I'm hooked on standard machines right now and in the last two days bought three of them: a 1936 Royal KHM, a late '40s Olivetti Lexikon 80, and this bizarre machine, a 1945 Royal MM.

It was a bit of an odd purchase. I had just finished agreeing to buying the KHM from the seller when he mentioned that he had another machine he wanted to sell. Of course I was interested and agreed to check it out. The machine was one of the filthiest I'd ever seen; the keys were so caked with dirt that it looked like they were made of mud. The first thing I noticed aside from the dirt was that this Royal was missing the shift keys, so I immediately balked at the thought of buying it.

"Looks like this thing was gutted for parts," I mentioned pointing at the empty spaces on both sides of the keyboard.

Just before I told him that I wasn't interested, I opened the ribbon cover and quickly changed my mind. The spool holders held tiny plastic spools meant for an ultra-portable, which was a definite minus.

"This machine won't work properly - if it even works at all - with these spools," I said as I spun one freely on its post. "These Royal models need specific spools for the ribbon transport mechanism to function properly."

I had a brand new set of the special Royal spools at home, but even so it seemed like a waste to use them on this pile of junk. 

"I'll give you $20 for it." It probably wasn't even worth that. Typers that look this bad usually need more work than they're worth, but I was curious by what I had seen under the ribbon cover and didn't want to lose this rarity, even if it would never type again.

"Someone else is interested in it, and has offered me $25 based on the photo I sent him," he replied with a poker face. 

It bothered me that I was being leveraged for a extra $5, but it would have bothered me a lot more to have lost this machine for a few extra bucks, so I reached into my pocket for the money and put the nasty typer in the car beside the KHM.

After a cursory cleaning, and a new set of Royal spools with vintage (dried-out) ribbon, I was surprised to find that the machine worked perfectly. It was fantastic to discover that it types well, but I was still stumped by the history of this Royal.

What I had seen under the ribbon cover and had changed my mind about this typewriter was its slugs.My first thought when I had spotted them was that this typewriter was a radio mill. However, now that I've seen the type on paper, I'm not so sure. The typeface is massive, and the character set extremely limited, so it has me wondering what other uses this machine might have had. Was the character set custom made for military use? Given its 1945 production date it certainly could be a possibility. Maybe it was used for typing out telegraph messages? Probably not; surely you would at least need a question mark at your disposal for such a use and this machine doesn't have one.

It looks like this Royal's purpose-built use will remain a mystery. However, I am hoping that someone will stumble across this post who will have a definitive answer concerning its history. In the meantime I still have a LOT of cleaning to do.


This photo was taken after the MM was first cleaned. It's obviously had a rough life, but a little love will turn this wallflower into something far more attractive. Note the screw that has been placed in the ribbon colour selector opening to prevent the lever from being switched to red type. The slugs in this machine are so big that they use up the entire ribbon surface.



See the shift keys? Yeah, neither did I. The keys were covered in thick grime when I bought the machine; had I seen them in this state it would have immediately been obvious why there weren't any shift keys on this Royal.



Ever seen a set of slugs like these? They're quite an imposing sight when you first flip open the ribbon cover.



Obviously this machine is in desperate need of a full tear down. She might be as ugly as a bag of stones, but she works great. Go figure.


This comparison will give you some idea as to the size of this typeface. The smaller type on the bottom is from the other Royal I bought. It's 10-pitch and yet completely dwarfed by the MM's massive typeface. The blotchy/uneven type can be attributed to the new, yet terribly old ribbon on the NOS Royal spools that I installed.