Here´s my story:
The first typewriter I saw as at my grandfather´s office, an Olivetti Linea 98. For me it was a weird toy, I found it fun to type some silly stories on it. Then when I was 11 a good friend gave me a Nakajima ALL 8000 as a gift. In theory it should be useful at school, but in the end I used it very little and my grandfather after retiring decided he preferred the Nakajima instead of the bulky Linea 98.

So far, no interest at all in typewriters.

But then, like 15 years after my girlfriend´s grandfather passed away, and no one knew what to do with a Lettera 32 he had used for a lot of years. It was "useless", but I felt it was wrong to send it to the junkyard. I decided to keep it and maybe I´d give it some use. And that´s when I was bitten. During those 15 years I started to write, and I tried it on that little machine. What a huuuuuuge difference. Somehow the typewriter makes me feel way better, more comfortable. In addition to the pleasure of the action, I started learning more abot mechanics, and then about typewriter history. And that was it. First I rescued my grandfather´s Linea 98 from oblivion, and then I started hunting everywhere I could.

As for now, my girlfriend complains about the little army of typewriters at home and how they keep piling up.

I have an Adler 7 (1917), a Klein Adler 2 (1927) and a Favorit (1937), so my experience with Adler ends pretty early. In addition I have a Triumph Tippa, and if it qualifies as an Adler it´s nowhere near the Olympia Splendid 33.

As for the older ones, all of them are thrust action typewriters, and that set them apart from the rest. The 7 is damn hard to use properly (but blissfully pleasant!), the Klein Adler is currently out of order and the Favorit is just great. IMO Adler produced a bunch of great and indestructible typewriters, and by sticking to the thrust action mechanism they made a name for themselves. If I had to recommend a model it´d be the Favorit. A great all-rounder, better suited to regular typing than the 7.

Ampelmann wrote:

There's no accounting for taste, I guess...

And at the same time, as we say in Spain, hay gustos que merecen tortas (some tastes deserve a beating).
 

In Spain we have a nice word to describe this: Hartistas.

An artista is an artist, of course. Someone who makes art pieces, and that can´t be taken lightly. Art is something worthy, something that moves your emotions.

But what happens when someone pretends to be an artist and (what´s even worse) someone else feeds that troll? You get an hartista, which is a play on words of harto (fed up with something) + artista (artist). This goes with a lot of "modern" "artists".

With the poor Royal P is pretty much the same. You pretend your crap is art. First of all, it isn´t because the quality is, ahem, not there. Secondly, you´ve destroyed something much more valuable in the process. Next stop: someone might find your "creation" interesting, and that´s putting out a fire with gasoline. Every way you look at it, it´s wrong. It´s no a matter of underrating the work of someone who might have done it with the best intention (who am I to contend that), it´s that the result is plainly wrong.

Sometimes I see these kind of things at shops on displays, and at least for me they get the opposite effect of what was intended. Yeah, they catch my attention, and they make me want to turn away from that shop. Is there any need to destroy a typewriter?

This is a bit of a rant, but that´s how I see it. If a typewriter can´t work anymore, its pieces can help other typewriters. And if you are going to make something different, it´d better be REAL good.

TypewriterKing wrote:

I am not an expert on foreign machines, even Olympia, nor do I pretend to be. But I do know this: The Olympias I've seen, except for the SGEs, do have spring-loaded keys, and it's the only typewriter make I know of that has them. I've seen them on the SG uprights.

Could you explain that, please? This is mostly an issue of me being lost in translation, because what I imagine whith spring-loaded keys is something like what you find in the Erika Modell S. The link between the key and the typebar is a spring instead of a piece of steel wire, and that makes the machine extremely snappy and responsive, but not especially comfortable.