What is the colour of this typewriter? This isn’t a trick question. The photo below was taken with my iPhone in my kitchen under 8 x 11-watt high efficiency (fluorescent) light bulbs. If you’ve seen a few of these Erika typewriters before, you probably will have just glanced at it and said ‘Black’. If you…
It has become a sad era for television. I can flick on box on any given night and see an array of cop shows, distorted ‘reality’ and teen-pandering supernaturalism. Outside of that there seems to be only ‘Game of Thrones’, which has been banned at our house (not by me). I’ve watched some incredibly well…
Welcome back to ‘Filthy Labs’! I don’t really need a lot of words to introduce what this blog post is about, as the title is rather self explanatory. So welcome to the interesting, and microscopic world of the typewriter – under a somewhat dodgy and cheap 60X microscope. Type Stubs Crinkle…
I’m on dangerous ground here. For the last 6 months I have been largely concentrating my collecting activity on German machines – specifically Olympias, and I have been trawling ebay.de looking for specific typewriters for my collection. However, focusing on Olympias has introduced me to some interesting aspects of the history of their machines,…
When it comes to Science fiction story-telling, it is hard to remember a world that wasn’t created in a CGI environment. Colour, light and texture-mapping often fades out strong stories and good character development. The bigger the budget, the bigger the wow and the smaller the personal involvement in the story. So I was…
With thanks to Thomas Fürtig. While browsing ebay, it is easy to dismiss many of the machines there as ‘just a re-badged machine’. That phrase itself implies that it has no collectable or desirable characteristics, and is thus regarded as just another ‘also-ran’. It is also a very puritanical view that can leave out significant parts of our…
The Filthy Platen 