For about 7 years Typewriter Muse has been operating out of a home-like space, but this weekend they opened a lovely brick and mortar location in Riverside, CA in a nice sized business park with plenty of Doris Day parking right out front.  Their Instagram account has been documenting some of the move and set up over the past month, but Bob and the gang have unveiled their new space on Saturday, January 31, 2026.  Bob's shop is one of the few I'm aware of with a multitude of people (at least six by my count on Saturday) working at any given time. (Most modern shops are one or possibly two person operations.) This means that the cleaning, repairs, oiling, and adjusting can be set up in an assembly line fashion. Machines come into the front of the shop on the left hand side, then move down the left to the rear where they do power washing and platen work in the back room. From there they move back into the main portion of the shop where the segments and internals are cleaned using isopropyl alcohol and long stick q-tips. (This generally means less health and safety issues by not using mineral spirits, lacquer thinner, or other caustic chemicals which require better ventilation.) From there  they stage on a long desk before they go to one of two mechanic's stations where repairs and adjustments are made before being stored for pick up or placed in the "showroom"  The overall layout is quite well designed for moving machines in and out of the shop. Unique for many shops, the front reception space has community room for a handful of small desks and typewriters to accommodate 8-10 people for small classes, demonstrations, or a small type-in. The room has been dedicated to local journalist Dan Bernstein. (If you're in the So-Cal area and are interested, Bob has kindly offered the writing space for small type-in events.) I drove out in the late morning from Altadena. As a typewriter enthusiast I naturally chose the apropos 71 S Corona route (California State Route 71 towards Corona) before turning off toward Riverside, which is about an hour from my house near Pasadena. [caption id="attachment_55834521" align="aligncenter" width="660"]Five lane highway featuring a massive sign over the road announcing the split between the 71 South to Corona and the 60 East to Riverside. Who'd have thought the great typewriters were in Riverside and not in Corona?[/caption] Single story business park building featuring the storefront of Typewriter Muse including a black sandwich board touting the store.Front entrance at Typewriter Muse with a snack station and small drink refrigerator next to a typewriter table and a ribbon dispenser.A view of the front reception/writing room at Typewriter Muse. There are several small desks with typewriters and a dedicatory sign on the wall that reads "The Dan Bernstein Writing Room".The front reception window that separates the reception and writing rooms from the office and repair space in a typewriter shop.Bob Marshall with his hair tied back and wearing his mechanic's shirt sitting at the intake desk in front of a green Celtic-painted Royal P owned by Bryan Mahoney who is wearing a plaid vest and flat cap. Bob Marshall and Bryan Mahoney discussing a custom painted Royal P. [caption id="attachment_55834537" align="aligncenter" width="660"]Typewriter Muse's typewriter showroom with 4 wire shelving units covered with about two dozen typewriters of various makes and models. Underneath the shelving is a row of typewriter cases. On the side of the room opposite the shelving is a table with space for three typewriters for typing tests. Try out a machine or twenty while you're here![/caption] A typewriter mechanic's bench with a variety of tools on it and a lazy susan with a typewriter on it for restorationA typewriter mechanics's station with a Corona 3 on one side and a bunch of long handled q-tips and other cleaning tools on the other side.A parts station with shelving for a variety of typewriter replacement feet, and miniature drawers for screws, springs, and various other typewriter parts.Typewriter repair bench at Typewriter Muse with a typewriter surrounded by tools and an anglepoise lamp.Typewriter Muse has gone old school analog even in their speaker choice.The rear washroom at Typewriter Muse for cleaning typewriters including a sink and an air filtration station
#Events #Typewriters #Bob Marshall #Typewriter Muse #typewriter repair #typewriter repair shops
Just a few hours ago, Faye shared some sad news. Screencapture of a Facebook post announcing the passing of Duane Jensen which reads: Our hearts are broken to share the news of Duane Jensen's passing. Please keep his family and friends in your thoughts. | Thanks to all of you for your support. | Faye Wade Jensen Most of us might only be able to recognize his voice, his patient hands, and his preference for lacquer thinner, but all of us are richer in typewriter knowledge because of Duane Jensen's kind sharing of his craft by way of his spectacularly helpful Phoenix Typewriter YouTube channel. A bunch of us both watch and provide links to his library of typewriter repair videos on a daily basis. Many of us know how to tear down and build up a typewriter because of his tutorials and years of work. Once you attempt to repair a typewriter for yourself, you'll realize how skilled he was to be able to simultaneously film his work while he did it. (I swear he had six hands....) He also patiently dispensed (and still asked for his own repair advice) on a regular basis on Facebook. Thousands of his repaired machines will continue to give people joy every day. He'll be missed terribly in the typewriter community, but fortunately some of his work and his spirit will continue live on online.  For those who don't know him as well (yet), here's an article about Duane from last year: Meet one of the few people in America who knows how to fix manual typewriters, and an excellent podcast from September 2024: Charm Type Repair podcast w/ Duane Jensen of Phoenix Typewriter. Because it was his usual sign off, I feel obligated to quote him:
Phoenix Typewriter, Good Day!
—Duane Jensen
#Typewriters #Duane Jensen #obituaries #typewriter repair people
Purchased at Acts Thrift for $2.20.  The green paint is almost an exact match for our vintage Stanley thermos and my 1958 Olympia SM3 typewriter.
#Acquisition #Social Stream #analog office equipment #Excelsior Hardware Company #steel
Typed index card that reads: On Which Typewriter is the "Best" | It's all subjective. Some days you want apples. Other days you prefer oranges. | This is why one has a collection of 50 or more typewriters—to have a machine that will suit your mood on any given day.
#Photo #Social Stream #Typewriters #typecasts
Congratulations on getting this back to life. I'm a big fan of typing on index cards myself. If you need inexpensive, US-made typewriter ribbon, try Baco Ribbon or Fine Line which can be had for pennies on the dollar (and it's usually where most shops or re-sellers of ribbon are sourcing theirs). https://boffosocko.com/research/typewriter-collection/#Typewriter%20Ribbon Most know about the blogosphere, but did you know there is also a small, but growing, typosphere?!?
#Reply #Social Stream
Typed index card that reads: REASON #58 FOR KEEPING A COMMONPLACE OR ZETTELKASTEN | THE OFFICE, "Performance Review", Season 2, Episode 8 | Context: Hapless branch manager Michael Scott is under the gun from corporate to demonstrate his value and show his work and share his ideas, which he hasn't done and can't provide. | MICHAEL: Pam, I have ideas on a daily basis. I know I do. I have a clear memory of telling people my ideas. Um, is there any chance that you wrote any of my ideas down in a folder---like an idea folder? PAM: Sorry. MICHAEL: That's unfortunate. How about the suggestion box? There's tons of ideas in there.
#Note taking #Social Stream #commonplace books #Michael Scott #productivity #The Office #why zettelkasten #Zettelkasten
TIL: Moon+ Reader Pro has RSVP technology hiding in it's settings! This is going to dramatically help my inspectional reading this year.
#Social Stream #inspectional reading #Moon+ Reader #rapid serial visual presentation #reading practices #Today I Learned (TIL)
I've just noticed that Zotero update 7.0.31 added specific fields for Original Place, Original Publisher, and Original Date for books. Even better, the books for which I had defined an "Original-date" in the Extra section automatically sucked in that data and updated my database! Good work development team!
#Note taking #Social Stream #Zotero
Because I often buy index cards in tranches of 5,000 to 10,000 at a time, I've noticed that Oxford recently dropped their brick of 500 4x6" index cards to $6.47, a new low for the past year when they've generally been hovering in the $8.50-9.50 range. As a competitive move, Amazon has dropped their competing brick to $5.82, also a new annual low. If your card index habit is price sensitive, now is the time to buy. Three notebooks stacked up next to three separate piles of 1,300 index cards.
#Social Stream #4 x 6" index cards #Amazon Basics #arbitrage #Oxford
As I'm watching the Golden Globes, it's painfully obvious that it is missing some important analog representation. In an effort to remedy the error, shall we collect the nominations for Best Typewriter in a Movie or Television Series? (The only requirement for nomination is that the movie or television show was released in the 2025 calendar year. Bonus points if you include a photo of the typewriter from the show with your nomination.) I'll start with a first nominee: The 1930s Juwel 3 from the Netflix series WEDNESDAY. Thing, a disembodied hand, types on a black portable Juwel 3 typewriter. What other machines deserve a nomination?
#Typewriters #awards #Golden Globes
New typewriter enthusiasts will very often post to Reddit, one of the Facebook typewriter groups or other similar fora, something along the lines of: "I spotted this typewriter at an antique store. Good condition to buy?" and include a picture of some generic typewriter. It bears mentioning and thoroughly understanding that even an expert typewriter collector or professional repair person can only tell very little of the condition of a typewriter by photos. Does it look generally clean? Are the decals in tact? Does the segment look clean (a vague proxy for the potential condition of the internals)? Is anything obvious missing (knobs, return lever, keys)? Does it look cared for or has it been neglected in a barn for half a century? If it has a case, how beat up, dirty, and water-stained is it? Most modern typewriters made after 1930 in unknown condition are worth about $5-25 and they peak at about $500 when purchased from a solid repair shop unless some Herculean additional restoration has taken place, they've got a rarer typeface, or are inherently actually rare. Hint: unless it's a pro repair shop or very high end collector with lots of experience, don't trust anyone saying that a typewriter is "rare"—run the other direction. Run faster if they say it "works, but just needs a new ribbon" as—even at the most expensive—new ribbon is only $15 and their "rare" $600+ machine should have fresh, wet ribbon. The rule of thumb I use is that almost no one online selling a typewriter knows anything about it, including if it actually works. Worse, they've probably priced it at professional repair shop prices because they don't know that in the secondary typewriter market: condition is king. The least experienced typist will know far more about the condition of a machine by putting their hands on it and trying it out. Does it generally work? Does the carriage move the full length of its travel? Can you set the margins at the extremes and space reliably from one end to another? Does it skip? Is the inside clean or full of decades of dried oil, dust, correction tape, white-out splatter, and eraser crumbs? Does the margin release work? Does it backspace properly? When typing "HHHhhhHHH" are the letters all printed well and on the same baseline?  Presumably a typewriter at an antique store will meet these minimum conditions (though be aware that many don't as their proprietors have no idea about typewriters other than that if they wait long enough, some sucker will spend $150 on almost anything). They've done the work of finding a machine that (barely) works, housing it, and presenting it to the public for sale. This time and effort is worth something to the beginning typewriter enthusiast, but worth much, much less to the longer term practiced collector. If everything is present and at least generally limping along, you've got yourself a $30 typewriter. Most people can spend a few hours watching YouTube videos and then manage to clean and lubricate a typewriter to get it functioning reasonably. You can always learn to do the adjustments from YouTube videos. (Or just take it to a typewriter repair shop and fork over $200-400 to get things squared.) If you're getting into collecting, you'll make some useful mistakes by overpaying in the beginning and those mistakes will teach you a lot. Maybe you're a tinkerer and looking for a project? If so, then find the cheapest machine you can get your hands on (maybe a Royal KMM for $9 at thrift) and work your way through a home study course. Otherwise, if you're just buying one or two machines to use—by far—the best value you'll find is to purchase a cleaned, oiled, and well-adjusted machine from a repair shop. Sure it might cost $350-600, but what you'll save in time, effort, heartache, searching, repair, etc. will more than outweigh the difference. Additionally you'll have a range of machines to choose from aesthetically and you can test out their feel to find something that works best for you. Or, you could buy a reasonable machine like the one typically asked about for $40-70 and find out it needs cleaning, oiling, and adjusting and potentially a few repairs. The repair tab might run you an additional $450. Is it worth it when a repair shop would have sold you the same, a very similar, or an even better machine in excellent condition for $350? It also doesn't take much work to realize the god-send that a properly packaged and shipped typewriter is worth.

Why Context is Queen

Remember in asking about the cost and value/worth of a typewriter, you're actually attempting to maximize a wide variety of unstated variables including, but not limited to:
  • upfront price and value, 
  • information about the current state of the market,
  • information/knowledge about the machine itself, its history, desirability/popularity, and how often it's encountered in the wild, 
  • information about how to clean it,
  • information about oiling it,
  • information about adjusting,
  • information about repairing it,
  • cost and availability of tools and repair parts,
  • and the time involved for both learning and doing all of the above.
The more time you've spent learning and doing all of these, the better "deals" you'll find, but gaining this expertise is going to cost you a few years of life. What is all this "worth" when you just want to type on a machine that actually works as well as it was meant to? Most of the prognostication you'll find in online typewriter fora will be generally useless to you because you're not readily aware of the context and background of the respondents with respect to all of the variables above. Similarly they're working with no context about you, your situation, where you live, what's available in your area, your level of typewriter knowledge, your aesthetic, or your budget. You don't know what you don't know. At the end of the day, you're assuredly just as well off to use a bit of your intuition and putting your hands on a machine and trying it out. Then ask: "What is it worth to you?" If you find yourself asking this question online, but you're really asking: "Is this $50 typewriter highway robbery?", the answer is generally: "no". Alternately if the question is: "Is this $1,000 typewriter really this valuable?", the vast majority of the time the answer is also probably also "no".  More resources (and some of my own context) if you need them: https://boffosocko.com/research/typewriter-collection/ Happy typing.
#Typewriters #antiques #typewriter business #typewriter market #typewriter repair
Someone recently mentioned to me that the small, portable 1,000 index card capacity cardboard box with lid that they use as a zettelkasten felt more like it was for deep storage rather than daily use. Perhaps it's a result of the fact that this is how most people have been using these cheaper cardboard boxes for the last 30+ years? They said they'd prefer to have a drawer or a box with an attached lid.  It dawns on me that I've never mentioned one of the great affordances of many of the older card index cabinets is that they're designed to be able to completely remove one or more drawers at a time and use at your desk. On an almost daily basis, I pull out at least one drawer from my cabinet and place it on my desk and it allows me to actively work with collections of over 7,000 cards at a time. This means that while the cabinet itself may seem like deep or "cold" storage, it's really ongoing active storage that I can quickly and easily interact with depending on the range of projects I may be dealing with on a given day. Working on a different project for a bit? Put one drawer away and pull another... Several of my cabinets have not only pull handles on the front of the drawers, but also have cut-out handles in the rear to be able to easily pull them out and move them around. This feature was also the reason many cabinets also had card rods. The cards could be physically held into the drawers to prevent the user from accidentally tipping the drawer and loosing all the cards into a random pile on the floor.  Robert Pirsig describes a sad affair similar to this in his book Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (Bantam Books, 1991). Angle on a Steelcase card index drawer and chassis. The back of the drawer features a hole just large enough to put one's hand through to make carrying the drawer as a tray easier. Of course at the end of the day I can quickly slot the drawer right back into the cabinet for that clean desk look. And because today is the one year anniversary of the Eaton Fire, I'll mention that it's also pretty easy to pull a few of your favorite drawers out of the filing cabinet for fleeing your home office, evacuating your town, and being able to work for four months remotely. (Just remember to seat belt those drawers into the back seat if you don't have card rods!) 
#Furniture #Note taking #affordances #analog office equipment #card index filing cabinets
Typed index card with text: "I've got lots to say. I'm saving it all up." ---Beca Mitchell (portrayed by Anna Kendrick) Pitch Perfect 2 (Universal, 2015) Given as an excuse in a recording studio This is the reason that creatives should keep notebooks, commonplace books, or zettelkasten---so they have material to use immediately when under pressure, or simply to stimulate their creativity. 2026-01-02
#Note taking #Quotes #commonplace books #creativity #notebooks #Pitch Perfect 2 #pressure #why zettelkasten
Ricky Gervis in a black t-shirt pretends to be typing as if at an invisible typewriter
They've got a lovely big attic, a typewriter. You're gonna love it there.
—Ricky Gervais in Ricky Gervais: Mortality (Netflix, 2025)
#Photo #Social Stream #Typewriters #Anne Frank #Ricky Gervais #typewriters in media
Dan Allosso has been hosting a regular book club since Autumn 2021, centered around sense making, note taking, and topics like economics, history, sociology, and anthropology. (See our list of past books to get an idea of topic coverage.) Our next iteration over the coming month or so will focus on Steven Pinker's most recent book on knowledge: Pinker, Steven. 2025. When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. New York: Scribner. The first session will be on Saturday, January 10, 2026, and will recur weekly from 8:00 AM – 10:00 Pacific. Our meetings are welcoming and casual conversations over Zoom with the optional beverage of your choice. We'll cover the first three chapters in the first meeting and the book will likely consume three meetings in all over the coming month. To join and get access to the Zoom links and the shared Obsidian vault we use for notes and community communication, ping Dan Allosso with your email address.  Happy reading!
#Events #Science #book clubs #Dan Allosso #Dan Allosso Book Club #intellectual history #knowledge
The internet is now rife with what I call "zettelkasten method one pagers" that describe what many people rightly (or very often wrongly) think that Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten method entails.  While doing some research about Luhmann's numbering system's antecedents, I recently came across a "one pager" (typescript) written by Luhmann himself in the form of some lecture notes from 1968 that folks may appreciate. Luhmann, Niklas. 1968-01-13. “Ms. 2906: Technik des Zettelkastens.” Münster, Germany. Lecture Notes. Niklas Luhmann Archiv, https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/manuskripte/manuskript/MS_2906_0001. Seemingly everyone with a blog that ran across the idea of Zettelkasten in the last decade or so wrote up their own description of what it is.  If you know of other blog posts about zettelkasten, let me know for my collection. Of special note to those who are still under the misapprehension that Luhmann "invented the zettelkasten", in the closing section of his 1968 notes he writes "In conclusion: from personal experience, others work differently" by which one understands that he's aware of others who use similar systems and admits that they're all idiosyncratic to their individual users. I would suspect that he gave this lecture while at Sozialforschungsstelle an der Universität Münster (Social Research Centre of the University of Münster) to students about how to arrange and do their own sociology research work.
#Note taking #Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten #note taking methods #zettelkasten method one pagers
Not surprisingly, I don't always file away my index cards as quickly as I probably ought to. Every now and then I go through my deck of unfiled cards and try to sort them into my card index/zettelkasten. The end of the year seems like a pretty good time to clear the decks. Because I haven't documented some of this portion of my process before, I thought I'd take a few photos of my C-Line document sorter which I use to do a fast sort of cards before filing into my card index. I bought it a while back from Brodart Library supplies and it comes in quite handy for sorting and filing documents. It's got sections for sorting by alphabet, days of a month, months of the year, days of the week, and numbers up to 30,000 (which I primarily co-opt for Dewey Decimal sorting). The days of the month and month sections come in handy for use with my Memindex work, and the months of the year are useful for sorting receipts for expenses and at tax preparation time. In all, it's fairly flexible analog office tool. Side view of a C-Line index card sorter sitting on a wooden table. We can see about 100 cards slotted into the various flaps of the sorter As I go through my stack of index cards, I use a Mitsubishi No. 772 pencil (the vermillion side) to underline topics for filing and cross-referencing purposes. This allows me to cross-index topics quickly as well. A box of Mitsubishi No. 772 pencils with a sharpened one sitting in front of it. One end of the half red/half blue pencil is vermillion and the other end is Prussian blue. I went through several hundred cards the other day and only had about 150-200 left for filing into the commonplace book section of my card index. Most of these cards were from 2025, but some dated into 2024 with a handful from as far back as 2023.  Over the coming days, I'm hoping to finish cleaning up some of the notes from this year's reading work.
#Social Stream #analog office equipment #Brodart #C-Line #commonplace book #commonplace books #document sorters #filing practices #Memindex #Mitsubishi No. 772 #pencils #zettelkasten accessories
A burgundy 1964 Sears Cutlass typewriter with white racing strips which has a typed index card in the platen that reads: "Love is so short, forgetting is so long." ---Pablo Neruda | Opening card in All Too Well: The Short Film directed by Taylor Swift
#Quotes #Social Stream #one typed quote #Pablo Neruda #Sears Cutlass #Taylor Swift

Notebooks

Product Sheet width
(inches) Sheet height
(inches) pages price Area
sq. ft. $/sq. ft. Hobonichi A5 Graph 5.8 8.3 288 $23.00 96.3 $0.24 Leuchtturm 1917 A5 5.8 8.3 251 $25.95 83.9 $0.31 Moleskine Hard Cover 5 8.25 192 $20.00 55.0 $0.36 Travelers Notebook 4.3 8.3 128 $11.90 31.7 $0.38  

4 x 6 inch index cards

Product Sheet width
(inches) Sheet height
(inches) sheets price Area
sq. ft. $/sq. ft. Amazon Basics 4x6 Index Cards 4 6 500 $7.30 166.7 $0.04 Oxford 4x6 6 4 1000 $16.49 333.3 $0.05 Stockroom Plus 4x6 (grid) 6 4 300 $13.67 100.0 $0.14 Exacompta 4x6 6 4 100 $15.77 33.3 $0.47 Notsu 4x6 6 4 50 $14.99 16.7 $0.90 Generally, Exacompta cards are the closest in price per square foot to the nicer notebooks while most 4 x 6 inch index cards are comparatively much cheaper (even if you're only writing on one side).
#Social Stream #index cards #notebooks #stationery
A red typewriter for Christmas! And it was hiding the uncommon Sears Futura typeface (aka Smith-Corona Numode No. 61) for its American 88 No. 423 keyboard which also features the Change-A-Type functionality. (Sadly it'll be a slog to try to find matching Numode typeface slugs to match, though some of my math slugs may work well.) This means that it meets my current collector's criteria for an interesting model I don't already have as well as an uncommon typeface. Futura typeface sample of a 1964 Sears Cutlass' I've been on the hunt for one of these for over two years and always lost out in online auctions which generally went in the range of $150-200 in part because of the hot reddish/burgundy paint job with white racing stripes and the fact that Taylor Swift used this same typewriter in her All Too Well: The Short Film. In the last two years I've only seen three of these on ShopGoodwill, so they definitely don't pop up often. There are only 5 others on the Typewriter Database. Many of the online auctions where they went for a few hundred on ShopGoodwill.com had them being relisted by flippers on eBay in the $600-800 range within two weeks with no cleaning or restoration work. I've seen prices for them on eBay for $1,000 and over. For comparison, similar typewriter models in the 5 and 6 series of the period would otherwise be selling in the $25-50 range in this condition. (Ultimately, I'm glad I waited.) 1964 Sears Cutlass sitting at an angle on a sea green metal bar stool in front of a barrister bookcase flanked by card index filing cabinets.Close up angled from the top of a burgundy 1964 Sears Cutlass which has a pair of racing strips on the right side of the hood.1964 Sears Cutlass with the hood open to show the stickers underneath the hood and a portion of the basket. One of the stickers indicates the type as "Futura". This one is in generally exceptional shape and works well out of the box. The shop it came from (or more likely the prior owner) was definitely on the liberal side with their lubrication. One of the two carriage release levers is broken off, which is extremely common on the 6-series models which used plastic which apparently brittled with age. I'll give it a once over to touch up some of the dirtier parts and make some subtle adjustments. I will probably hold off on a major overhaul at the moment because it's in such good condition. The platen is solid and plastic-y feeling. It definitely needs an upgrade on this front. This model seems to bridge the gap between the 5 series Smith-Coronas into the 60s and the 6 series machines like the Galaxie. It's a top-of-the-line model with the keyboard tabulator and the hood hinges up and back like the 5 series rather than sliding forward like the 6 series models. I don't have one, but I would suspect it's closest to the Sterling 5AX typewriter which started in 1963. It's also got a great little paragraph indent button for use at the beginning of new paragraphs. I look forward to seeing how they implemented this feature mechanically. A 1964 Sears Cutlass sits on a stool in front of a Christmas tree. To the side is a wooden bureau with a wide screen television on it featuring the face of Joe Pesci as Harry in Home Alone. It almost appears as if he's squinting at the typewriter.A 1964 Sears Cutlass sits on a stool in front of a Christmas tree. To the side is a wooden bureau with a wide screen television on it featuring the face of Macauley Culkin as Kevin in Home Alone as he claps his hands to his face and screams.A 1964 Sears Cutlass sits on a stool in front of a Christmas tree. To the side is a wooden bureau with a wide screen television on it featuring the face of Kieran Culkin as Fuller in Home Alone. His face is being squished up against a chair and it gives the appearance that he's trying to look at the typewriter in front of the television.
#Acquisition #Social Stream #Typewriters #Change-A-type #Futura typeface #Numode No. 61 typeface #Sears Cutlass #Smith-Corona 6 series #Smith-Corona typewriters #typewriter collection