The Hermes Baby 1967
After many years of searching, I finally found the make and model of my childhood typewriter and am beside myself with joy. Anthropic’s free-tier Claude was of tremendous help and I am much obliged.
Behold, and in cursive!
Source: This old eBay listing.
I spent many hours taking it apart (as much as I could), studying it (as much I could), getting scolded by my Dad, and helping him put it back together. I spent untold hours writing stories and letters on this thing. One of the last things I remember authoring was a Sherlock Holmes short story, a thrilling three-pager, double-sided, written in furious haste after I found out that I’d read the entire canon1.
It was a beautiful machine. I don’t remember what happened to it and wish I still had it. Here are a few more gorgeous glamour shots.
Source: This other, old eBay listing.
Elsewhere
Here’s a Reddit post on the Typewriter, and its entry on the Typewriter Database.
Holmes retired to Oxford to become a professor. Watson had passed but not without issue: He had a daugher named Elizabeth who was at least as smart as Holmes but consulted with the (tenured) professor on a particularly vexing case involving the murder of her bestie. The mystery was fully, succinctly resolved in the final paragraph.↩︎