I'll be there! I know the Hoop & Toy very well... I'll see if I can manage to bring two machines.  

Hope to see maybe one or two others from here on the day.

Thanks, looking forward to it! Piotr and I are old friends by now, and I'm also hoping to bring a nerdy 14-year-old typing enthusiast with me. For at least a bit, anyway. ;)

 

Hiya, well I was a bit useless and took nary a one picture. But it was a very nice event, in a pub in South Kensington that I never went in for years and years and then have somehow been in about four times this year! Here's a link to Richard Polt's latest blog post on the typewriters of London - which I include because I want to state that I got to type on his bright red Good Companion! and I can vouch for it being a lovely machine. VERY pretty - and I realised I don't have anything red, my typewriters on the whole are rather greyish and greenish... except for the orange Tippa, of course. So I now know that my previous prejudice against Good Companions was more about an antipathy towards one machine I had bought - and possibly one model, the Model 2 - not really a hatred of the whole make. I'd never seen one in that colour before, not even on the internet.

Other typewriters people brought along included a really lovely blue Studio 44  with a bright, crisp action, a 1935 Rheinmetall of great beauty, which worked gorgeously too; an Empire Aristocrat a few years newer than mine, maybe 1954? and anOlivetti Scribe brought by Piotr. Now that's a very interesting and sweet machine: a sort of prototype Lettera 22, with a couple of key differences. One being the keys, which were flat, just discs cut from black plastic, not the liquorice-drop concave of a L22. Though the shift keys, as he pointed out to me, were the concave of a Lettera. So a rather interesting hybrid-stroke-prototype. And it had a shinier finish than any L22 I've seen. Most impressive to me was its drop-dead gorgeous leather case, which was more like a much-more-beautiful version of a Studio 44 case, with the wooden brace bits inside it. And a fantastic late-40s leather briefcase-style handle. I could have wept. The machine I took along was my 1955 Groma Modell T, which is ineffably beautiful but which I'm thinking about selling. It struck 

I couldn't type much because I have some kind of horrible RSI in my right shoulder and have been in agonies for days with it, but I bravely carried my machine in my other hand and crossed London - and was very glad I did! Very nice indeed to meet Richard P, a very jolly laid-back fellow, and get my book signed, and to see Piotr again. I met some other very interesting guys as well - and yes they were guys, there was only one other woman there (and she hadn't even brought a typewriter with her!). We're not very well represented in this little world. One plucky fellow had come from Swindon! AND brought a friend. Some people will do anything to get to a type-in. ;)

I'm imagining someone else will have been better on the  picture front than I was.