Thanks, I'm quite happy with it; can't wait to get it all cleaned up and running properly!

With the limited knowledge of Olympia and Optima I've acquired now, it seems to me that the keyboard with the tab function makes it certain that it is an Elite, but the paintjob, the serial number and even the colors of the Olympia decal makes me wonder if it might actually be a 1952 Optima Elite, which was for some reason re-decaled as an Olympia?

If so, they even went through the trouble of giving the Olympia logo the same colors – silver with red edges – as the Optima logo. Perhaps the Elite decal could not be "olympified" in a similarly satisfactory manner or it was considered not worth the effort, so it was just painted over?



For comparison, here is a close up of the Optima decal from a 1952 Optima Elite (from https://typewriterdatabase.com/1952-optima-elite.11136.typewriter):


This is all pure conjecture coming from a newbie, of course, but I could not find any other examples of Olympia painting their logo in red and silver like this. After a quick search I could not find any examples of Finnish keyboard Optima Elites either though, just some Optima Elite 2s and 3s.

The only other Olympia Elites with Finnish keyboards I found look like this:


An intriguing little mystery, I would say. I wonder if the carrying case could shed any extra light on it...

As a sidenote, I keep seeing some old Finnish typewriters – like the black Olympia above – with the letters Å and Ä weirdly placed on the left side of the fourth row, next to the Z, instead of next to the Ö on the right. Must be some older version of the Finnish/Swedish QWERTY layout. Most of the Finnish typewriters I've seen have it like my Elite, side by side on the extreme right of the fourth row. Then some models feature the current modern layout, where the Å, Ä and Ö are located on the extreme right of the second and third rows, like on this Olympia Traveller:


Oh, and robmck, your suggestion for replacing the apostrophe with the acute accent and a space might actually be satisfactory for certain situations, so thanks for the idea. I mostly write in Finnish anyway, but my current Finnish language project actually has plenty of apostrophe-needing quotes within quotes, so I certainly won't be using this machine for it.

And perhaps the carrying case was considered to be enough of a carriage lock for it... hopefully the sellers can find it.

Well, the mystery was solved: this machine indeed came out of the Optima factory with that Optima-colored Olympia decal, and without the Elite logo on the ribbon cover. I spotted a similar one for sale:


I have no idea what happened to that machine's margin release key though, as "DEVAM" is not Finnish, unlike the language of the other keys. According to wiktionary, it might be Turkish?

Side note: That Olympia sports the alternative Finnish keyboard layout, which was also known as the Remington keyboard, as it was introduced by Systema Oy, Remington's main Finnish distributor. It was designed to be uniquely fit for the needs of the Finnish language, and this layout competed with the standard layout (which was probably adopted from Sweden, and also known as the Underwood keyboard) for several decades, from the early 1900s until 1960, when the Finnish office machine association finally put an end to the bothersome system of having two competing keyboard layouts. This alternative "XASDF" layout, as some modern enthusiasts call it, must not have been bad at all if you were used to it, but these days it just renders a large amount of old Finnish typewriters unusable for anyone who is used to the standard layout, which is pretty much everyone