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1964 Olivetti Lettera 32 Serial # 9223659 1964 Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter, Serial # 9223659 Mighty Jabba's 1964 Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter. 2023-05-07 From the Virtual Typewriter Collection of Mighty Jabba: 1964 Olivetti Lettera 32 Serial # 9223659 I chose 1964 for this, but I'm unsure of the year (or even decade) of production for this machine, since I got it from Japan and it was manufactured in Spain. The database doesn't seem to be able to pin it down to a specific year. It has Japanese (katakana) on the primary keys, with capital English letters on the shifted keys. If you know anything about Japanese, this will seem to be a bit of an odd choice, since you wouldn't normally write Japanese just in katakana. It's used primarily for loan words and other special cases.

I believe these machines were made with composing telegrams in mind, since telegrams were traditionally written only in katakana (and this presumably explains the capital English letters, for writing English telegrams). But I'm not entirely sure who would have used it. Were they intended to be used at the actual telegraph offices? It seems unlikely that a private citizen would have needed such a thing. If I'm right, it makes this a doubly obsolete machine, since very few people write telegrams anymore, and they certainly don't do it on typewriters. But it still works just fine and actually has some pretty nice typing action.

1964 Olivetti Lettera 32 #9223659

Status: My Collection
Hunter: Mighty Jabba (MightyJabba)
Created: 05-07-2023 at 12:37PM
Last Edit: 05-07-2023 at 12:43PM

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Description:

I chose 1964 for this, but I'm unsure of the year (or even decade) of production for this machine, since I got it from Japan and it was manufactured in Spain. The database doesn't seem to be able to pin it down to a specific year. It has Japanese (katakana) on the primary keys, with capital English letters on the shifted keys. If you know anything about Japanese, this will seem to be a bit of an odd choice, since you wouldn't normally write Japanese just in katakana. It's used primarily for loan words and other special cases.

I believe these machines were made with composing telegrams in mind, since telegrams were traditionally written only in katakana (and this presumably explains the capital English letters, for writing English telegrams). But I'm not entirely sure who would have used it. Were they intended to be used at the actual telegraph offices? It seems unlikely that a private citizen would have needed such a thing. If I'm right, it makes this a doubly obsolete machine, since very few people write telegrams anymore, and they certainly don't do it on typewriters. But it still works just fine and actually has some pretty nice typing action.

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