CollectibleBitz Blog

Who Wants To Restore This Remington Standard Typewriter?

This beat up old Remington typewriter is up for grabs on eBay. Its a Remington Standard Model 2 and I must admit it looks a tad sad and needs a loving new owner who will restore it to its original glory.

There are some bits missing and I am pretty sure Remington are right out of stock of anything for this model so be prepared to spend some hours making them.

Remington Standard Model 2 listed on eBay

Here’s the full listing URL:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=260309944745

Tags: Antique Typewriter, eBay, Remington Standard Model 2 Typewriter

How Best To Begin Buying Antiques In Auction Or From Dealers

by: John N. Cohen

Some personal guidance on how to begin buying antiques from dealers, or in the auction room, as a collector.  Some valuable insights not generally known, that will equally apply to all types of antique collecting.

ABOUT BECOMING AN ANTIQUE COLLECTOR

Before buying anything; make a point of studying books and catalogues (even old ones) on your subject, then attend a few auctions, be sure to inspect your choice of antiques on the viewing days before the auction, always allow enough time to visit and explore the main dealers’ stock, both before and after any auction sales.  This way you will gradually be able to assess what quality items are available and the prices being currently asked.  Make a point of chatting to dealers, or well-known collectors, about what has happened after an auction.  Not always, but sometimes one can gain quite a lot of useful guidance about particular pieces, what to look out for and importantly about the general feelings about any record breaking prices. To read the full article GO HERE.

Tags: Antique Collecting, Antique Dealers, Antiques Auctions, BECOMING AN ANTIQUE COLLECTOR, Buying Antiques, John N. Cohen

Finding Rare Antique Collectibles

Do you love to collect antiques? Are you a serious collector that is
looking for a specific antique such as a certain piece of furniture, a
unique car, or perhaps a specific antique painting that suits your
taste? If so, then you know it is not always an easy task to find the
items you are looking for, especially if you don’t know where to look.

So the question that many collectors have is just where to find the
good stuff anyway? The thing that makes being an antique collector
different is that you can’t just go to the store and buy the item you
want, no matter how much money you have. It can literally be an Easter
egg hunt to try to find the treasures you seek.

More here…..

Tags: Antiques, Collectibles, Finding Rare Antiques

The 1878 Remington 2 Set The Standard For Typewriter Design

By Dave Knight

The Remington Standard 2 typewriter first made in 1878 was the successor to the “Sholes & Glidden Type Writer”. The Sholes & Glidden machine was produced in the Remington factory and is regarded as the first Remington typewriter, the Remington 1. The Remington 2 was the first model to be sold in substantial quantities though and had a number of improvements over the Sholes & Glidden design. It is generally accepted that over 100,000 R2 machines were sold.

The QWERTY keyboard was designed by Sholes and featured on the S&G machine which was first produced only four years before the Remington 2. It only typed upper case letters and didn’t have a ’shift key’. The Remington 2 remained an up-strike machine just like it’s predecessor.

An up-strike machine has the type bars hanging down in a circle in what is called the type basket. When the keys are hit the type bars swing up against the platen and transfer a small quantity of ink to the paper from the ink-saturated ribbon that is stretched under the platen. The typist lifted the carriage to read what was written and check for errors. A front-strike machine which allows the reading of the document as it is being typed was many years away.

So what was different with the new Remington?

Probably the most important improvement was it’s capability to type in upper and lower case. This was made possible by the introduction of the ’shift key’ that literally shifted the carriage to the front to type capitals. This key is still sometimes referred to as the ’shift key’ even on computers that do not have a carriage. However, it is now more commonly called the ‘Enter’ key.

The S&G model had decorated panels surrounding the mechanism but these were removed on the Remington 2 in favour of a black open frame. This change made it quieter and established the open-black-box look typewriters would have for decades to come.

The Remington 2 was being being sold well into the 1890s and it wasn’t until 1908 that Remington yielded to market pressure to produce a front-strike machine named the Remington 10. There were various other Remington models produced and sold alongside the Remington 2 but it alone set the standard for typewriter design for many decades.

A Short History

Remington played a leading role in typewriter production for years but the original Remington Arms factory was only making typewriters for a short time. Remington originally owned only a minority share in the project but between 1877 and 1882 became the majority owners.

Later, between 1883 and 1886 marketers Wyckoff, Seamans and Benedict obtained full ownership and the right to use the Remington name. A new factory was built and manufacture transferred from the original Remington family arms factory.

Collectible or not?

So many of this model were made it is doubtful it will ever become valuable but for the antique typewriter collector this fact makes it more likely to obtain one.

Tags: Antique Typewriter, Collectible Typewriter, Qwerty keyboard, Remington 10, Remington 2, Remington Standard No. 2, Seamans and Benedict, Sholes & Glidden, Wyckoff

How The Sholes & Glidden Manual Typewriter Changed The World

By Dave Knight

The manual typewriter and indeed it’s successor the electric typewriter is regarded by most people a relic of a bygone age. Modern offices and home businesses now use computers to produce both hard copy documents and electronic documents that whisk across the world in seconds.

However, the personal computer is the latest development in the evolution of the writing. It all started with early man scratching words on cave walls and from these humble beginnings various implements have been invented so mankind can communicate via the written word.

In the late nineteenth century the evolution of the writing instrument took a monumental leap forward. The “Type Writer” was invented.

E. Remington & Sons produced what is considered the first typewriter but it wasn’t invented by Remington. In 1868 at Kleinsteuber’s Machine Shop in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Christopher Latham Sholes and others were busy inventing devices that would take the tedium out of repetitious and time-consuming work. It was here the idea for the “Sholes & Glidden Type Writer” was born. Carlos Glidden worked on the device with Sholes.

Sholes made a demonstration device that only typed one letter but it proved the idea a possibility. The idea accepted by the gentlemen of “Scientific America” he went on to produce the prototype that could do the whole alphabet. The prototype, pictured below, was sent to Washington as the required Patent Model and the original still exists.

The printing type is mounted on the end of a type-bar and pressing a key swings the type-bar up to the cylindrical platen. A inked ribbon is threaded between the type head and the platen. The typing wasn’t immediately viewable so the machine was called a “blind-writer” and the carriage was hinged so that the operator could check the result.

The original Sholes & Glidden used the QWERTY keyboard and typed capitals letters only. The machine was sluggish, fiddly and inefficient but investor James Densmore had enough faith in the machine to buy the patent from Sholes. This is how Remington came to produce the device.

The original “Type Writer” came mounted on a table with foot treadle to operate the carriage return. It was also heavily decorated with gold paint and colorful decals. Their was also a table model with a handle that operated the carriage return in place of the foot treadle.

A decade later the Remington 2 was produced. It was quieter, typed in upper and lower case and had a shift key. Remington was responsible for mass producing and marketing the manual typewriter but the industry that changed the world began with the Sholes & Glidden manual typewriter.

It is a a valuable and desirable collectors item although not that rare. It is estimated that a couple of hundred survive with values from $1000 for a black model and $5000 for an ornately-decorated model on a treadle stand.

Want to use this article on your Blog, Newsletter or Web Site? You may do so as long as the article is published unaltered and includes the author’s Bio Box. For full details click here or the image to the left.

Tags: Blind-writer, Carlos Glidden, Changed the world, Christopher Latham Sholes, Collectible, E. Remington & Sons, Manual Typewriter, QWERTY, Remington 2, Scientific America, Sholes & Glidden, Type Writer, Writing

Collectable or Collectible?

By Dave Knight

An interesting word collectible it can be spelt collectable also. It is a noun meaning “Things considered to be worth collecting (not necessarily valuable or antique)” or an adjective meaning “That which can be collected: a collectible loan” or “Worthy of being collected: collectible antique coins”. For the purposes of this article it is it’s meaning as a something valuable that is of interest. What is deemed collectable isn’t necessarily valuable monetarily but is valuable to the collector due to its satisfaction value. But I digress.

In my research of the word I discovered some interesting facts. Collectable is the spelling listed first in the Oxford English Dictionary, the dictionary notes that the -ible form is also valid, and is more commonly used in the United States. This fact probably explains the following search results.

I found that the use of collectible or collectibles was almost five times as popular as collectable or collectables. A search of Google for each word revealed that there were over forty four million sites containing the word collectible but under ten million containing the alternative spelling.

So there you have it. The USA has the largest number of Internet sites hence the greater number of sites using the -ible form of the word but both spellings are correct.

Useful Links:
Cambridge Dictionaries On-Line

Tags: Cambridge Dictionaries On-Line, collectable, Collectible, Collecting

The “Hot” New Collectibles

Article by: Laura Thykeson

A few months ago I wrote an article named “Signed vs. Unsigned – Buying Art, Pottery and Collectibles”. The basic premise of the article was my own opinion about “Should you pay the price for signed jewelry, art and collectibles, as opposed to buying what you love, whether signed or unsigned?”.

Since writing that article, I have read in one of my many collectible newsletters and magazines that the “hot” new collectible trend is buying……..

To read the rest of the article go here

Tags: Buying Art, Hot New Collectibles, Laura Thykeson, Pottery and Collectibles, signed jewelry, Signed vs. Unsigned

The Trinks-Brunsviga Antique Pinwheel Calculator Is Very Collectible

By: Dave Knight

Until November 2006 I was the proud owner of a Trinks-Brunsviga model MB. Where I lived at the time was so small I had it boxed up and hidden. I decided to put it up for auction on eBay. It made $500 and was sold to a gentleman in the USA. The sale price was some compensation for no longer owning this treasure. Photos of the machine are published on my web site. You will find the link in my resource box below.

Sometimes called the ‘Midget’, it is mounted on a wood base with a mahogany veneer and has beautifully curved cover in the same material. It has a capacity of 9×13×8 and I researched the machine using its serial number #45827I and from the resulting information I believe this particular machine was made around 1920. There were a few defects, however, considering it’s age it is in excellent condition.

The Trinks-Brunsviga MB was produced between the years 1910 – 1927 and is known as a pinwheel calculator. Only sixteen thousand machines were built. I gleaned much of this information from rechenmaschinen-illustrated and I am grateful to owners for this site. The machine has a UK ‘manufacturers’ plate on the base but they were made in Germany. I can only speculate on the reason for this; early political correctness maybe? After all the UK was at war Germany from 1914 to 1919.

The German patent of W T Odhner, 1891, was obtained by Grimme, Natalis & Co, Braunschweig, and was embodied in a machine known as the “Brunsviga.” Odhner was then in St Petersberg, Russia but moved to Sweden after the Russian Revolution. Brunsviga incidentally is Latin for Braunschweig.

Grimme, Natalis & Co named the company Brunsviga Maschinenwerke AG in 1927 and much later merged with the Olympia Werke AG, Wilhelmshaven (1959). Also closely connected to the Brunsviga name is Franz Trinks who lead the development from 1892 until 1926.

The Trinks-Brunsviga MB antique pinwheel calculator is very collectible and quite valuable but there are other Brunsviga calculators that are rarer and in turn far more valuable.

Want to use this article on your Blog, Newsletter or Web Site? You may do so as long as the article is published unaltered and includes the author’s Bio Box. For full details click here or the image to the image on the left.

Tags: Antique Office Machines, Braunschweig, Brunsviga, Brunsviga MB, Brunsviga Midget, Franz Trinks, Grimme, Maschinenwerke AG, mechanical calculator, Natalis & Co, Odhner, Pinwheel Calculator, Scientific antiques, Trinks-Brunsviga