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beak wrote:
I'm almost surprised that anyone thought the thing worth the effort to produce and to run.
I agree that it makes absolutely no sense for traditional, mass produced books, and I doubt that's what it was for. And aside from the difficulties that you mentioned, there's also the issue of typing anywhere near the inside margin of a bound book. How many open books are that wide to begin with? Of course it might have been a home kit, the typewriter era's version of today's self-publishing craze...
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Here ya' go! According to "The Collectors Guide To Antique Typewriters" it is indeed a book typewriter. Although I thought 'One-Between-Two' was very clever!
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P.S. The one on eBay is obviously missing the lower rails that would allow vertical movement.
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One thing this makes clear is that these typewriters weren't about typing out literary books, but instead books that were used for bookkeeping. In other words, accounting books. The machine in the 1902 ad appears to be a much smaller design than the one in the eBay auction. I can't believe, despite the ad's hyperbole, these machines were very popular. It seems like a cumbersome and overly complex solution when placed next to a standard typewriter with a very wide carriage, even if they required loose pages that had to be put into a binder after the entries had been completed. I'll have to ask my mother about this as she worked as a bookkeeper in a large firm and I vaguely recall that she used some extremely oversized pieces of equipment for data entry.
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I think I read also that they were used for large architectural plans (Such as blueprints). I cannot remember where that was now!
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Oh, and maybe they made giant books...