Oct 10
It’s a Two-fer Tuesday – Early Del Rey Edition
Good Show Sir Comments:
#1. “The book is a joy … I give it two skulls” – Clown Daily News
#2. Eggstremely bad cover art
Published 1975, 1976
It’s a Two-fer Tuesday – Early Del Rey Edition
Good Show Sir Comments:
#1. “The book is a joy … I give it two skulls” – Clown Daily News
#2. Eggstremely bad cover art
Published 1975, 1976
October 10th, 2017 at 10:51 am
1: Thank heavens Stephen King beat his addictions and doesn’t need to see this anymore.
2: “I’m arresting you on suspicion of being drunk in charge of a typewriter.”
October 10th, 2017 at 11:23 am
#2 Alien meets The Naked Lunch. One can’t make a Del Rey without breaking a few eggs.
October 10th, 2017 at 12:06 pm
Today will be a day for eggceptionally bad puns.
October 10th, 2017 at 1:32 pm
@DeadSWBT—I guess the yolks on us.
October 10th, 2017 at 1:37 pm
#2 ‘The eagle…the dove…the turkey…the typewriter.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds4dv4IS0PM
October 10th, 2017 at 3:14 pm
1. I’ve seen some olive-coloured typewriters before, but that one is Oliver!
October 10th, 2017 at 3:15 pm
@BC: the admins started it! Don’t ova-look that.
October 10th, 2017 at 3:48 pm
1. The clown demands writing, now, or you will become a member of his skull collection. Maybe this was the inspiration for “It” . . .
2. I didn’t know that typewriters were egg-laying creatures! The things you learn on the Internet these days . . .
October 10th, 2017 at 3:49 pm
@DSWithBT— Now is the time for albumen to come to the aid of their country, so omletting you know not to eggscalate an already-cracked situation.
October 10th, 2017 at 4:08 pm
Not many people know that Lester Del Rey gave up a promising career as a circus clown to become an SF writer.
(It proved impossible to combine the two jobs, as his clown colleagues considered Science Fiction to be utterly risible and a blot on any self-respecting clown’s reputation.)
October 10th, 2017 at 4:11 pm
Ashes to ashes
Typewriters to monkeys
We know Lester Del Rey
Is a flunky
Of the New York publishing world
Reaching an all-time low
October 10th, 2017 at 5:16 pm
1. It’s a Ballantine Book but not “A Del Rey Book”. I’m sad. No clown can cheer me up.
2. Looks like Lester is hatching a new plot.
October 10th, 2017 at 5:51 pm
#1 “You think I’m some clown, here to amuse you? This is what happened to the last two authors who missed a deadline!”
#2 I will never understand modernist cuisine
October 10th, 2017 at 6:09 pm
@DSwBT: I’m actually surprised and delighted by the relatively accurate and faithful rendering of that Oliver typewriter, down to the brand logo. It’s a little overly rectilinear, some of the logo details were omitted, and I have no idea what the toggle switch on the right by the space bar is all about, but on the whole, I award it a solid B grade.
Olivers are, if you were wondering (and why would you be) marvelously odd to behold, ferociously heavy to move, and kind of dreary to actually type on.
October 10th, 2017 at 7:41 pm
@Lillie A.—Haven’t found out what the toggle was actually used for, but apparently it was real. Maybe that gets it to a B+?
October 10th, 2017 at 8:05 pm
@LA @BC – The toggle is to reverse the direction of the ribbon so you can reuse it once you get to the end of the spool.
— Bibliomancer, typist to the gods
October 10th, 2017 at 8:11 pm
http://johnesimmons.com/Typewriter/Articles/Manualpdf/Oliver_Manual.pdf
— Alexis, helper to the gods
October 10th, 2017 at 8:43 pm
@B. Chiclitz, @Bibliomancer, @Alexis, well done (one might even say, “good sh-” no, there isn’t time)!
My OIiver is a #9, which as we can see, is squatter, curvier, and sans ribbon direction toggle.
I hereby revise my grade to A- (because we’re still talking about a clown and skulls here, for pity’s sake).
Incidentally, putting the ribbon toggle there seems like engineering an awful lot of failure- and breakage-prone distance and angles into the machine, if you ask me.
October 10th, 2017 at 11:18 pm
You know the art’s only moderately bad when the comments are almost all egg puns and technical specs of old typewriters.
Nevertheless I wish to commend @THX for his #1 comment on #1 and @fred for his musical interlude.
And to threaten Admin and Tag Wizard with the incoming batch of submissions I have for them. One of the dealers was heavy on the BAEN!explosion books. Would you prefer them in one email or in a series? There’s about a dozen.
There was a self-published cover I would have loved to submit, but I couldn’t take a photo of it as the author was sitting right there and it would have been Most Awkward. It was maybe an 8.5 on the GSS scale.
October 11th, 2017 at 5:16 am
@GSSxn – GSS Admin has been busy lately at his gig mining Bitcoin at a Chinese server farm in the Taklamakan Desert. Email them to me at “iamtagwizard” at the gmail. Be sure to include a self-addressed stamped working email for replies.
October 11th, 2017 at 7:58 am
@TW: A likely story! He’s either defecting to or enslaved by Chinese GSS!
October 11th, 2017 at 8:29 am
OK, can we now agree on a crackdown on all the cheap egg jokes?
October 11th, 2017 at 11:16 am
@AR: don’t be so shellfish.
October 11th, 2017 at 12:42 pm
All right, I’ll peel off.
October 11th, 2017 at 1:07 pm
@A.R.Y.—It’s not like you to scramble away so quickly; I’ve always thought you were more hard boiled.
October 11th, 2017 at 1:11 pm
@BC – Hey go over easy on him. A.R. is a guy who always looks on the sunny side of life.
October 11th, 2017 at 2:46 pm
@B’Mancer—There you go again, always poaching my good lines.
October 11th, 2017 at 3:01 pm
@BC – I’m be-deviled. I’m not shirr that’s correct!
October 11th, 2017 at 3:37 pm
Omelette it be, gents.
October 11th, 2017 at 4:13 pm
@DeadSWBT—Yolkay, good sir, I will huevos bye-bye to the whole thing.
October 11th, 2017 at 9:41 pm
@DSWBT – Same here. I will ovoid making any more egg puns.
October 12th, 2017 at 12:57 am
Shell we move on then…?
@Lillie Awesome, I have to say your Oliver photo is fascinating. It’s like the clown car of typewriters — it doesn’t seem like full size paper would fit in there but I assume it does? And how does the attached pencil function? Is that just a holder to place your pencil in while typing, or does that arm swing down to write?
October 12th, 2017 at 2:01 pm
@Scott B: It does accept a standard 8 1/2″x11″ sheet of paper, which gives you a sense of just how massive a machine it is. The typebars come down from either side to strike the paper, and each key is capable of typing 3 characters; there are separate ‘SHIFT’ and ‘FIG’ keys that move the carriage toward and away from the typist (instead of up and down like typical typewriters) to allow for lowercase, uppercase, and special characters. The arm that holds the pencil does swing down to put the pencil to the paper, sort of like the tone arm on a record player. I have always assumed that it’s for accounting purposes; by either using the space key or turning the platen while the pencil is against the paper, you can make straight lines that I would think would be useful for creating a ledger.
As a writing machine, it’s only so-so. For one thing, it doesn’t accept standard ribbon spools; you have to cut the ribbon out of a universal spool, attach it to a small wooden spindle with a C-shaped clip, then hand-wind it before putting it on the typewriter, which is always messy procedure. And the key action is about as ponderous as the appearance of the machine would suggest; 25-30 words per minute is a pretty blistering pace on it. And it’s so incredibly heavy that only the most robust desk will hold it. When I actually type, my go-to is a totally unglamourous 1970s Adler portable, or if I’m feeling fancy, a 1960s Smith Corona that types in cursive.