Tune Type

I will never not use a computer keyboard if it is available. Since I don't know how to touch-type, the ability to backtrack and correct errors is essential. I pause, O Tolerant Reader, so that you may recover from being overwhelmed with gratitude for the immense edifice of technology that exists so that I may continue my decade-long pretense of being Mike Royko.

However, I love old typewriters. By which I mean the cast-iron manual machines with keys that had to be hit with a sledgehammer and which could double as ammunition for the USS Missouri's 16-inch guns. I am frequently tempted to buy ones I see in antique stores even though they would be only decoration.

So this typewriter, which was designed to type music onto scores, is fascinating to me even though I would have even less use for it than I would for a regular old Underwood Battlestar model. The carriage allowed the paper to be adjusted so the notes would be on the proper staff and in the proper relationship to each other. The first patent was issued in 1936 to Robert H. Keaton, and then a revised keyboard version was patented in 1953. Not many seem to have been produced, and the 1953 model went for $225 -- a little over two grand in today's terms.

So in other words, it's ridiculously expensive and can have no use in any aspect of my life as I neither read nor write music. My desire to own it has thus increased by almost the same amount as the price.