If I can fix a typewriter, surely I can fix a motorcycle No, I haven’t fallen of the face of the earth or shut down my blog. I’ve just been a little bit…. preoccupied of late. In the last 8 months my work has been very fatiguing, as for a number of reasons my shifts have…
Of Typewriters and Telephones. Things have been a little chaotic here at Filthy HQ, and in a lot of ways it has been living up to that very name. Work has been consuming my time of late, and I’ve been keeping contact with friends and family – and much of the typosphere, with intermittent Facebook…
I’ll be frank. After writing over 200 posts for this blog, I have to concede that there’s one thing that really keeps me going with this… typewriter… thing… and contrary to popular belief it isn’t a raging red cordial habit. No. I just really like the gas-bagging. I wouldn’t call myself an extravert, but…
Michael Clemens on the typosphere page recently set a challenge to us typewriter fanatics for typewriter day to “honour your roots“. Well, I don’t think I can do that any better than to talk about a typewriter that has more personal significance to me than any other in my collection. This the typewriter that belonged…
This typewriter reminds me of one very important fact in life: You should never be afraid to ask a question. When I first spotted this machine on Gumtree here in Australia, the seller was asking a whopping $25,000 for it. The price was so absurd that I snapped a photo from the Gumtree site and…
No, you haven’t misread the nameplate. It isn’t missing any characters or been badly labeled when a label may have been re-applied. This is a Remington J – which is known in the USA as the Remington Junior. Why? Well, we’ll get to that in a moment. My collecting has taken a bit of an…
Some time in the next week this typewriter will be taken down to a post office and sent on its merry way up to Queensland. There, it will join up with many other interesting typewriters that are housed in John Lavery’s collection and at least get some appreciation. I promised John that I would send…
My relationship with Shenzhen dates back a decade or so. I first visited here in the early 2000s which was back before the Chinese Olympics. Back then it was a city that was exploding almost out of control of the government, and was a pretty wild place. For those who are unfamiliar with Shenzhen, it is…
It is hard not to be curious about the demountable typewriter. These beasts of the early 20th century is an excellent example of the ambition and ingenuity that the early typewriter designers had during this era. However for all its advances, the Demountable typewriter company would be no more by the end of the great…
I’ve been eager to write Kowloon Walled City for a while. It was one of the main reasons I wanted to re-visit Hong Kong, The book can be acquired directly from the…
The Filthy Platen 