QWERTY

Brought home a functional 1930's portable Royal Junior typewriter today. Found it at a garage sale for $ 20. The woman said her aunt still used it until she passed away a few years ago. I thought that was pretty cool, I now wish I had asked : "What did she type"? Letters to the editor, or to a dear friend far away? Recipe cards? Or perhaps she wrote stories, clicking away on the gleaming glass-covered keys, words hammered out in an iconic font that we strive to duplicate today on our modern keyboards.
With a manual typewriter, given the varied pressure on the keys and the age of the ribbon, some letters appear bold and crisp, while a lighter touch produces a fainter result. Ghostly letters might appear sans ink, stamped into the page in relief. There is a randomness and literally a 'depth' that the modern keyboard and downloadable typewriter fonts are missing. I just read that the older typewriters (like mine) have no '1' or the exclamation point (!!!!) Even older ones did not have a zero. So the lowercase L was substituted for the numeral 1 and the uppercase O for zero. The exclamation point was a three-stroke combination of an apostrophe, a backspace, and a period. I guess the 'l', '0' and '!' were considered redundant since there were "work-arounds" , so it made for a simpler more economic design.

Oh and QWERTY...its the stuff of legends in typewriter lore.......
Postscript: Apparently Hemmingway's typewriter of choice was a Royal.