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1916 Royal 10 Serial # X245336 1916 Royal 10 typewriter, Serial # X245336 Mark Schrad's 1916 Royal 10 typewriter. 2024-09-29 From the Virtual Typewriter Collection of Mark Schrad: 1916 Royal 10 Serial # X245336 I joke sometimes about “toiling down in the typewriter mines”… But they can be hard work to haul, absolutely filthy, and sometimes you can unearth a rare gem.
This 1916 Royal 10 came from the Upper West Side NYC apartment of Tikva Tytell—widow of Peter Tytell. The Tytell family is typewriter royalty, world famous for their NYC shop in which they could swap-out typefaces for different languages, as well as being renowned forensics documents experts. (Google them.) So it was an honor and a privilege to help them downsize in September, 2024.

This Royal was up on a closet shelf, covered in literally 50 years of dust… since the newspapers surrounding it dated from March, 1974.
Curious to see whether it was anything special, I wiped the dust away from one key, only to reveal the letter M. Nothing special, I thought. But people do really dig these early models with the pinstripes, so I hauled it (and fifty years of grime) home.

Only days later did I realize that the M key isn’t where an M key usually is on a keyboard. Brushing off the keyboard only then revealed that it was, in fact, a pre-orthographic-reform Russian model.

This will take quite a bit of work to get cleaned and functional—especially since all of the Russian typebars had been removed. So it seems that I will be in the unique position of finishing a foreign-language typewriter swap project that either Martin or Peter began over a half a century ago.

In my mind, this is a pretty cool thing.

1916 Royal 10 #X245336

Status: My Collection
Hunter: Mark Schrad (MLSchrad)
Created: 09-29-2024 at 03:08PM
Last Edit: 09-29-2024 at 03:10PM


Description:

I joke sometimes about “toiling down in the typewriter mines”… But they can be hard work to haul, absolutely filthy, and sometimes you can unearth a rare gem.
This 1916 Royal 10 came from the Upper West Side NYC apartment of Tikva Tytell—widow of Peter Tytell. The Tytell family is typewriter royalty, world famous for their NYC shop in which they could swap-out typefaces for different languages, as well as being renowned forensics documents experts. (Google them.) So it was an honor and a privilege to help them downsize in September, 2024.

This Royal was up on a closet shelf, covered in literally 50 years of dust… since the newspapers surrounding it dated from March, 1974.
Curious to see whether it was anything special, I wiped the dust away from one key, only to reveal the letter M. Nothing special, I thought. But people do really dig these early models with the pinstripes, so I hauled it (and fifty years of grime) home.

Only days later did I realize that the M key isn’t where an M key usually is on a keyboard. Brushing off the keyboard only then revealed that it was, in fact, a pre-orthographic-reform Russian model.

This will take quite a bit of work to get cleaned and functional—especially since all of the Russian typebars had been removed. So it seems that I will be in the unique position of finishing a foreign-language typewriter swap project that either Martin or Peter began over a half a century ago.

In my mind, this is a pretty cool thing.

Typeface Specimen:

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Hunter: Mark Schrad (MLSchrad)

Mark Schrad's Typewriter Galleries [ My Collection ] [ My Sightings ]

Status: Typewriter Hunter
Points: 29790

Professor of Political Science and Director of Russian Area Studies at Villanova University. Writes about alcohol politics, Russia, and international law when not refurbishing old typewriters.



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