IF I WERE YOUR BROTHER.

The typewriter is a 1963 Signature 100, an ultraportable made for Montgomery Ward by Brother in Japan.

Signature 100 keyboard

If I were your Brother,
I’d tell you what I thought.
We’d both correct each other,
As loving brothers ought.
And you would tell your mother
How glad you were she’d brought
A little baby Brother
From the store where it was waiting to be bought.

Comments

  1. KevinT says:

    I am very late to the game, but I just noticed that only about half of these old manual typewriters have the numeral 1 (when they have numbers at all). I’m now trying to pull out of the mists of my memory whether we needed to use the small case L for 1 when I took typing class in the early 1970s…

    • Occasional Correspondent says:

      I took typing about the same time.  The typewriters we used (manual, not electric) had dedicated numeric 1 and 0 keys but the instructor did observe that we might encounter typewriters without and would have to use minuscule L for 1 and majuscule O for 0.  I also remember the rub-on transfer characters for really exotic typography.

    • Dr. Boli says:

      You’ll find that all the typewriters have numbers, but a few have them where you don’t expect. The Underwood Portable has a double shift, with a “CAP” shift for capitals and a “FIG” shift for numbers, punctuation, and symbols. That permits it to have a space-saving three-bank keyboard. Three-bank keyboards disappeared almost completely (except on toy typewriters) by about 1930, until they came roaring back with the smartphone. Many smartphone keyboards have exactly the same kind of double shift.

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