, […]

The Corona in the Loft

The manhunt started on May 25, 1978, when a package exploded at the University of Illinois at Chicago and injured a security guard. The FBI code-named the case UNABOM, short for University and Airline Bombing, after the two kinds of targets the early attacks kept returning to, before Ted Kaczynski’s list of victims widened well […]

The Confession Letter

Cheri Jo Bates was murdered near a community college campus in Riverside, California, and for the sixty years since, her case has sat at the edge of the Zodiac story without ever officially joining it. Zodiac himself would later claim her. Riverside police still say he’s wrong. Whichever of them is right, the typed letter […]

Hiss-Chambers & Exhibit UUU

This case is at the center of one of the most durable conspiracy theories in American history. It played out just as Cold War anti-communist anxiety was tightening its grip on the country. A private investigator who may have been secretly reporting to the FBI. A federal judge who took a forgery theory seriously enough […]