Join us on Saturday, December 6th from 11am to 1pm for Letters to Santa at the Kasson Public Library! This FREE event is open to people of all ages!

Check out our Facebook event here: https://www.facebook.com/share/1AsDNjm9Ea/

I’m deeply saddened to hear that the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) organization closed in April after 25 years. While their website is no longer operable, according to Wikipedia, nearly 400 NaNoWriMo novels have been published via traditional publishing houses and over 200 novels have been published by smaller presses or self-published. Notable titles included:

• Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
• The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, published by Doubleday
• Cinder by Marissa Meyer, published by Square Fish
• The Darwin Elevator by Jason M. Hough, published by Del Rey Books

Several factors led to the organizations demise. Here are a couple of articles that talk about the events leading up to the closure:
https://www.the-plottery.com/blog/the-nanowrimo-shutdown-hurts-for-all-the-wrong-reasons
https://roundtable.beloit.edu/2025/04/09/why-nanowrimo-is-shutting-down/

BUT FEAR NOT! Even though there isn’t a national group to cheer you on, you can still write your novel in November.

Contact us today to rent a typewriter for your month of writing!

Monthly Rental Fee: $40* with $35 security deposit

Typewriter rental begins on the penultimate day of the previous month (October 30) and ends on the second day of the following month (December 2).

Weekly rentals are also available.

Weekly Rental Fee: $10* with $35 security deposit

*Rental fees can be applied to the purchase of the typewriter if you fall in love with it.

We are so happy to support poetry writing at the Dodge Center Public Library during the month of April! Stop by and use Luna (1947 Remington Rand Deluxe Model 5) or Grace (1960 Smith Corona Sterling) to write your own masterpiece.

Join us on Saturday, December 9th from 10am to 2pm for Letters to Santa at the Kasson Public Library! This FREE event is open to people of all ages!

Add it to your calendar here: https://fb.me/e/415HFqNaB

Today is my birthday, so naturally I chose to work on this 103-year old treasure while wearing a tiara. Actually I wore the tiara all day: to the library, to a yard sale where I found an awesome vintage atlas, to my besties house to borrow an egg for my birthday brownies, and to the local antique store.

The local antique store owner asked me to fix and clean this machine. It had a broken main spring, no draw band, and was filthy.

Here are some before pictures:

I began by repairing the main spring and replacing the draw band. (Extra-special thanks to Phoenix Typewriter for making a YouTube video of doing this exact repair!!)

With my remaining time, I did a quick cleaning, taking great care to avoid the extra-fragile decals. I ran a ribbon through it long enough to make sure it was working properly and create a type sample. It will need a set of original spool centers but otherwise it’s ready for another hundred years of typing!

Stay tuned for more tales from the repair shop!

Ever wonder why you shouldn’t try to take apart a typewriter? Well, here’s what happened to me yesterday.

I decided that I am going to paint at least one of the LC Smith Super Speeds (because I now have six nearly identical machines) and maybe someone would like to have one that is a fun, bold new color.

I picked Rosalyn because she had the most rust inside and was unlikely to be in perfect working order again. Her decals were also very faded, but her keys are in good shape.

I started disassembly by removing the platen, which was easy because this model has two convenient levers holding it in place.

When taking something apart that you hope to put back together, please, please, please document your progress. I take pictures of a little scrap of paper next to each screw I remove, and store them in a pill box for safe keeping.

And when a big piece comes off, I take a picture of that too.

Usually, I remove the body panels to clean machines, which means that the functionality is still intact. But in this case, I was trying to remove the machine from the base so I could repaint that portion too. And that’s where it went all wrong.

When turning the machine over to see if I could unscrew it from the base, these two mystery parts fell out. I had obviously unscrewed them unknowingly and now I have no idea where to put them back. (Cue the sad music…)

It probably would have been salvageable at this point but I then got carried away and removed three or four more screws, which caused other parts to come off.

So after a few hours of destruction, I decided to stop digging myself into a hole. I put all the panels, parts, and pill boxes into a large tote, with what’s left of the body. When I’m feeling brave, I’ll spend a few more hours trying to put it back together.

LESSON LEARNED: When planning to repaint a typewriter, remove the body panels but don’t try to remove it from the base. Just paper and tape off the base and paint that as best you can. At least then you won’t wreck the functionality of the machine.

Hello typewriter friends. This is our first blog post. We bought a collection of 24 machines in September 2022. This is our adventure of cleaning, repairing, (sometimes repainting), and reselling them. It turns out we don’t have enough storage to post photos on the blog because we are using it to display the collection. But when we get a free moment, we will update you on our repair projects.