Posted 10 years ago
BarbWiseberg
(1 item)
I bought this typewriter last week - I may have paid too much but it "spoke" to me.....
It’s a Remington typewriter but I am not sure if the letters are Hebrew or Yiddish. Hebrew has 22 characters on their keyboard but this has more. The letters on five of the original keys seem to have been replaced – the original ones are all black and these five are white.
It comes with a black cover that fits over the whole unit.
I am not sure if this is the serial number, but the number I see, right above the top row of keys, on the right hand side, is V677486.
Hi. If you lift off the ribbon cover near the carriage roller, and look on the frame itself towards the keyboard, I believe you'll find both the year/month of manufacture and the serial number. It may not be obvious at first, so use a flashlight and a magnifying glass. I'm betting this is a late 20's or early 30's vintage.
And yes, I believe those are Hebrew characters, but I'm not an expert so you'd better verify.
Hey there! I'm definitely no expert (or even novice) on typewriters, but I can tell you this is almost certainly a Yiddish, not a Hebrew typewriter. There are 3 keys that make me think that. There is a dedicated key for tsvey vovn (?), tsvey yudn (?), and komets alef (??). It appears (though I can't quite tell) that one of the replacement keys is a pasekh alef (??). These four letters are all used extremely commonly in Yiddish, but would not be considered separate letters or used very often in Hebrew. Also, the fact that these are the only accented letters included suggests that this typewriter was manufactured after the language was standardized by YIVO. So I'd say the very, very earliest this could have been manufactured would have been 1926, but it is likely much later than that, I would guess post-1937 (see this article for more information on the standardization of the language: http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Language/Planning_and_Standardization_of_Yiddish ). This is a very interesting piece!
Hello. This is 100% a Yiddish typewriter. I am fluent in Yiddish and have a beautiful 1957 custom made Remington Standard that I purchased from Martin Tytell from the fabled Tytell Typewriter Company in New York City in 1991. The give away is the double yud for the ey-ay diphthong, and the and double vov keys for the v letter/sound in Yiddish. Mystery solved.