Electric typewriters

Has anyone any advice on acquiring one of these, and the ink to go with it? I want to produce pamphlets and used to do this years ago with an old manual typewriter. It was an easy job and took little time. I have over the years produced many leaflets on gardening and plants, and sold them at market stalls etc, but technology has made it much harder. Commercial print shops charge too much, and trying to format print jobs with Word, pdf's etc, has just proved impossible. It seems that things which were once easy have been made difficult by computers. Yet when searching for manual or electric typewriters I find they all exceed £100 in price, most are unusable, and the inks are hard to find.

 

For real?

With a leccy typewriter, all you can do is type text, always the same font, always the same size, always the same layout.

There are open source, free apps for designing leaflets, many are easy to use. Print shops can print high volume far more cost effectively than anything you can do at home. You just send them an image or PDF of your leaflet, tell them how many thousand you want, pay a few quid, and then a great box will arrive by courier a few days later.

 

Bit like polaroid cameras, once they stopped making them the film supplies ran out very quickly.

I agree, I could do far better forgeries design work with a typewriter, letrasett catalogue & a photo copier than I can with a computer, everything seems to take so long now.

 

I put my old one in the rubbish skip about 6 months ago, couldn't get the tapes anymore!!

Val

 

Taken me back now, to the first blank dentists appointment card I managed to filch borrow.

Think it was 120 gsm card, a bit tricky as it was double sided & photocopiers only did one side at a time then.

Soon as I cracked it, it was like having a get out of School free card

 

Lol, I was never that clever. I started with a proper manual typewriter as an adolescent, then progressed to a "Smith Corona" and used to buy the ribbons at WH Smith, they were worth their weight in gold! Instead of fraudulent dental appointments, I wrote creepy crime and horror stories which, had anyone read them would no doubt have marked me out as a psychopathic crank

 

Surely you can find a desk top publisher software for making leaflets and flyers ? I used Microsoft Publisher there must be some freeware for this ?

 

http://www.serif.com/desktop-publishing-software/

This is free , Serif is a good name so it may be OK , in desktop publishing you just have text boxes and picture boxes and you drag them around where you want them - simples

 

There is also GIMP, as an open source (completely free) alternative to the mighty Photoshop. Proper designers I know say it's lacking, but they are hardcore Photoshoppers, for casual use I think its absolutely fine.

http://www.gimp.org/

 

When I search for GIMP on Google I get some very peculiar sites

 

I know, the developers of that one certainly had a sense of humour. I reckon they chose they did the old game of choosing the word first and see what it could be an acronym for, rather than the other way round. I think it stands for Graphical Image Manipulation Program.

 

Look in the antique / junk shops ... they are always available. We had an old manual Remington I think it was, would love another, brilliant. You pay for what you get ... no, rather what you want ...

 

Harry, I bet there was a lace-making one amongst them.

I have a portable manual typewriter that is still in working order, the only problem is the ribbon has dried out and I don't know whether they're still available.

 

Surely you could find one somewhere Sheal ... at a price if you really, really want it ...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=ribbons for manual typewriters