1953 Royal HH #HHP-5202608

Status: My Collection
Hunter: Christopher Bailey (cbaile19)
Created: 04-14-2023 at 01:20PM
Last Edit: 02-07-2024 at 03:23PM

Description Hunter 9 Photos 1 Like  Find on Ebay #AD  Find on Etsy #AD

Description:

The ugliest typewriter I own, and probably the best. “The brown frieze finish, the non-glare plastic keys and the modern streamlining of the Royal Model HH will enhance the beauty of any office,” said the manual. The colors are muck brown and scum green. I found it a few years ago in a thrift store for $15, and I nearly passed it by because it was so ugly. I picked it up because it seemed to work very well, and it became one of my favorite writing machines.

This unit has some minor mechanical flaws that don’t keep it from being a splendid typewriter. The “Time-Saver Top” doesn’t spring open; I have to unlatch it by reaching inside. The Magic Margin controls are a bit finicky. The type could probably stand to be raised a bit; descenders are sometimes too light. But the machine types good, legible text, and it just works and works, page after page.

In the Typewriter Database listings for the Royal HH, Elite machines are much more common than Pica machines like this one. In most of my experience, Pica is more common, and books about typewriters confirm that Pica was the norm. Was there a change in office fashions in the 1950s?

Typeface Specimen:

Photos:

From typing position.

The keyboard. The “Extra Key at no extra cost” is + and =.

This tab key, like the rest of the typewriter, is ugly and extremely useful.

An unadvertised but useful feature: it types in Latin.

Move the carriage all the way to the left to find a little rectangular window filled with gunk. Move the gunk to find the serial number.

Inspection stickers under the paper table. We may suspect that the last time this machine was seen by a technician was in 1961.

Enhancing the beauty of an office.

Hunter: Christopher Bailey (cbaile19)

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Status: Typewriter Hunter
Points: 890

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.