The reason that the SM9 does not have a 'Red' position on the ribbon selector is that the cursive typeface is much taller than standard and will not entirely fit on the black half of a normal Black/Red ribbon.  Therefore the machine is set up to take an All-Black (or single colour) ribbon only.

thetypewriterman wrote:

The reason that the SM9 does not have a 'Red' position on the ribbon selector is that the cursive typeface is much taller than standard and will not entirely fit on the black half of a normal Black/Red ribbon.  Therefore the machine is set up to take an All-Black (or single colour) ribbon only.

 
THANKS! I thought it might be something like that, now I know. That would be a clue when looking at auction photos when the seller doesn't know how to properly describe their machine

Yes, or any tools at all that aren't a smartphone... 

And, since I appear to have figured out the photo posting thing, the three machines I mentioned a couple of days ago!

Today I picked up a Royal "unknown to science" (not really!) -- a Tab-O-Matic that appears to date from 1961. I say "appears" because it's basically a stripped-down Futura, and its serial number (457xxxx) would seem to track with the Futura serial numbering for that year. But its prefix, M, is not mentioned in the Typewriter Database, so who knows when exactly these models were made, or for how long. I'm wondering whether it was offered through a specific retailer (M for Montgomery Ward?), but there's no badging that would give a clue.

It's a nice looking machine -- sort of a gray/green crinkle finish overall. As mentioned, it's pretty basic: no touch control setting, no ribbon position selector, no Magic Margin (margins are set manually; no adjacent spacing scale for reference). As the name indicates, it has a full keyset tabulator (Magic Column, as they call it), so that is a feature often missing from simpler machines. The keyboard is pretty much standard for the time -- no key for the 1 and !, but more or less everything else you'd expect.

The machine exhibits the rather typical Royal tendency to crowd letters, and the left margin can be inconsistent (also a Royal feature), so smartly returning the carriage is called for. The spacebar sometimes doesn't operate if I'm typing too quickly. I think (hope) these things will lessen with use, and deliberate typing technique.

The name is very mid-century, and rather amusing. (The seller referred to it in the ad as Type-O-Manic, which is even better.) Anyone else here have one of these?

(Oh, and I got an Underwood Master from 1940 over a week ago, but that's a different story. Very nice machine once the crud was cleared out of its nether regions.)