Yes, we do own one. My husband has a government job, and sometimes this job requires that he type something up on an actual paper form. I think that the gummint is slowly moving away from this idea though.
I think I have two manual typewriters at home: one in the basement and one in the attic. There may also be an old electric one around somewhere, but I haven’t seen it in a long time. None of them has been used at all in 15 years or more. I used to use them to type the addresses on envelopes for several years after I stopped using them for anything else.
I love I mean fucking LOVE my Olivetti with a French keyboard. It was fucking hard to buy even in situ ca 2000 in Paris. Shit’s all gunked up now, but my nephew liked playing with it and now his brother probably will too. Hard to get new ribbons – just re-wind some fresh stuff onto the old spindles or whatever they’re called. Makes those suckers who typed their dissertations in the 1970s–>1980s look like suckers hand-writing the accents on every page. Of course, the umlaut diacritic is quotes over a letter and you have to just wing transferring the ess-szet or whatever into two esses Better than nothing.
Threw away a Smith-Corona I used since I was a little kid a long time ago – good machine, but no accents made it absurd.
I think my old Olivetti is still at Mom’s. The only reason it doesn’t work is that I have no freaking idea where to get ribbons any more, or how to ink one back up: the machine itself is in perfect shape (they’re just a bunch of levers, really hard to break; the oldest one we had in Typing Class was a 19th-century piece which the teacher brought out of storage for a classmate who really pounded the keys).
No, forget about buying new spools. Just get some random ones from a shop and spend literally 1.5 minutes winding it around the old spools. Olivetti spools are a little different – there’s some kind of little notch in them different from some others. Just get a new roll of ink and wind it by hand. It takes a few seconds, is cheap, and you’re good to go.
Oh, to give you an idea – I guess it was sometime in 2000, I spent an entire morning trying to find this one little shop…these few old ladies (well, they seemed old – they were probably in their forties) were just killing time in this nicely decorated shop and hardly could understand that I wanted to buy a manual typewriter. One went in the back, grabbed a brochure, and insisted I read it. It was just some junk about corporate crap. Finally after about twenty minutes and I think one of the ladies went outside to get a smoke and I joined her, looking at the window dressings the other one came out from the back with a “new” model and threw in a free carrying case. I think it was about twenty bucks, the whole thing, at the exchange rate then.
No, forget about getting Olivetti spools or whatever the word is – I don’t know what it’s called in any language. Just get some ribbons and wind it yourself on the spools that cam with the machine.
I own three manuals…two portable and one big huge honking desktop type. They all work, and my mom used one a few years ago to type up a recipe. My family tried to throw they away during the last big cleanup, but I resisted. I need to be ready for when that electro-magnetic pulse thingy happens and the world grinds to a stop.
If I could guarantee a lifelong supply of usable ribbons and correcting tape, I’d pay more for a working IBM Selectric II than I would for a mid-range computer. I worked on one of those babies for a dozen years (government employee, y’know), and there’s something about knowing you can’t go back and revise text willy-nilly that stimulates creativity.
BTW, my husband came home from the store the other day with a bottle of Wite-Out; he was pissed that they didn’t have Liquid Paper. He didn’t understand why I was laughing at him. [/hijack]
I haven’t tried this, but I suspect if you have an old cloth ribbon and cannot find a new one, that you could saturate the old one with stamp pad ink and use it until the threads disintegrated.
I have an ancient 1896 typewriter still, but it doesn’t work as the ribbon is all dried out.
My wife has her typewriter- still in it’s case- from her uni days. I understand it is an Olympia and it was a second hand one from a rural newspaper office. Age undetermined.
I have both a working mechanical typewriter and a working electrical typewriter. Yay!
And I have the mechanical one with me right now in college. Eventually I’ll have to write a paper with it… It’s still in pretty good condition, although the ? key tends to jam.
Typewriter ribbon is easy and cheap to get. Amazon sells all sorts. They even still sell the multicolor versions. No need to roll your own unless you prefer to do that.
For what it is worth, they also still sell many makes of typewriter, both manual and electric.
A friend of mine spends his summer “Up North”. Nothing around, except an old workshop full of tools and printing equipment. On the way up to visit him on his birthday, i found an old Underwood in an abandoned barn. He still talks about restoring it, and he will, someday.
… a few more sources:
http://mytypewriter.com/ribbons.aspx
http://uweb.superlink.net/~jrespler/web.html
Uh, maybe the amazon source will work. Most of the others are useless to me, as they’re highly unlikely to ship to Spain at a reasonable cost. Thanks.
raises hand I have a small collection of typewriters, several of which are in very good working condition. My favourites are two Blickensderfers (models 5 and 7) from 1899-1902, and a Hammond from the early 20th century.
Well, I’m a Yank, so this is my idea of anything east of Long Island. 
This is a list of typewriter repair shops by country. They typically have a wide variety of ribbons too. Some of the info may be out of date.
I still have a working Remington manual typewriter I picked up at a flea market in Zurich in 1982. I don’t know how old it is, but I suspect it’s from the 1940’s. The unique attribute is the German keyboard. It works, but requires a lot of finger strength and needs maintenance.
A few months ago, I saw a manual Smith-Corona as set decoration in a shop window. It was the model I learned to type on in a decade that shall remain nameless. So I went in, tried it out, asked if they’d sell it, and got a price. I didn’t buy it after all, but remain wistful. I miss the sound of clatter of keys and the carriage return. If I decide that Sudden Kestrel’s comment about the typewriter inspiring creativity might be true for me, I think I’ll go back and buy it.
It would be great to settle down to work without the temptation of web surfing.
This.
A manual typewriter can only do one thing. No games, no web; no photos, videos, or music.
Scan your pages at the end of the day, convert to text via OCR. Done.
I started out with a fully manual typewriter, got an electric typewriter in high school, and, when it broke down, got a used one at a pawn shop, which I still have. I used to use it to adress envelopes.