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[The Australian Panther]

On Page 2. That is one awesome typewriter. I could just gawk at that thing all day. If Duchamp had seen that he would have exhibited it. It would make a great T-shirt.

Link to the book: Argosy All-Story Weekly v133 01

[crashryan]

Yes, the grand old Oliver typewriter. One of them is sitting in my garage at this very moment. My dad bought it heaven knows when. He mounted it to a piece of a wooden acey-deucy board during his Navy days. When I was a kid we liked to play with it. We didn't use it for serious typing; for that we had the ol' Smith Corona portable.

The Oliver is an interesting machine. Each type bar has three characters rather than two: lower case letter, capital, and a numeral or special character. Because of the extra real estate the machine offers a bunch of specialty characters that most typewriters didn't have. To access them there are two shift levers, a "Cap Shift" and a "Fig Shift."

The thing is a century old and time has not been kind to it. The pieces are all there but the carriage has come loose and the workings are all gummed up. I have half-heartedly tried selling it, but there's not much of a market for such beasts. And a beast it is. It's all iron and weighs slightly less than a Volkswagen. I put it on a wheeled platform so I could move it about the garage without breaking my back.