Item #0001 – Royal Speed King Typewriter (1938)

It was a crisp autumn morning (one of the only 30 “feel good” days in south Georgia a year). My husband and I had cash in hand and were ready to find magical treasures on the yards of an upscale neighborhood yard sale. At the time, we had just one kiddo, safe and sound in our dual straight jacket baby wearing device giving me two available hands for the journey of secondhand shopping.

Two things popped into my mind when we saw this typewriter at that yard sale in 2009:

Vintage typewriter…pretty cool.

I must fight the urge to TAP! TAP! TAP! the keys.

So we gave the sweet couple $20, brought it home, got my TAP! TAP! TAP! fix satisfied, put the typewriter back in its case, and, not knowing anything about it aside from it being old, to storage it went.

Sad, I know.

I always wanted to have this hipster artifact displayed, but since buying it, we have moved five times and added two more kids to our crew. Where was I supposed to put it? With three kids, you find yourself hiding a lot of stuff…and this typewriter is kind of heavy.

Without judging my first world problem here, let’s take this beautiful piece back out do some…RESEARCH!

First, we had to find a serial number somewhere. This was a little tricky, but an ebay community forum post directed us to sliding the carriage to the right and…our antique treasure hunt began!

Just popping “Royal typewriter B773046” into a Google search yielded nada. (WHAT?! Google Machine, it’s 2016!) Ebay had nothing. (Apparently, a lot of sellers are lazy because they list these typewriters with just the brand and “vintage”; you’re lucky if you are given a decade.) Preliminary research led me to find out that the typewriters with “B” prefix serial numbers were made between 1938-1941, and all the numbers were assigned chronologically and not randomly.

So, I finally stumbled upon The Typewriter Database and voila! in about 10 minutes, I found out our little yard sale find is a 1938 Royal Speed King with (most likely) its original case!

CASE SOLVED!

Ah, but where do we put it? The kids have been typing silliness on it while this antique chronicle of publishing has been out with Star Wars figures, Legos, numerous very full cups, and the usual glue and scissors as I prepped for this post. (You’re welcome, history.)

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Status: Personal item – not for sale

Random For You:

The O model from the 1940s looks very similar but does not have the TAB key.

When you push the carriage all the way over, push the TAB key to bring it back. (The sound makes me jump every time even though I know it’s coming!)

Many older typewriters, like our Royal, were manufactured without a number 1 key. HOW?! WHY?! WHAT?! Calm down–they just used the lowercase L. (Honestly, I actually had a 4% freak out when I first noticed the missing key.)