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1942 Royal KMM Serial # KMM-2912996 1942 Royal KMM typewriter, Serial # KMM-2912996 Christopher Bailey's 1942 Royal KMM typewriter. 2023-08-15 From the Virtual Typewriter Collection of Christopher Bailey: 1942 Royal KMM Serial # KMM-2912996 Found in a flea market just down the hill. It was rusty and grubby, but it seemed to work. With a new purple cash-register ribbon, I discovered that the main problem was the shift: the capitals and lower case were in different ZIP codes, and the motion adjustments were rusted solid. It took about three hours of fiddling, but I finally got the nuts loose, and now the machine writes legibly. I’ve cleaned it up some, but it won’t be a beauty queen. I think it will be a good writing machine for another few decades, though. Elite type.

Addendum: Even though I typed the type specimen myself and must have looked it over thoroughly, I never noticed until months later that this machine has a degree sign where the asterisk would normally be. It must have hit my brain as a small asterisk, but it is definitely a degree sign, which is the only unusual thing about this otherwise very common typewriter.

1942 Royal KMM #KMM-2912996

Status: My Collection
Hunter: Christopher Bailey (cbaile19)
Created: 04-11-2023 at 12:45PM
Last Edit: 08-15-2023 at 06:37PM

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Description:

Found in a flea market just down the hill. It was rusty and grubby, but it seemed to work. With a new purple cash-register ribbon, I discovered that the main problem was the shift: the capitals and lower case were in different ZIP codes, and the motion adjustments were rusted solid. It took about three hours of fiddling, but I finally got the nuts loose, and now the machine writes legibly. I’ve cleaned it up some, but it won’t be a beauty queen. I think it will be a good writing machine for another few decades, though. Elite type.

Addendum: Even though I typed the type specimen myself and must have looked it over thoroughly, I never noticed until months later that this machine has a degree sign where the asterisk would normally be. It must have hit my brain as a small asterisk, but it is definitely a degree sign, which is the only unusual thing about this otherwise very common typewriter.

Typeface Specimen:

Photos:

The keyboard.
The keyboard.

Cicero’s First Catilinarian Oration, the universal type-sample text.
Cicero’s First Catilinarian Oration, the universal type-sample text.



As it looked when it came home from the flea market.
As it looked when it came home from the flea market.

Hunter: Christopher Bailey (cbaile19)

Christopher Bailey's Typewriter Galleries [ My Collection ] [ My Sightings ]

Status: Typewriter Hunter
Points: 867

I’m a writer who often writes with a typewriter to get away from the computer for a while. I think I became a typewriter collector when I bought my typewriters some industrial-grade wheeled steel shelving from a restaurant supply house. Before that I was just an accumulator, but now I’ve spent more on shelves than on all the typewriters put together. (They were all cheap.)

I have steel pens, too, which I also write with regularly. Both collections started at the same moment in 1990, at the liquidation of the head offices of the old G. C. Murphy five-and-dime chain, where I bought a Woodstock typewriter, two gross of Esterbrook Jackson Stub pens, and three bottles of Carter’s green ink.


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