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| on its way to San Francisco |
Well, the Christmas rush is going full steam ahead around here. The shop in hopping to be sure. Lots of repairs are coming through the door. Tons of people coming in to buy ribbons and supplies or ordering over the phone or emailing orders. I still can't get over how people from all over the country can order a vintage typewriter or ribbons over the computer from me. For the thirty years that I've been here, this has always been a small neighborhood typewriter shop. Now I'm the only typewriter shop around and my customers are from all across the country. Earlier this week a man from San Francisco bought a 1956 Royal Quiet de Luxe with red accents as a Christmas gift for his wife. Hope it arrives in time for Christmas. Today I shipped Matt's Hermes Ambassador down to New Jersey. Anyone who follows his blog knows he's been drooling for weeks over getting this machine. Matt thinks he'll have it Monday but the UPS driver said more like Tuesday because of the volume of packages right now.
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| a 15 year old girl will be very happy next Saturday. |
I've sold alot of machines so far this week. Not surprisingly, most of them are for teenagers. Most of them, are for girls by a 5 to 1 ratio this year. So far its mostly dads coming in to pick out the machines for their daughters. I'm impressed that the dads are into it this year. In years past they didn't understand why their kid wanted an old typewriter. This year I'm getting dads in here saying that they are happy their kid wants a low tech present. I think they sounded alittle proud about it. Also finding new homes this week are a 1936 Royal Touch Control , a 1940 Royal Companion, 2- Olympia portable lightweights, a Olympia SM-3, a SM-5, a Smith Corona Galaxie 12, a Smith Corona Sterling, a Corona Silent and several IBM Wheelwriters, going to Boston area companies. I'm very happy that the vintage ads are starting to sell more and more. Remember that Olympia SM-5 in caramel from last weeks blog, well it sold in less than a week, as predicted. Ta-dah! A man bought it for his girlfriend, who is a writer, for Christmas. He originally came in with a Olympia repair that he bought on Ebay. It was unrepairable, so he was looking at some machines and was seduced by the SM-5. Can't blame him, it was a real beauty.
Yesterday I sold a Olympia SM-3 to a television show that films in Vancouver, British Columbia. Its a two tone model that appeared the t.v show Fringe
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| a future television star |
on Fox television, during the first show of the first season. They don't have that machine anymore and needed it for a show in the upcoming season. So I got the call from the prop master to duplicate the machine for a scene to be shot in a typewriter shop. Sounds pretty cool to me. When this show originally aired two years ago, the day after the first episode, two different customers called me up all excited saying, " Did you watch that new show Fringe last night. They did a scene in a typewriter shop and I'd swear it was your shop. It looked exactly the same. Are you sure nobody took a picture of the inside of the store."
So thats how my exciting, busy and fun week ended for Christmas rush. Hope you all had a good week too. Thanks for checking it out. See you next week.
This is great -- I am jealous of all the folks getting the typewriters. I didn't ask Santa for one but my birthday is in March and I think I know what I will wish for...so cool that you making so many folks happy with these beautiful machines.......Happy Holidays.
ReplyDeleteSweet! I guess Tuesday's the big day!
ReplyDeleteTom-- My husband bought that beautiful Royal typewriter for me! Check out my blogpost SCORE! and you'll see it here in SF. I love it. But that was a close call that the surprise wasn't ruined....maybe you shouldn't post about people ordering presents.....Happy Holidays and thanks for that beauty.
ReplyDeletemcget here... one odd suggestion -- where you refer to typewriters as "low tech" -- for some reason, I feel like taking issue, as a reporter did the same thing recently and I wanted to correct him, but didn't want to break his flow.
ReplyDeleteThen, the next two people I talked to, I found myself saying, "Mid-tech", which really cracked them and me up... and I think that's actually more accurate, because pencil and paper and maybe for that matter, Twitter, are sort of low-tech, but typewriters and vinyl records and acoustic guitars are "mid-tech"... they take real skill to make, and they also demand a bit more from their users...
high tech demands little..
oh, wait, and ok, here's the phrase, "Mid-Tech", but "High-Touch" ...
just like a stick shift car, or a vinyl record... the tactile is more demanding... and the feedback is immediate...
One parallel ... at least in my experience... I can think of scores of times where I stopped listening to a band because they were TOO LOUD....
with an acoustic guitar... you can make people more attentive by playing softly... one of the marks of a good band is that they know how to turn down... which, sadly, so many bands are unable to do...
one of my dad's biggest compliments about a jazz group was, "They could swing at a whisper"...
Typewriters are in a way, low volume --because you don't dash off as much junk... the ability of computers to produce vast quantities of text sure hasn't raised the quality level...
But anyway,
what do you say to calling this stuff, "Mid-Tech"?
--Michael McGettigan
That's a deal Mike. A much more accurate description for sure.
ReplyDelete