https://old.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1h4b3aw/is_there_a_source_that_exists_that_sells_or/

If you need them for basic functionality, often you can find the manuals of the original manufacturers' models for rebrands (example: the Sears Tower machines which were really just rebrandings of the Smith-Corona 5 series).

Additionally, after the 1930s there really wasn't a lot of new functionality, so almost any manual will help you to get you where you need to go, though there are some small differences in locations of things like carriage locks which can be helpful to know about and whose placement moved around on various machines.

You might also notice that as typewriters were more ubiquitous in the 60s and 70s their manuals got thinner and thinner with less detail. If you do find a specific manual, you're unlikely to find very much in it.

The Davis Brothers have some history on the Commodore line which was related to some of the Sears Chevron line. Polt does have two Commodore manuals which may be close to your machine: https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/tw-manuals.html

On the value of typewriters

As a hobbyist, you'll easily obtain several hundred dollars worth of potential diversion and satisfaction out of your alluring typewriter by cleaning, properly oiling, and adjusting it. Then you're guaranteed to both give and receive thousands of dollars worth of happiness out of it by typing letters to family and friends. With practice, you may reap millions by writing stories, plays, poems, screenplays, and books.

Even if your scintillating typewriter sits on a shelf as home decor only to be viewed as a museum piece, you'll have gotten $50 of value for even that lowly function.

You'll only have wasted your money if your wondorous typewriter sits lonely and forgotten in a dusty attic or dank basement to rust and rot away.

Might you have gotten it for less? Perhaps, but you've saved yourself a huge amount of time and effort in such a hunt for a machine as desirous as this. You have it in front of you for writing right now.

So get to typing at once my friend! For time is money, and every moment your fingers aren't caressing its keys, you are losing value.

Congratulations on your stunning find.

reply to u/readysalted344 at https://old.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1h3jyyt/did_i_waste_my_money/

reply to u/SupItsBuck88 at https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1h0vuek/zettelkasten_vs_commonplace_book/ on Zettelkasten vs Commonplace Book

Don't tell anyone as it's a well-kept secret, but the way most digital practitioners (especially in Obsidian) arrange their "zettelkasten" is generally closer to commonplace book practice than it is to that of Niklas Luhmann's particular practice of zettelkasten. Honestly outside of Luhmann's practice (and those who follow his example more closely) really all zettelkasten into the late 1900s were commonplace books written on index cards rather than into books or notebooks. It's certainly the case that as the practices got older, commonplaces morphed from storehouses of only sententiae to more focused databases and tools for thought, particularly after the works on historical method done by Ernst Bernheim and later by Charles Seignobos & Charles Victor Langlois in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

More modern variations and versions in English can be seen in:

• Barzun, Jacques, and Henry F. Graff. The Modern Researcher. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1957. http://archive.org/details/modernreseracher0000unse.
• Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis. Translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina. 1977. Reprint, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-write-thesis.

See also:

• Differentiating online variations of the Commonplace Book: Digital Gardens, Wikis, Zettlekasten, Waste Books, Florilegia, and Second Brains
• Reframing and simplifying the idea of how to keep a Zettelkasten
• &c: https://boffosocko.com/research/zettelkasten-commonplace-books-and-note-taking-collection/

Generally, the more focused your needs for particular types of information and the higher need of specific outputs may drive one to adopt one form over another. At the end of the day, I would contend that the specific affordances for how each of these forms work for the vast majority of people are exactly the same. This is especially true if one is using digital methods. In practice, I find that a lot of the difference between the practices comes down to where the user wishes to put in their work: either upfront (Luhmann-artig zettelkasten) or down the road in a more laissez faire manner (commonplace book or "traditional" zettelkasten). As a result, I always recommend people experiment a bit and settle on the method(s) which is (are) more motivating and useful for their modes and styles of work. Everyone's needs, inputs, and outputs will differ, and, as a result, so will their methods.

Start of an outline for a longer article on typewriter tools<br /> Suggested by reply to u/Confident_Avocado768 at https://old.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1gy25og/christmas_gift_help/

If they've been doing restoration for a while, try to find out what they already have to avoid duplication. Anyone who's done a few machines is likely to have a lifetime supply of lubricant (it really goes a long way) and is likely to have gone well beyond cotton swabs. The sort of kit you mention would be more appropriate to someone who's recently gotten their first typewriter, not someone who has restored more than a machine or two.

Chances are that you can up the level of their restoration tool bag with a small handful of inexpensive and easy to source options:

• oiler bottles for solvents/cleaning
• spring hook (push)
• spring hook (pull)
• spring hook (captive)
• wiping cloths (cotton)
• nylon, brass, and steel brushes (example; 2 or 3 sets of these are always useful)
• high quality wool mats make a great (soft) surface for working on machines (as well as for typing on). Here's some details and a link to a well-recommended one.

I've documented some of my own versions of these with links at https://boffosocko.com/2024/08/11/adding-to-my-typewriter-toolset/

Slightly more expensive tools that they may not have:

• hollow ground/precision screwdriver set ($35-150)
• Lucas Dul and others often suggest the Chapman typewriter set: https://chapmanmfg.com/products/0623-r-typewriterset
• Others recommend the slightly more ergonomic Weaver multi-bit gunsmith tool kit: https://www.bushnell.com/gunsmithing-tools/driver-and-hammer-sets/multi-bit-tool-kit/WV-849718.html
• Small air compressor ($75-$150) for cleaning out machines

If you really want to shoot the moon and they're into the older vintage machines, you could get them a new pair of keyring pliers: http://mytypewriter.com/hello-qwerty-typewriter-keyring-pliers-kit.aspx

You can also browse Lucas Dul's kit for other ideas via this presentation: https://virtualhermans.com/lucas-dul

Good luck and Merry Christmas! 🪛🛠️🎅🏼🎄

And this is where you see how the condition of a machine comes into play when pricing is being considered. A $700 machine has had several hours of cleaning and potential reconditioning, parts, repairs, oiling, and adjusting done. At $700 and given it's age, I'd also want to ask if they've replaced the platen. Compare this with a dirty, old machine that's going to need those same hours of work, attention, parts, and new rubber, to bring it up to par and it's definitely not going to fetch the same price.

And this is exactly what is wrong with 95% of the market: most buyers and sellers have no idea what they've got, much less the condition it's in or the work that it takes to bring these back to life for another 50-75 years. Thus they price their dirty, and rough machines at the same prices as the repair shops thinking they're going to make a mint. Apparently they're all hoping some sucker who doesn't know better will buy it.

Remember: Dante has a special circle of hell for those who buy typewriters for pennies on the dollar and flip them on eBay without doing any work on them.

reply to u/actualwoey at https://old.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1gqhied/recommendations_for_reliable_new_small_spool_1_58/

You could see if a local repair shop is parting out a machine or has spools that would work for you. iirc the Corona Zephyr, Skyriter, and the later versions of the Corsair all used that smaller spool size, usually described as 1 5/8" or 1 2/3". https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/tw-repair.html Once you've got the correct sized spools, you can wind your Amazon ribbon onto them, but you'll likely have to trim it down to fit. (2" spools usually have 16 yards of ribbon while the 1 5/8" accommodate about 12 yards.)

If you can't come up with original metal spools to respool your 1/2" ribbon onto, you can try https://www.ribbonsunlimited.com/category-s/12779.htm which will sell you both in one go.

Some other ribbon options: https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/tw-faq.html#q1. I've had good luck buying bulk ribbon from both Baco Ribbon and Fine Line.

I've heard some have successfully re-juvenated old ribbon by spraying it (unspooled into a box) with WD-40 or glycerine to re-wet it and then respooling it.

actual posted reply to https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1gpx62s/is_a_zettelkasten_a_largely_unknown_form_of/

Taking too narrow a definition of zettelkasten is antithetical to the combinatorial creativity inherent in one of the zettelkasten's most important affordances.

OP was right on track, perhaps without knowing why... I appreciate that you scratch some of the historical surface, but an apple/tomato analogy is flimsy and the family tree is a lot closer. Too often we're ignoring the history of ars excerpendi, commonplacing, waste books, summas, early encyclopedias, etc. from the broad swath of intellectual history. What we now call a zettelkasten evolved very closely out of all these traditions. It's definitely not something that Luhmann suddenly invented one morning while lounging in the bath.

Stroll back a bit into the history to see what folks like Pliny the Elder, Konrad Gessner, Theodor Zwinger, Laurentius Beyerlink, or even the Brothers Grimm were doing centuries back and you'll realize it's all closer to a wide variety of heirloom apples and a modern Gala or Fuji. They were all broadly using zettelkasten methods in their work. Encyclopedias and dictionaries are more like sons and daughters, or viewed in other ways, maybe even parents to the zettelkasten. Almost everyone using them has different means and methods because their needs and goals are all different.

If you dig a bit you'll find fascinating tidbits like Samuel Hartlib describing early versions of "cut and paste" in 1641: “Zwinger made his excerpta by being using [sic] of old books and tearing whole leaves out of them, otherwise it had beene impossible to have written so much if every thing should have beene written or copied out.” (Talk about the collector's fallacy turned on its head!) As nice as Obsidian's new Web Clipper is this month, it's just another tool in a long line of tools that all do the same thing for much the same reasons.

Ignoring these contributions and their closeness means that you won't be able to take advantage of the various affordances all these methods in your own slip box, whichever form it takes. How will you ever evolve it into the paper machine that students a century hence are copying and mimicking and pontificating about in their generation's version of Reddit? Why couldn't a person's slip box have some flavor of an evolving encyclopedia? Maybe it's closer to Adler's Syntopicon? Maybe something different altogether for their particular use?

Those interested in expanding their practice might try some of the following for more details:

• Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Yale University Press, 2010. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300165395/too-much-know.
• Krajewski, Markus. Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929. Translated by Peter Krapp. History and Foundations of Information Science. MIT Press, 2011. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/paper-machines.
• Wright, Alex. Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age. 1st ed. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

For deeper dives on methods, try: https://www.zotero.org/groups/4676190/tools_for_thought/tags/note%20taking%20manuals/items/F8WSEABT/item-list

cc: u/JasperMcGee u/dasduvish u/Quack_quack_22

reply to u/Hugglebuns at https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1gpx62s/is_a_zettelkasten_a_largely_unknown_form_of/lwtoopw/:

I appreciate that you scratch some of the historical surface, but your apple/tomato analogy is flimsy and the family tree is a lot closer. Too often we're ignoring the history of ars excerpendi, commonplacing, waste books, summas, and early encyclopedias from the broad swath of intellectual history. What we now call a zettelkasten evolved very closely out of all these traditions. It's definitely not something that Luhmann suddenly invented one morning while lounging in the bath.

Stroll back a bit into the history to see what folks like Pliny the Elder, Konrad Gessner, Theodor Zwinger, Laurentius Beyerlink, or even the Brothers Grimm were doing centuries back and you'll realize it's all closer to a wide variety of heirloom apples and a modern Gala or Fuji. They were all broadly using zettelkasten methods in their work. Encyclopedias and dictionaries are more like sons and daughters, or viewed in other ways, maybe even parents to the zettelkasten. Almost everyone using them has different means and methods because their needs and goals are all different.

If you dig a bit you'll find fascinating tidbits like Samuel Hartlib describing early versions of "cut and paste" in 1641: “Zwinger made his excerpta by being using [sic] of old books and tearing whole leaves out of them, otherwise it had beene impossible to have written so much if every thing should have beene written or copied out.” As nice as Obsidian's new Web Clipper is this month, it's just another tool in a long line of tools that all do the same thing for much the same reasons.

Ignoring these contributions and their closeness means that you won't be able to take advantage of the various affordances all these methods presented in your own slip box, whichever form it takes. How will you ever evolve it into the paper machine that students a century hence are copying and mimicking and pontificating about in their version of Reddit? Why couldn't a person's slip box have some flavor of an encyclopedia? Maybe it's closer to Adler's Syntopicon? Maybe something different all together for their particular use?

Try some of the following for more details: <br /> - Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Yale University Press, 2010. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300165395/too-much-know.<br /> - Krajewski, Markus. Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929. Translated by Peter Krapp. History and Foundations of Information Science. MIT Press, 2011. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/paper-machines.<br /> - Wright, Alex. Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age. 1st ed. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

For deeper dives on methods, try: https://www.zotero.org/groups/4676190/tools_for_thought/tags/note%20taking%20manuals/items/F8WSEABT/item-list

cc: u/JasperMcGee u/dasduvish u/Quack_quack_22

iirc, the second oldest synagogue in America is there. It's a gorgeous bit of gothic architecture that's worth a visit even if you're not a member of the tribe. The historic district is where most of the old school charm and entertainment are. Great for just walking around and seeing what you see. If you've not seen it, watch Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil to give you a flavor of some of the city, which is a central character in the movie. I'd recommend restaurants, but all the ones I liked were southern comfort food and incredibly unlikely to be kosher. I wish I had been using FourSquare/Swarm when I went in 2006 or I could give you the entire itinerary and hotels. I stayed in a different bed and breakfast every night in the historic district which wasn't bad since they were all within walking distance of each other. Definitely an experience.

Reply to David Shanske at https://david.shanske.com/2024/10/09/7986/

Reply to @Edmund https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/21907/#Comment_21907

Doto's book is the best and tightest yet for explaining both how to implement a Luhmann-artig zettelkasten as well as why along with the affordances certain elements provide. He does a particularly good job of providing clear and straightforward definitions which have a muddy nature in some of the online spaces, which tends to cause issues for people new to the practice. Sadly, for me, there isn't much new insight due to the amount of experience and research I bring to the enterprise.

I do like that Doto puts at least some emphasis on why one might want to use alphanumerics even in digital spaces, an idea which has broadly been sidelined in most contexts for lack of experience or concrete affordances for why one might do it.

The other area he addresses, which most elide and the balance gloss over at best, is that of the discussion of using the zettelkasten for output. Though he touches on some particular methods and scaffolding, most of it is limited to suggestions based on his own experience rather than a broader set of structures and practices. This is probably the biggest area for potential expansion and examples I'd like to see, especially as I'm reading through Eustace Miles' How to Prepare Essays, Lectures, Articles, Books, Speeches and Letters, with Hints on Writing for the Press (London: Rivingtons, 1905).

I could have had some more material in chapter 3 which has some fascinating, but still evolving work. Ideas like interstitial journaling and some of the related productivity methods are interesting, but Doto only barely scratches the surface on some of these techniques and methods which go beyond the traditional "zettelkasten space", but which certainly fall in his broader framing of "system for writing" promise.

Doto's "triangle of creativity", a discussion of proximal feedback, has close parallels of Adler and Hutchins' idea of "The Great Conversation" (1952), which many are likely to miss.

For those who missed out, Dan Allosso has posted video from the sessions at https://lifelonglearn.substack.com/ Sadly missing, unless you're in the book club, are some generally lively side chat discussions as the primary video discussion was proceeding. The sessions had a breadth of experiences from the new to the old hands as well as from students to teachers and everywhere in between.

reply to @ayjay @annie at https://micro.blog/ayjay/48571448

@ayjay I've long presumed you were digitally commonplacing by means of your websites, so thanks for laying out some of your specific current thoughts on the process.

​@Annie I've been collecting examples of bloggers who are using their personal websites as commonplaces, zettelkasten, and "thought spaces" at https://indieweb.org/commonplace_book. If you're interested, you'll also find examples and details to explore in my own digital commonplace. "Thought spaces" is an interesting entry point.

Doctorow goes through more of his process in which he's saving both his "box of delights" and the refashioning of them into longer pieces in "20 years a blogger". In his case it's (now) all done on Pluralistic and syndicated out from there, in much the same way @dave has done for years.

reply to michaljjwilk at https://hypothes.is/a/rwiI4rJYEe62aaN50r2zzQ to ensure it's properly indexed:

Most following my argument will have likely read The Two Definitions of Zettelkasten which may cover some of your initial question, or at least from my perspective. (Others certainly have different views.)

Some of your questions relate to what Robert Hutchins calls "The Great Conversation" (1952) and efforts over time to create Summa or compilations of all knowledge.

Variations of your remark about Plato can be seen in later Greeks' aphorism that "Everywhere I go in my head, I meet Plato coming back." or more recently in A.N. Whitehead's statement that everything is "a footnote to Plato".

They're looking at what others online are listed for (and not what they've actually sold for) to set their price. They probably have no idea what the typewriter market is like and what the value of their machine really is based on a variety of factors including make/model, condition, servicing, extras, typeface. Unless their machine has an exceptionally rare typeface (usually adds $80-150) or has a brand new rubber (usually adds 30-40 for new feet) or a new platen ($100-180), then in its current condition it's probably not worth more than $50.

Once you get it, you're going to want to have it cleaned, oiled, and adjusted which will run you several hours of labor and materials at a repair shop at $50-75 per hour. It may also need one or two replacement parts.

If talking to them about the price doesn't bring it down significantly then you should pass on it. If you're not up to cleaning, adjusting, oiling a machine yourself, your best bet is to purchase something from a repair shop that already is. You'll have a far better experience. https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/tw-repair.html

For comparison here's some similar machines professionally cleaned, serviced, with new ribbons and a 3 month warranty from $240-350 with some of the price depending on particular model and desirability of color. https://reeselectronics.com/search.php?search_query=smith+corona+silent&x=0&y=0

If you've got money to burn then maybe it's worth $180 to you, but if that's the case then get something in much nicer condition from a repair shop.

reply to u/EmergencyFirst7634 at https://old.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1gcyayc/this_a_good_buy/

Crash course on typewriter maintenance and repair

A list of resources and references for the budding typewriter repair person. There is a lot here that I've compiled and consumed over the last six months, so don't be overwhelmed. Half the battle is figuring out where to find all these things, so if nothing else, this should shave off a month of reading and researching.

Basic Introductory Material

Get a notebook and be ready to take some notes so you'll remember where you found the random information you're bound to pick up over time and are able to occasionally review it.

Work your way through Sarah Everett's excellent Typewriter 101 videos (at least the first five): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJtHauPh529XYHI5QNj5w9PUdi89pOXsS

Read Richard Polt's book which is a great overview to the general space:<br /> Polt, Richard. The Typewriter Revolution: A Typist’s Companion for the 21st Century. 1st ed. Woodstock, VT: Countryman Press, 2015.

Next watch the documentary California Typewriter. Documentary. Gravitas Pictures, 2016. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5966990/. It has some interesting subtle material hiding within it, but it will give you a good idea of where you're headed off to.

Get a machine (or four) you can practice on. Get a flat head screwdriver and maybe a small adjustable wrench. Buy some mineral spirits and a small headed toothbrush and clean out your first machine. Buy some light sewing machine oil and try oiling it. Search YouTube for videos about how to repair anything that may be wrong with it.

Basic restoration advice: https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/tw-restoration.html

On colloquial advice for degreasing, cleaning, and oiling manual typewriters https://boffosocko.com/2024/08/09/on-colloquial-advice-for-degreasing-cleaning-and-oiling-manual-typewriters/

Repair Manuals

Create an account on typewriterdatabase.com which will give you some additional access to catalogs, manuals, and dealer catalogs.

They also have some openly accessible material like:<br /> * https://typewriterdatabase.com/manuals.php

Printed manuals: https://www.lulu.com/search?adult_audience_rating=00&contributor=Ted+Munk&page=1&pageSize=50 PDF manuals: https://sellfy.com/twdb

Ted Munk's website also has a plethora of ephemera that is often useful * https://munk.org/typecast/

Richard Polt's list of service manuals, which also includes some correspondence course typewriter repair classes: https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/tw-manuals.html#servicemanuals

Tools

In rough order of increasing complexity:

• Typewriter Tool Kit from the DOLLAR TREE by Just My Typewriter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-7E4fM6gBw
• Some simple basics and where to get them: https://boffosocko.com/2024/08/11/adding-to-my-typewriter-toolset/
• Typewriter tools of the trade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5bKk93rtxs
• Lucas Dul's Toolset presentation: https://virtualhermans.com/lucas-dul
• Tour of an advanced hobbyist/semi-pro shop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZjf6InMlgU

Tools can be expensive, so start out small with just a few things and expand as you need them. You'll be amazed at what you can accomplish with a single thin bladed flathead screwdriver, an adjustable wrench, a rag, a bottle of Simple Green cleaning solution, and a bottle of isopropyl alcohol.

Videos

Subscribe to and become acquainted with YouTube channels like the following:

• Duane Jensen's Phoenix Typewriter https://www.youtube.com/@phoenixtypewriter2136
• Gerren Balch's HotRod Typewriter Company https://www.youtube.com/@HotRodTypewriter
• Joe Van Cleave https://www.youtube.com/@Joe_VanCleave
• Sarah Everett's Just My Typewriter https://www.youtube.com/@JustMyTypewriter

While watching a variety of videos is great, as you're doing specific repairs search YouTube and you're likely to find full demos of the repairs you're doing yourself.

I've compiled a playlist of videos for repair of an Olympia SM3 which, while specific to the SM3, is a an excellent outline/overview of how to disassemble a portable typewriter, where many of the adjustment points are as well as an outline of the order to do them in.

If you're not a good typist or don't have experience in the area, try out some of the following short films which will also provide some useful historical perspective:

• Basic Typing: Methods. Vol. MN-1512a. United States Navy Training Film, 1943. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztyzGit1dTI.
• Basic Typing: Machine Operation. Vol. MN-1512b. United States Navy Training Film, 1943. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-REJEArnjE.
• Advanced Typing: Shortcuts. Vol. MN-1512c. United States Navy Training Film, 1943. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUJfCfqgsX0.
• Advanced Typing: Duplicating and Manuscript. Vol. MN-1512d. United States Navy Training Film, 1943. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ve5JnTUzvo.
• Maintenance Of Office Machines. Vol. MN-1513. United States Navy Training Film, 1943. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocdxgkxKAKo.

Internships & Apprenticeships

If you have the time and flexibility try arranging an internship or apprenticeship with a local typewriter repair shop. Meet your local repair people even if you can't spend the time on an internship. You'll learn a lot and create relationships with businesses who will more easily swap/supply you with machines they're parting out or access to tools which may otherwise be difficult to source.

• https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/tw-repair.html

Podcasts

• Austin Typewriter Ink https://www.austintypewriterink.com/ati-the-podcast.html
• Charm Type Repair https://charmtypepodcast.podbean.com/

Some useful Bibliography

• Athey, Ralph S. Typewriter Repair Training Course. Tarentum, PA: Typewriter Repair Training, 1957. https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/AtheyTypewriterRepair.pdf.
• Atkinson, Annelise. Typewriter SOS: The DIY Guide to Fixing Common Problems with Typewriters, 2014. https://www.amazon.com/Typewriter-SOS-Fixing-Problems-Typewriters/dp/1520902700/.
• Hausrath, Alfred H., and Eugene L. Dahl. Typewriter Care. Edited by Walter K.M. Slavik. Federal Work Improvement Program United States Civil Service Commission and Government Division, U.S. Treasury Department, 1945. http://archive.org/details/twcare-1945.
• Jones, Clarence LeRoy. The Manual Typewriter Repair Bible. Edited by Theodore Munk. The Typewriter Repair Bible Series, 2017. https://www.lulu.com/shop/ted-munk/the-manual-typewriter-repair-bible/paperback/product-1vgk72jp.html.
• Kasten, R. M. “First Aid for Typewriters.” Popular Science Monthly, May 1941.
• Kravitz, Bryan. Hints for a Happy Typewriter. Bryan Kravitz, 1983. https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/Hints-Happy-TW.pdf.
• Hutchison, Howard. The Typewriter Repair Manual. 1st ed. Blue Ridge Summit, Pa: Tab Books, 1981. https://www.amazon.com/typewriter-repair-manual-Howard-Hutchison/dp/0830600345.
• Munk, Theodore. “The Typewriter Database,” 2012. https://typewriterdatabase.com/.
• Pearce, H. G. Complete Instructions: How to Repair, Rebuild, and Adjust Underwood Typewriters With Handy Reference for Locating Trouble Quickly. Bridgeport, CT: Typewriter Mechanics Publishing Co., 1920. https://johnesimmons.com/Typewriter/Articles/Manualpdf/Underwood_Repair_Manual.pdf.
• Polt, Richard. “The Classic Typewriter Page : All About Typewriters,” 2009. https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/index.html.
• Scadden, David T. Approved Home Study Course in Typewriter Repair and Service. Little Falls, NJ: Typewriter Repair School, 1959. https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/homestudycourse.pdf.

Good luck on your journey!

reply to u/fontinalispluma at https://old.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1gaza5x/learning_typewriter_maintenance_and_repair/

Usually the keys on most typewriters are friction fit on and come off pretty easily. The tougher part is that the slugs are soldered onto the typebars, so you'll need to remove them and swap them with a soldering arm. Even if you have the soldering tools, the more trying part is aligning them properly when putting them back on. Many old school shops have/had custom jigs made for properly aligning slugs when soldering them on.

If you don't have the tools, patience or facility, this is usually something best left to your favorite shop: https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/tw-repair.html

reply to u/fontinalispluma at https://old.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1gb3dwc/change_the_keys_and_type_slugs/

for - reply to - @Michael - annotation for annotation sake

reply to- @Michael - annotation for annotation sake - I think of annotation in the broadest possible sense - as social learning - Annotating is "making a note" and that is effectively noticing how I respond to the idea of another person. - If I am digesting ideas and suddenly a particular idea resonates with an idea in my salience landscape, my attention will be drawn to it. - That is, there is a salient reaction of my own consciousness with the ideas of another consciousness - If I react strongly to an idea, with my own ideas and feelings, then that moment of social learning is worth noting and recording, and hence annotating. - There's absolutely no point in annotating unless it is relevant to you - For me, it is the most powerful way to keep track of the evolution of my own intertwingled individual / collective learning journey - If that becomes a modus operandi for your annotation, then by definition they are all relevant, and not done simply for some external, dogmatic reason of conventionality

Pretty much all manual typewriters use 1/2" (12.7mm) wide ribbon which is most of what you're probably going to find in the marketplace.

The thing that changes from machine to machine is is the potentially proprietary spools and those are usually specific to how the ribbion auto switch is effectuated. Most ribbon comes with small grommets about 10-12 inches from the ends as many machines need this to trigger the switch over. If the plastic spools you purchase don't work with your particular machine you simply spend a minute or two to hand wind it onto your existing original (metal) spools and go from there.

There are lots of videos on YouTube showing how to hand wind ribbon onto a machine. Sarah has a pretty reasonable one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up412FjTEkw

Even Tom Hanks has a ribbon changing video... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBbsNKaVAB0

Incidentally, if your seller specifies them, the Underwoods take Group 9 (GR9) spools. Likely not helpful or illustrative for you, but certainly interesting from a historical perspective, Ted Munk has a catalog of Typewriter Ribbon varieties Offered by Underwood in 1956: https://munk.org/typecast/2020/08/23/typewriter-ribbon-varieties-offered-by-underwood-in-1956/

reply to u/prettiestGOAT at https://old.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1g8z0fm/can_anyone_help_id_this_underwood_typewriter_and/

reply to u/cosmic-magistra at https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1g8diq4/any_books_about_how_someone_used_zettelkasten_to/lt4en6f/

Dude, you're taking too narrow a view at what's going on as each person uses the stored work in their particular set of "cards". Everyone is going to be different based on their particular needs. I've sketched an outline of a fairly broad spectrum of users from Eminem (low organization) to Luhmann (high organization). If putting in the level of work Luhmann did upfront isn't working for you, why follow his exact recipe?

Nabokov is an outlier in the larger group. Does he really need a heavily linked system to write what is linear fiction? Did he even need to index his cards at all? Separate boxes per book worked well enough for him, much the way they do for both Robert Greene and Ryan Halliday who follow some of this pattern as well. Nabokov generally did both research on characters and laid out the outline of his plot. Following this he'd dictate drafts to his wife Vera from the cards and edit from there. In '58 Carl Mydans got photos of some of this process. (See: https://www.thoughtco.com/thmb/tlFRyEZcBnGmBDStKWdpR1cXt0Q=/750x0/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():format(webp)/the-nabakovs-at-work-96793854-468f6ab40e914e45abdd1542fa370872.jpg ) In The Original of Laura, you're seeing the rawest, earliest outline of Nabokov's process. He hasn't gotten to the dictation/typescript level yet. As a result, it's surely not going to make much sense, and assuredly the reason he didn't want it published. Again, you have to either discover or imagine the broader process each person used. If I gave you a similar tranch of Luhmann's cards without any additional context, would they mean much to you? Could you turn them into something concrete without a lot of additional work? Why would you expect the same from these excerpts from Nabokov? This doesn't mean that they don't provide the interested party a window into his work and methods.

Others broadly indexed their ideas as they filed them, a fact which creates the exact links you seem to indicate didn't exist. John Locke's method of indexing was incredibly widespread to the point that at the end of the 18th century, John Bell (1745–1831), an English publisher, mass produced books with the title Bell’s Common-Place Book, Formed generally upon the Principles Recommended and Practised by Mr Locke. The notebooks commonly included 550 pages, of which eight pages included instructions on John Locke's indexing method. There are many extant copies of these including one used by Erasmus Darwin, which was bequeathed to Charles Darwin.

OP certainly posed a fair question (and incidentally very similar to one I posed a few years back), but the answer was broadly sketched, so anyone interested in a full answer is going to need to delve a lot further into these examples to be able to get the full picture. I was providing a list of some additional evidence to show there's a lot more depth out there than is generally being talked about. There are hundreds of one page blog posts about Luhmann's method in the last five plus years, but do any of them really encompass what he was doing? Ahrens wrote a whole book about it, but obviously people are still full of questions about the process. I gave less than a few sentences about a couple dozen well-known people as examples, so your expectations may be a little on the high side. It's pretty easy to find my own digital notes for those who want to skip some of the work, but if you want more, you're going to need to do some of your own reading and research. My response was generally to say that, yes, there's some there, there, but as almost everyone here for the last several years can tell you, it's going to require some work and lots of practice on your part to get somewhere with it. There isn't a royal road, but the peasant's path will assuredly get you where you want to go.

Pierre Anton Grillet, in the preface to Abstract Algebra, 2nd Edition (Springer, 2007) said, "Algebra is like French Pastry: wonderful, but cannot be learned without putting one’s hands to the dough." Zettelkasten methods are much the same. 🗃️🥐

reply to u/ArousedByApostasy at https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1g8diq4/any_books_about_how_someone_used_zettelkasten_to/

If you're suffering from the delusion (and many do) that Zettelkasten is only about Luhmann and his own writing and 4-5 recent books on the topic, you're only lacking creativity and some research skills. Seemingly Luhmann has lots of good PR, particularly since 2013, but this doesn't mitigate the fact that huge swaths of the late 1800s to the late 1900s are chock-a-block full of books produced by these methods. Loads of examples exist under other names prior to that including florilegia, commonplace books, the card system, card indexes, etc.

Your proximal issue is that the scaffolding used to write all these books is generally invisible because authors rarely, if ever, talk about their methods and as a result, they're hard to "see". This doesn't mean that they don't exist.

I've got a list of about 50+ books about the topic of zettelkasten or incredibly closely related methods dating back to 1548 if you want to peruse some: https://www.zotero.org/groups/4676190/tools_for_thought/collections/V9RPUCXJ/tags/note%20taking%20manuals/items/F8WSEABT/item-list

There are a variety of examples of people's note collections that you can see in various media and compare to their published output. I've collected several dozens of examples, many of which you can find here: https://boffosocko.com/research/zettelkasten-commonplace-books-and-note-taking-collection/

Interesting examples to get you started:

• Vladimir Nabokov's estate published copies of his index cards for the novel The Original of Laura which you can purchase and read in its index card format. You can find a copy of his index card diary as Insomniac Dreams from Princeton University Press: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691196909/insomniac-dreams
• S.D. Goitein - researchers on the Cairo Geniza still use his note collection to produce new scholarship; though he had 1/3 the number of note cards compared to Luhmann, his academic writing output was 3 times larger. If you dig around you can find a .pdf copy of his collection of almost 30,000 notes and compare it to his written work.
• There's a digitized collection of W. Ross Ashby's notes (in notebook and index card format) which you can use to cross reference his written books and articles. https://ashby.info/
• Wittgenstein had a well-known note collection which underpinned his works (as well as posthumous works). See: Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Zettel. Edited by Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe and Georg Henrik von Wright. Translated by Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe. Second California Paperback Printing. 1967. Reprint, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2007.
• Roland Barthes had a significant collection from which he both taught and wrote; His notes following his mother's death can be read in the book Morning Diary which were published as index card-based notes.
• The Marbach exhibition in 2013 explored six well-known zettelkasten (including Luhmann's): Gfrereis, Heike, and Ellen Strittmatter. Zettelkästen: Maschinen der Phantasie. 1st edition. Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillerges, 2013. https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Heike-Gfrereis/dp/3937384855/.
• Philosopher John Locke wrote a famous treatise on indexing commonplace books which underlay his own commonplacing and writing work: Locke, John, 1632-1704. A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books. 1685. Reprint, London, 1706. https://archive.org/details/gu_newmethodmaki00lock/mode/2up.
• Historian Jacques Barzun, a professor, dean and later provost at Columbia, not only wrote dozens of scholarly books, articles, and essays out of his own note collection, but also wrote a book about some of the process in a book which has over half a dozen editions: Barzun, Jacques, and Henry F. Graff. The Modern Researcher. New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1957. http://archive.org/details/modernreseracher0000unse. In his private life, he also kept a separate shared zettelkasten documenting the detective fiction which he read and was a fan. From this he produced A Catalogue of Crime: Being a Reader's Guide to the Literature of Mystery, Detection, and Related Genres (with Wendell Hertig Taylor). 1971. Revised edition, Harper & Row, 1989: ISBN 0-06-015796-8.
• Erasmus, Agricola, and Melanchthon all wrote treatises which included a variation of the note taking methods which were widely taught in the late 1500s at universities and other schools.
• The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale has a digitized version of his note collection called the Miscellanies that you can use to cross reference his written works.
• A recent example I've come across but haven't mentioned to others until now is that of Barrett Wendell, a professor at Harvard in the late 1800s, taught composition using a zettelkasten or card system method.
• Director David Lynch used a card index method for writing and directing his movies based on the method taught to him by Frank Daniel, a dean at the American Film Institute.
• Mortimer J. Adler et al. created a massive group zettelkasten of western literature from which they wrote volumes 2 and 3 (aka The Syntopicon) of the Great Books of the Western World. See: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2623/mortimer-j-adlers-syntopicon-a-topically-arranged-collaborative-slipbox
• Before he died, historian Victor Margolin made a YouTube video of how he wrote the massive two volume World History of Design which included a zettelkasten workflow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxyy0THLfuI
• Martin Luther King, Jr. kept a zettelkasten which is still extant and might allow you to reference his notes to his written words.
• The Brothers Grimm used a zettelkasten method (though theirs was slips nailed to a wall) to create The Deutsches Wörterbuch (The German Dictionary that preceeded the Oxford Dictionary). The DWB was begun in 1838 by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm who worked on it through the letter F prior to their deaths. The dictionary project was ended in 1961 after 123 years of work which resulted in 16 volumes. A further 17th source volume was released in 1971.
• Here's an interesting video of Ryan Holliday's method condensed over time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU7efgGEOgk
• Because Halloween is around the corner, I'll even give you a published example of death by zettelkasten described by Nobel Prize winner Anatole France in one of his books: https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/24/death-by-zettelkasten/

If you dig in a bit you can find and see the processes of others like Anne Lamott, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Bob Hope, Michael Ende, Twyla Tharp, Kate Grenville, Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Phyllis Diller, Carl Linnaeus, Beatrice Webb, Isaac Newton, Harold Innis, Joan Rivers, Umberto Eco, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Raymond, Llull, George Carlin, and Eminem who all did variations of this for themselves for a variety of output types.

These barely scratch the surface of even Western intellectual history much less other cultures which have broadly similar methods (including oral cultures). If you do a bit of research into any major intellectual, you're likely to uncover a similar underlying method of work.

While there are some who lionize Luhmann, he didn't invent or even perfect these methods, but is just a drop of water in a vast sea of intellectual history.

And how did I write this short essay response? How do I have all these examples to hand? I had your same question years ago and read and researched my way into an answer. I have both paper and digital zettelkasten from which to query and write. I don't count my individual paper slips of which there are over 15,000 now, but my digital repository is easily over 20,000 (though only 19K+ are public).

I hope you manage to figure out some version of the system for yourself and manage to create something interesting and unique out of it. It's not a fluke and it's not "just a method for writing material about zettelkasten itself".

reply to u/General-Writing1764 at https://old.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1g7a8y5/does_anyone_know_how_do_they_make_new_platens/

I'm guessing that JJ Short is taking the original, removing the rubber. Placing the core into a mold and pouring in new material which hardens. Once done they put it on a lathe and turn it down to the appropriate (original) diameter. Potentially they're sanding the final couple of thousands of an inch for finish.

I'd imagine that if you asked them, they could/would confirm this general process.

The only other shop I've heard doing platen work is Bob at Typewriter Muse, but I haven't gone through his YouTube videos to see what his process looks like. (I'm pretty sure he documents some of it there.)

I've picked up about 20 of the typewriters in my collection from ShopGoodwill.

Only two were impeccably/properly packaged and shipped and one of these was a special machine that I emailed them after purchase with written details and links to videos about how to pack and ship it just to be on the safe side.

Three were dreadful disasters: one was a 40 pound standard that was dropped and the frame bent drastically (it had almost no padding materials inside the box), two were shoved into cases (one upside down and the other right side up, but neither locked into their cases properly nor with their carriage locks engaged so they both bounced around for the entire trip) and put into boxes with almost no packing material. All three refunded portions of the price and/or all the shipping costs.

Most of the remainder (all portables with cases) were packaged with a modicum of care (some packing material in the case and some outside the case with reasonable boxes) and showed up in reasonable condition.

Two of the machines were local enough that I did a local pick up to ensure better care.

Generally, it's a crapshoot, but this is also the reason why I don't spend more than $20 on any machine I get from them (except one reasonably rare German typewriter in the US and a Royal with a Vogue typeface that still came out at less than $100 because only one other person noticed its rarity in the photos).

Only one of the machines was clean as a whistle and ready to type on day one. All the remainder required serious cleanings at a minimum. Two were missing internal pieces, two had repairable drawband issues, one had dramatically bad escapement issues, and one had a destroyed mainspring that I need to replace.

Only one of the group had a platen with any life left in it. One had a completely unusable platen, but it was also relatively obvious in the photos. Most of the rest were hard, but usable.

I live in the US and typically only bid on machines that are in the top 20% of their class cosmetically.

I'll echo the thought of others that I wouldn't have a machine from them shipped directly to someone as a present unless I knew they were a tinkerer and had the mechanical ability, the facilities/tools, and desire to clean and service their own machine. Otherwise, I'd do that myself and ship it to them directly.

reply to u/Tico_Typer at https://old.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1g28v6z/i_am_curious_about_the_shopping_goodwill_websites/

Often after you resurface a platen, it slightly changes the configuration of the platen with respect to the typeface. As a result one usually may need to do three adjustments in a specific order to get things to align properly again. These can definitely be done at home with some patience.

Usually the order for tweaking is: * Ring and Cylinder adjustment (distance of platen from typeface; the type shouldn't touch the platen or you'll find you're imprinting on your paper, making holes in the paper and/or ribbon, which isn't good). Sometimes using a simple backing sheet can remedy a bit of this distance problem, especially on platens which have hardened or shrunk slightly over time. * On Feet adjustment (vertical adjustment so that letters are bright and clear and neither top or bottom of characters are too light/faint) Repair shops will often type /// or a variety of characters with longer ascenders/descenders to make sure that the type is clear from top to bottom. * Motion adjustment (the lower and upper case letters are at the same level with respect to each other) The best way to test this is to type a center character like HHHhhhHHH to see if they line up on the bottom (the last three Hs are usually done with the Shift Lock on to make sure that's properly set).

You can search YouTube videos for your model (or related models) and these words which may uncover someone doing a similar repair, so you have a better idea of what you're doing and where to make the adjustments.

Here's Joe Van Cleave describing some of it in one of his early videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0AozF2Jfo0

The general principles for most typewriters are roughly the same with slight variations depending on whether your machine is a segment shift or a carriage shift. You should roughly be able to puzzle out which screws to adjust on your particular model to get the general outcome you want.

Related blogposts: * https://munk.org/typecast/2022/01/23/adjusting-ring-cylinder-on-a-brother-jp-1/<br /> * https://munk.org/typecast/2013/07/30/typewriter-repair-101-adjusting-vertical-typeface-alignment-segmentbasket-shift-typewriters/

You might find a related repair manual for your machine with more detail and diagrams for these adjustments via the Typewriter Database or on Richard Polt's typewriter site.

For those not mechanically inclined you may be better off taking it onto a repair shop for a quick adjustment. https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/tw-repair.html 

Reply to u/Acethease at https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1d76ygx/got_a_as_a_gift_corona_3_recentlyish_and_i_need/

reply to Signynt at https://discord.com/channels/686053708261228577/979886299785863178/1293207926013427733

Does Carl Linnaeus' incarnation work? Isabelle Charmantier and Staffan Müller-Wille have a number of journal articles on his "invention" and use of index cards in his research and writing work. If you dig around you'll find references to Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz' use of index cards and the Arca Studiorum (Krajewski, MIT, 2011); Computer scientist Gerald Weinberg wrote Gerald M. Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method. New York, N.Y: Dorset House, 2005, which might appeal; you'll also find examples in physicist Mario Bunge, and, although he had a mixed practice of notebooks and index cards, W. Ross Ashby's collection of notes on complexity can be found at https://ashby.info/. Hundreds of other scientists and mathematicians had practices, though theirs typically fall under the heading of commonplace books (Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin, et al.) or as in the case of Isaac Newton and others the heading of "waste books". While looking at others' examples or reading about it may feel like it's going to get you somewhere (better?), having some blind faith and proceeding with your own practice is really the better way to go. Others have certainly done it. Generally it's far rarer for mathematicians, engineers, or scientists to write about their note making/methods so you're unlikely to find direct treatises the way you would for historians, sociologists, anthropologists, humanists, etc.

syndication link: https://discord.com/channels/686053708261228577/979886299785863178/1293663556197417082

Not that it couldn't be done, but I'll suggest that following the structure/order of a Luhmann-artig zettelkasten may be a bit more limiting or difficult for creating fiction.

There's a rich history of researching, outlining, and writing with card indexes as part of the creative process. Perhaps looking briefly at some examples particularly focusing on fiction may be helpful? Once you've done this, you can pick and choose the portions and affordances that work best for your preferred way of thinking and working.

Some quick examples:

• Vladimir Nabokov https://www.openculture.com/2014/02/the-notecards-on-which-vladimir-nabokov-wrote-lolita.html
• David Lynch process via Frank Daniel: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%27David+Lynch%27
• Variations of this method include:
  • Dustin Lance Black https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrvawtrRxsw
  • Ben Rowland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwKjuBvNi40
• Randy Ingermanson. “The Snowflake Method For Designing A Novel.” Advanced Fiction Writing, circa 2013. https://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/snowflake-method/

Perhaps querying my digital zettelkasten may be helpful for you? Start with: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%27card+index+for+writing%27

Ultimately, you can only spend so much time going down the rabbit hole of how you ought to do this work and taking suggestions or reading about how others have done it. The more difficult but more fruitful portion is to pick a method which seems like it will work for you and experiment with it by actually using or evolving it for yourself. How you start may not necessarily be how you end, but you won't know what's best for you if you don't start. Practice, practice, practice will get you much farther faster.

reply to u/Atreides_Lion at https://reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1ft4r3z/a_very_important_matter_for_me/

Yes, and books also tell us everything you want to know.

Yes, and sometimes I think we could make up some stories to let climax more impressive.

Yes, but there’s a little bit of different with writing and a baby. For example, you can rewrite the essay but you can’t rebirth a baby.

Yes, and I think the most difficult part is to start doing a thing.

Since you're asking in r/typewriters, here's a list of what some well known playwrights, screenwriters, and directors used and would likely have recommended for writing tools without harsh screens. Personally I'm in Tom Hank's camp and would recommend a Smith-Corona Clipper.

• Edward Albee: Remington 17 or KMC
• Ray Bradbury: Underwood (no. 5?), 1947 Royal KMM #3756210, IBM Selectric, IBM Wheelwriter, Silver-Seiko ultraportable (likely branded as Royal)
• Bertolt Brecht: Erika
• Mikhail Bulgakov: Olympia 8 (photo from Bulgakov museum)
• Paddy Chayefsky (playwright, May 1954): Underwood Standard Model 6, ca. 1946; Royal HH; Olympia SG3
• William Goldman: Olympia SM9
• Matt Groening: Hermes Rocket
• Alfred Hitchcock: '30s black Underwood Champion portable
• Sidney Howard (screenwriter, Gone With the Wind): Remington Noiseless Portable #N49669
• John Hughes (director): Olympia SM3
• Buster Keaton: Blickensderfer no. 5
• Stanley Kubrick: Adler Tippa S
• Ring Lardner: L. C. Smith
• Ernest Lehman: Royal Electress
• David Mamet: Smith-Corona portable, Olympia SM4, Olympia SM9, IBM Selectric
• Arthur Miller bought a used Smith-Corona portable in the late '30s (for one anonymous contest, he submitted a play that he said was "by Corona."). Later he used a '50s Smith-Corona Silent Super and a Royal KMG (1955 photo, another photo). He wrote his later plays on an IBM desktop computer. (Arthur Miller: His Life and Work, by Martin Gottfried, p. 26, 112, and 381.)
• F. W. Murnau: Remington portable no. 2 (1931 photo)
• Clifford Odets (1962): Royal Quiet DeLuxe, ca. 1957
• Rod Serling: Royal KMG (photo 1, photo 2)
• Neil Simon: Olympia SM9
• Steven Spielberg: Smith-Corona Coronamatic 2200 (photo 1, photo 2)
• James Thurber: Underwood no. 5
• John Waters: ca. 1950 Underwood (1961 photo), IBM A or B
• Orson Welles: 1926 woodgrain Underwood portable #4B73700 (Welles typing on it), ’30s Underwood Noiseless Portable, Smith-Corona (?)
• Tennessee Williams: Remington portable no. 2, 1936 Corona Junior #1F9874J (formerly in Steve Soboroff's collection), mid-1940s Corona Sterling, Royal KMM, Hermes Baby (gift from Margo Jones, 1947, according to John Lahr, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, Bloomsbury, 2014), Olivetti Studio 44 (picture 1, picture 2, picture 3, picture 4 1955), Remington portable #5 flat top, Remington Standard M, Olympia SM8. (This man loved to have himself photographed with his writing machines!)

If you need some other recommendations from novelists and others, you could try: https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/typers.html

If you like Scrivener, but want to get away from screens, you can look back to Frank Daniels' method with index cards which he taught to thousands of screenwriters including David Lynch. Variations can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrvawtrRxsw and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwKjuBvNi40. Vladimir Nabokov used a very similar method for his novels which is fairly well documented: https://www.openculture.com/2014/02/the-notecards-on-which-vladimir-nabokov-wrote-lolita.html

The additional "hidden context" is that the rachet/gear seen in many of these diagrams is usually attached to a radial spring (or some other device) which, as it is wound, stores energy which is later used by the bigger device in which the rachet and pawl are encased. Examples include the stem of watches, which when wound, store energy which the watch later uses to run as it counts the seconds. Another example is the mainspring of a typewriter which is attached to a ratchet/pawl set up; when you push the carriage to the right, the spring gets wound up and stores energy which is slowly expended by the escapement a space or a letter at a time as you type. In the zettelkasten analogy, the box and numbered cards placed in it act as the pawl (the wedge that prevents backward movement), as you add more and more information, you're storing/building up "potential energy" in small bits. This "stored energy" can be spent at a later time by allowing you to more easily write an article, paper, book, etc. In some sense, the zettelkasten (as most tools do) allows you a "mechanical advantage" in the writing process over trying to remember everything you've ever read and then relying on your ability to spit it all back out in a well-ordered manner.

reply to Muhammed Ali at https://discord.com/channels/992400632390615070/992400632776507447/1286577013439594497

continuation of https://hypothes.is/a/GTPIPnYiEe-GTUu4YcdeAQ

Zettelkasten is a method for creating "slow productivity" against a sea of information overload

Some of the framing goes back to using the card index as a means of overcoming the eternal problem of "information overload" [see A. Blair, Yale University Press, 2010]. I ran into an example the other day in David Blight's DeVane Lectures at Yale in which he simultaneously shrugged at the problem while talking about (perhaps unknown to him) the actual remedy: https://boffosocko.com/2024/09/16/paul-conkins-zettelkasten-advice/

It's also seen in Luhmann claiming he only worked on things he found easy/fun. The secret is that while you're doing this, your zettelkasten is functioning as a pawl against the ratchet of ideas so that as you proceed, you don't lose your place in your train of thought (folgezettel) even if it's months since you thought of something last. This allows you to always be building something of interest to you even (especially) if the pace is slow and you don't know where you're going as you proceed. It's definitely a form of advanced productivity, but not in the sort of "give-me-results-right-now" way that most have come to expect in a post-Industrial Revolution world. This distinction is what is usually lost on those coming from a productivity first perspective and causes friction because it's not the sort of productivity they've come to expect.

In reply to writingslowly and Bob Doto at https://discord.com/channels/992400632390615070/992400632776507447/1285175583877103749<br /> Conversation/context not for direct attribution

reply to u/atomicnotes at https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1fa0240/early_1900s_3_x_5_inch_card_index_filing_cabinet/

This is an excellent question. I strongly suspect you won't find a booklet or book from Macey after 1906 that does this, though there may have been something before that.

You'll notice that on page 9, the 1906 Macy Catalog takes what I consider to be a pot shot at their Shaw-Walker competition in the section "Not a kindergarten". Shaw-Walker was selling not just furniture, but a more specific system, as well as a magazine. Since there's something to be learned for current knowledge managers and zettel-casters in the historical experience of these companies and the systems and methods they were selling, I'll quote that section here (substitute references to enterprise and business for yourself):

Not a Kindergarten

Every successful enterprise knows its own requirements best, and develops the best system for its own purpose. We manufacture business machinery. Our appliances and supplies are boiled down to a few parts, and simple forms, and will accommodate any system in any business. The office boy can understand and use them. If we undertook to teach the whole world how to run its business, we would have to saddle the cost on those who buy for what we tried to teach those who do not.

System in business is desirable, but no system can make a business successful, where the management is deficient. So called ‘Systems’ often result in useless expense and disappointment. We retain what experience proves useful and practical; so far as possible, eliminating all complicated and useless features. This explains how we can employ the best workmanship and material, combined with pleasing designs, and sell our goods with profit at lower prices than the inferior articles offered by others.

There may have been some booklets at some point, but I've not run across them for any of the major manufacturers of the time. (I've only loosely searched this area.) Some of the general principles were covered in various articles in System Magazine which was published by Shaw-Walker, a filing cabinet manufacturer, in the early century. System Magazine was sold to McGraw-Hill which renamed it Business Week, but it is now better known as Bloomberg Business Week. In the December 1906 issue of System, W. K. Kellogg, the President of the Toasted Corn Flake Company, is quoted touting the invaluable nature of the Shaw-Walker filing system at a time when his company was using 640 drawers of their system.

To some extent the smaller discrete "system" was really a part of a broader range of information and knowledge of business and competition. This can be seen in the fact that System Magazine still exists, just under an alternate name, along with a much broader area of business schools and business systems. We've just "forgotten" (or take for granted) the art of the smaller systems and processes which seemed new in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Other companies had "systems" they sold or taught, much like Tiago Forte teaches his "Second Brain" method or Nick Milo teaches "Linking Your Thinking". However, most of them were really in the business of selling goods: furniture, filing cabinets, desks, index cards, card dividers, etc. and this was where the real money was to be found at the time.

A similar example in the space is the Memindex System booklet that came with their box and index cards. The broad principles of the system can be described in a few paragraphs so that the average person can read it and modify it to their particular needs or use case. The company never felt the need to write an entire book along the lines of David Allen's Getting Things Done or Ryder Carroll's Bullet Journal Method. Allen and Carroll are selling systems by way of books or classes. Admittedly, Carroll does have custom printed notebooks for using his methods, but I suspect these are a tiny fraction of the overall notebook sales for those who use his method.

Here's evidence of a correspondence course from the Library Bureau some time after 1927, which was when they'd been purchased by Remington Rand: https://www.ebay.com/itm/335534180049 . Library Bureau had an easier time as their system was standardized for libraries, though they did have efforts to cater to business concerns the way Shaw-Walker, The Macey Company, Globe-Wernicke and others certainly did.

I think the best examples in broader book form from that time period are Kaiser's two books which still stand up pretty well today for those creating knowledge management systems, zettelkasten, commonplace books, getting things done/productivity systems, second brains, etc.

Kaiser, J. Card System at the Office. The Card System Series 1. London: Vacher and Sons, 1908. http://archive.org/details/cardsystematoffi00kaisrich.

———. Systematic Indexing. The Card System Series 2. London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., 1911. http://archive.org/details/systematicindexi00kaisuoft.

https://new.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1ezpurn/typing_endurance/

Definitely posture. Arms level with the floor.

It also helps to have some additional leverage over your keyboard. Raise your chair if necessary. Most modern desktops are 29-30 inches off the floor while older typing desks and writing drawers were designed to be closer to 27 inches off the floor. This helps a lot for endurance.

Did it work prior to replacing the ribbon? If yes, then perhaps remove the ribbon and replace again. See page 19 of the manual here: https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/RoyalKMM.pdf

YouTube also has tutorials for how to thread these. (Also search for the No. 10, KH, KHM, HH, Empress, FP, etc. which also used the same general ribbon spools and set up if you can't find a KHM.) I can*t tell 100% from the photo, but the ribbon looks like it's spooling on clockwise on the right (and vice-versa for the left) and you want it the other way.

Is it not advancing regardless of which direction you have the ribbon going? Usually just one side is not working. You can use this fact to compare the typewriter bilaterally. Watch what's going on with the side that does work and compare it with the side the doesn't. What's wrong on the non-working side?

Often times the spindle on one or both sides is frozen up with dried up grease, oil, dirt, or dust. A small quirt of mineral spirits or lacquer thinner (or other degreaser) will free it up. (Here we use the mantra, a typewriter isn't really "broken" unless it's clean and broken.) See: https://boffosocko.com/2024/08/09/on-colloquial-advice-for-degreasing-cleaning-and-oiling-manual-typewriters/

reply to u/UltimateAiden98 at https://old.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1f0nzt8/my_royal_kmm_ribbon_is_t_advancing_what_should_i/

The daily cards and journal entries are obviously indexed by chronological date and then within tabbed sections by month and year.

The rest of the other cards with notes are given individual (decimal) numbers and and then are put into numerical order. These numbered cards are then indexed by putting related subject/topic/category words from them onto a separate index card which cross references either a dated card or the numbered card to which it corresponds. These index cards with topical words/phrases are then filed alphabetically into a tabbed alphabetical section (A-Z).

As an example with the card in this post, if I wanted to remember all the books I buy from Octavia's Bookshelf, then I'd create a card titled "Octavia's Bookshelf" and list the title along with the date 2024-08-13 and file it alphabetically within the "O" tab section of the index. Obviously this might be more useful if I had more extensive notes about the book or its purchase on the 2024-08-13 card. I did create a short journal card entry about the bookstore on 08-13 because it was the first time I visited the bookstore in it's new location and decor, so there are some scant notes about my impressions of that which are cross-indexed to that Octavia's Bookshelf card. Thus my Octavia's Bookshelf card has an entry with "The Book Title, 2024-08-13 (J)(R)" where the '(J)' indicates there's a separate journal entry for that day and the '(R)' indicates there's also a receipt filed next to that day's card.

I also created an "Author Card" with the author of the book's name, the title, publication date, etc. I included the purchase date and the reason why I was interested in the book. I'll use that same card to write notes on that particular book as I read it. These author cards are filed in a separate A-Z tabbed 'Bibliography' section for easily finding them as well. (I suppose I could just put them into the primary A-Z index, but I prefer having all the authors/books (I have thousands) in the same section.)

I also have a rolodex section of people filed alphabetically, so I can easily look up Steve and Sonia separately and see what I might have gotten them on prior birthdays as well as notes about potential future gift ideas. I had tickler cards with their names on them filed in early August and now that they're in my to do list, I've moved those cards to August 2025, ready for next year's reminder. Compared to a typical Future Log I don't do nearly as much writing and rewriting when migrating. I just migrate a card forward until it's done or I don't need it anymore.

If you've used a library card index before, the general idea is roughly the same, you're just cross-indexing more than books by title, author and subject. You can index by day, idea, project, or any other thing you like. My card index cabinet is really just a large personal database made out of paper and metal.

The secret isn't to index everything—just the things you either want to remember or know you'll want to look up later and use/re-use.

On many of the older 40s/50s typewriters, the same key will work on almost everything. If you search online there are a few people who have posted a 3D printable key that you can download and may be able to print at your local library. I'm guessing based on the limited photo, yours is an early 40s Smith-Corona.

I've tried a few local locksmiths who don't seem to carry these keys anymore.

I've got a late 40s Smith-Corona latch that occasionally self-locks and for ages I used a bent paperclip in the rough shape of the old keys to easily pick the lock with just 10 seconds of jiggling around inside. Roughly a 2 mm straight section of paperclip with a 1mm "T" section that sticks out (even just on one side) about 4-5mm and then continues straight ought to work if you're in a jam.

The level of security these keys/locks provide is minimal at best.

If you go the online route to buy a key, they can be quite expensive, so if you're a collector, just wait for a machine that comes with one and you'll have another typewriter for "free" in the deal.

reply to u/Succu6us66 at https://old.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1eqk6rd/typewriter_lock/

reply to u/IndividualCoast9039 at https://new.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1endi5d/screenwriter_here/

There's really no such thing as a screenplay specific machine, though for ease of use, you'll surely want one with a tabulator (tabs). If you want to hew toward the standard screenplay formatting look for pica machines (10 characters per inch) rather than elite machines (11-12 characters per inch).

SoCal is lousy with lots of great machines. If you want something that's going to work "out of the box" you'll pay a few bones more, but unless you're a tinkerer, it's definitely worth it.

I'd recommend checking out the following shops/repair joints near LA that specialize in machines for writers. Most will let you try out the touch and feel of a few in person to figure out what will work best for you. Putting your hands on actual machines will help you know which one you'll want for yourself.

• Helmut Schulze, Rees Electronics / Star Typewriters, 2140 Westwood Blvd. #224, Los Angeles, CA 90025. 310-475-0859 or 877-219-1450. Fax: 310-475-0850. E-mail star@startypewriters.com. Schulze has many years of experience and has restored typewriters of famous writers for collector Steve Soboroff.
• Aaron Therol @ Typewriter Connection, DTLA, https://www.typewriterconnection.com/
• Bob Marshall, Typewriter Muse, Riverside, CA. Service, restoration, and sales. Website: typewritermuse.com.
• Rubin Flores at U.S. Office Machine Co. over in Highland Park 323-256-2111 (better at repairs, restoration; I don't think he keeps stock)

​

I'd generally endorse most of the advice on models you'll find in these sources which are geared specifically toward writers, all three sources have lots experience and reasonable bona fides to make such recommendations.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9dXflhDed0
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKMt-aCHZZk
• https://typewriterreview.com/2020/01/10/top-10-writerly-typewriters/

All machines are slightly different, so pick the one that speaks to you and your methods of working.

If it helps to know what typewriters actual (screen) writers have used in the past, check out https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/typers.html

Beyond this Just My Typewriter has a few short videos that'll give you a crash course on Typewriter 101: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJtHauPh529XYHI5QNj5w9PUdi89pOXsS

​

Reply to Kathleen Spracklen's video

Alternate systems for helping to thin out typewriter collections:

Designer William Morris' weighing system:

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

I once had a collector friend who loved standard typewriters, so his weighing system was as follows:<br /> - If it weighs over 25 pounds, keep it<br /> - If it weighs less than 25 pounds, sell it off

And naturally, minimalist Marie Kondo's system:<br /> - Does it spark joy?

Joe Van Cleave also had another video for creating a minimal collection based on categories of typewriter which may also be useful for some: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ej6kd1FsnE

Reply to LibraryLin

Big Blue Gets Renewed by [[Joe Van Cleave]]

I like the aftermarket upgrades you've made.

The Cheers reference reminds me that I've been trying to pair drinks with machines as I write. I had a blue cocktail on a cruise to Alaska last year that used glacier ice (which is blue), but since that's not easy to source in ABQ, maybe try an "Electric Iced Tea" which is a variation on the Long Island iced tea but which swaps blue curaçao for the triple sec and a clear lemon-lime based soda for the cola.

reply to u/IamOkei at https://new.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1eg8jhe/how_different_is_bob_dotos_a_system_for_writing/?%24deep_link=true&correlation_id=f06f9a20-472b-4d1d-9820-65a28e4efb04&post_fullname=t3_1eg8jhe&post_index=0&ref=email_digest&ref_campaign=email_digest&ref_source=email&utm_content=post_title&%243p=e_as&utm_medium=Email%20Amazon%20SES

Doto's book is far more focused, well-written, and actually edited. Scheper's less well written and in need of heavy editing. Save yourself the extra 400 pages and spend that time practicing the craft instead.

If you were starting from scratch without any knowledge of the area, I would highly recommend Doto's work, possibly mention Ahrens in passing, and not suffer anyone to mention Scheper's book. If you're an academic, I would recommend Umberto Eco or perhaps if a historian, one of the many books on historical method like Barzun, Gottschalk, or Goutor.

As background, both Scheper and Doto sent me pre-publication drafts of their work-in-progress to read. I've also read the majority of other books, papers, articles, and works in the space over the past 150+ years including nearly 100% of the references footnoted the two texts referenced. See also: https://boffosocko.com/research/zettelkasten-commonplace-books-and-note-taking-collection/

reply to u/DinoPup87 at https://new.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1efzeor/adler_tippa_id/

It's a common misconception that the database lists all serial numbers.

You'll need to identify the make (and preferably the model) to search the database. Then you'll want to look at the serial numbers which your serial number appears between to be able to identify the year (or month if the data is granular enough) your machine was made. Reading the notes at the header of each page will give you details for how best to read and interpret the charts for each manufacturer. Notes and footnotes will provide you with additional details when available.

You can then compare your machine against others which individuals have photographed and uploaded to the database. Feel free to add your typewriter as an example by making an account of your own. Doing this is sure to help researches and other enthusiasts in the future. Don't forget photos of your manual, tools which came with your machine, your case, and original dated purchase receipts if you have them.

Chances are that you've got your original metal spools, and if so, definitely keep them. You can make a quick measurement, but I'm guessing you're going to want 1/2" or 13mm wide universal ribbon.

You can buy this in many places and in various color combinations (if you have a bichrome machine—look for a black/white/red switch which can usually be found on the front of your machine) for just a few dollars for 16 yards or about 14 meters to fill up a 2 inch diameter spool. Often it will come on cheap universal plastic spools which you can use to wind onto your own original metal spools if necessary.

Some machines often make use of proprietary mechanisms or geometry on their spools to effectuate the auto-reverse mechanism of the machine (though you'd have to check on your particular unit). Many machines after the 40s used small grommets on the ribbon itself to trigger the auto-reverse mechanism. If yours doesn't, you can trim these off with scissors as you spool the ribbon onto your machine if you're worried they'll get in the way.

Some smaller ultra-portables can and often do use smaller diameter spools which only fit 12 yards of ribbon, but you can always cut your ribbon down from bigger spools if necessary.

A few good sources of ribbon can be found at https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/tw-faq.html#q1.

If you don't have the original spools and the cheap plastic universal ones don't work on yours, you can find replacements via https://www.ribbonsunlimited.com/ or by calling around to repair shops which may have extras https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/tw-manuals.html

Incidentally, having your typewriter make and model as well as serial number can be helpful. You can often identify the model via https://typewriterdatabase.com/ if it's not on your typewriter directly. I'm guessing from the 2Y5852 that you've got a Good Companion No. 2 circa 1942, but you can track that down by looking at the database and individual galleries with photos.

If you don't have one already, you might find a manual for your machine (or one very similar to it) at https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/tw-manuals.html

reply to u/Fancy_Temporary_5902 at https://new.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1eg176q/im_trying_to_id_a_typewriter_of_my_dads_as_it/

I've used the small typewriter tables with drop sides and wheels before. I appreciate their small size and ability to move around. I'm actively looking for a new one at the moment. (I sold the original 20 years ago when downsizing during a move between apartments and prior to restarting my collection.)

I currently use a dual pedestal desk and and usually have my typewriters on the pull out writing drawers. This drops the typewriter an inch and makes one's typing position (27" off the floor) much more comfortable than having the typewriter higher up 29-31" for most modern desks and tables.

I have tested a pedestal desk with a spring-loaded typewriter platform that moves up and out of the desk after opening a door. This was an excellent experience, and if I find another, I will surely purchase it. The tough part is that they take up a lot of space as the internal desk space is given entirely to hiding the typewriter when not in use. They're definitely great if you have a heavy 30+ pound standard typewriter that's not so mobile.

The third type are wooden desks with two desk height levels. One for traditional desk work and a second lower one as the typewriter platform. The lower height is obviously much more ergonomic for typing for long periods. On most of these desks, the inset typewriter space is most often given completely over for the typewriter to be there permanently. If your plan is to only have a typewriter, then jump, but their use is more difficult if you're sharing that space with a computer and need to move the two back and forth regularly. Additionally, the wooden desks have either permanent cut outs or can be flipped over to hide the cutout and make the entire desk space flush when the typewriter isn't in use. You'll have to use your own gut to decide which of these two might be best for you. I recently saw a reasonable version of a convertible wooden desk at https://abqtypers.substack.com/p/convertible-typewriter-desk

I find these pop up pretty regularly in the $200-500 range. Often owners don't want them because they don't use typewriters, and they don't move easily, so they're likely to come down in price pretty quickly/easily.

I've felt guilty in the past that often we don't directly discuss the book and what it says, but since we've each individually had our own "conversations with the author", our sessions then become a method of taking those extant (hidden discussions) and bringing them to a group to have not only discussions with each other, but extend those discussions with other books we've read and connecting them with reading, watching, listening we've done with other sources. In some sense, we're creating connections (conversations) with all the other things rather than necessarily discussing the exact thing at hand. This is a different form of work than the work of the initial discussion we individually have with the author (in this case Adrian Johns) and this is something many book groups don't go past.

I don't feel so guilty about it anymore...

reply to u/Deep-Seaworthiness48 at https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1e5gh4p/two_5_keys_sc_poweriter/

Things like that happened on alternate language/region typewriters. I've got a Dutch keyboard layout that repeats a % symbol twice.

It's likely that the pound symbol was needed/required so they pulled one from a pre-existing typeslug and key cap on a keyboard where the £/5 key was common and replaced the 1/! which in the era was widely known could be done by alternate means (aka lower case 'l' and '.' backspace '''.

The value of the £ was more important to the typist and because of typeface manufacture was probably easier to do in the £/5 existing combination from something like the English No. 1028, International No. 1060 keyboard, the Brazilian No. 1065, or the Danish No. 1047 all of which paired the £/5. See also: https://munk.org/typecast/2023/02/03/1954-smith-corona-scm-typewriter-type-styles-and-keyboards-catalog/

Off hand, I don't see another S-C keyboard combination from that time period that had a £ paired with any other glyph/character. In the "change-a-type" time period they likely wouldn't have done a custom black key for the £/5 when they were already manufacturing one in a matching white. If they didn't also swap out the key at the far right end of that bank, I would expect it to be a standard black '+/=' key cap and slug.

reply to u/67comet at https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1e4hu0s/smith_corona_electra_120_ribbon_carrier_not_moving/

That piece is called a ribbon vibrator which moves the ribbon up and down. They generally operate on gravity and as a result they need to be clean and free from oil, gunk, hair, dust, etc. Usually they slide up and down freely. There's a colloquial saying in the typewriter space that "A typewriter isn't really broken unless it's clean and broken."

Occasionally ribbon vibrators can become bent which makes them inoperable and this can be remedied with some light forming (bending) with an appropriate screwdriver or needle nosed plier. You can search YouTube and you'll find a variety of videos for cleaning and forming these back into shape so that they slide cleanly.

As for your missing 1/! slug, it's unlikely that you'll find someone selling just the slug itself and then you'll need to solder it on perfectly and/or adjust it slightly with appropriate tools to get the right alignment. Far better is to check around with repair shops that might have the same or similar machines which they're parting out and then you could request one. Your best bet is to purchase the entire typebar and slug assembly from a donor machine which you can then swap out into your machine and skip the soldering. For this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFMu6dUROGA can give you tips.

To find donor machines, try repair shops on this list: https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/tw-repair.html

reply to u/riatai69 at https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1e3c0zy/tools_for_a_deep_maintenance/

You can do a tremendous amount with just a few things:

• thin Philips screwdriver with a small magnet to hold/catch screws
• small adjustable wrench
• bottle of Simple Green (or other mild cleaner)
• can of mineral spirits (naphtha, paint thinner, varnish remover, PB B'laster etc.) with a standard/cheap restaurant refillable ketchup/mustard squeeze bottle
• Toothbrush (and/or brass bristle brush)
• canned air
• a piece of string (useful for reattaching some pieces without more specialized tools, and particularly for reattaching springs)
• light machine oil (gun or sewing machine) for very lightly oiling your carriage rails
• YouTube for watching lots of typewriter repair videos

If you want to go higher end and do a lot more

• a set of spring hooks with push/pull ends
• full set of small wrenches
• more custom screw drivers
• a nice thick felt pad (approx 15" x 15" x 1/2"+ for having a place to sit your typewriter on without scratching it up)
• a small lazy susan big enough to set your typewriter on to more easily manipulate it
• air compressor (to replace your canned air)
• bins and trays for storing typewriter parts and screws while you're taking them apart and putting back together
• a set up for spraying down/washing out typewriters (DIY ideas include paint roller trays or plastic milk crates as a base and plastic bins for catching the run off)
• wiping cloths or similar cloth rags for wiping things down

If you want to go crazy

• Keyring pliers
• set up for respooling ribbon from 330+ yard spools
• The Manual Typewriter Repair Bible https://typewriterrepairbible.com/ as well as various other repair manuals and all the tools listed within them.
• storage shelving for 100+ typewriters
• a small collection of machines for parting out
• an 800+ square foot workshop space
• a publisher for you book about typewriters

When you're really ready for full-on insanity

• professional dunk tank and fire suppression equipment
• Your own typewriter repair shop and storefront
• I hear there's one for sale in Cambridge, MA https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/05/17/business/cambridge-typewriter-new-owner-retirement-tom-furrier/ It probably comes with everything mentioned above as well as lots of machines for parting out.

reply to u/ingeniouskeys at https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1e0utt9/differences_between_olympia_sge_typewriters/

The Typewriter Database is going to be one of your better sources, but will require delving into each particular exemplar to see what their owners may have written about them. So, for example, go to https://typewriterdatabase.com/Olympia.SGE40.61.bmys and then click on the individual galleries for all the machines. If you've got an account, you can message those who currently have them and ask questions directly.

Given their manufacture in the late 60s and into the early 70s you're likely to find small incremental improvements in the electrical side, but you're also likely to find more dramatic changes in manufacturing which made them cheaper (replacing metal pieces for flimsier plastic.) I doubt the 45 (later 70s) is going to be incredibly much better than the 40, which I would suspect to be more robust from a manufacturing standpoint. You may have vaguely better "specs", but its build quality is likely going to suffer even more, so you'll have to balance out what you're after.

If you want to delve into the deeper specifics, then try out the repair manuals for them: https://www.lulu.com/shop/ted-munk/the-olympia-sge-304050-typewriter-repair-manual/paperback/product-1e4pnd4v.html?page=1&pageSize=4

Typically in this sub, when people ask, "Is it worth it?" the presumption is that they're buying it to use for themselves. You left out your context of buying it to sell until later. This means that once you've cleaned things up, and go to try to sell it for something above $40, people are going to show up here and ask that same question. When they do, the answer is going to be that it's far too expensive, especially with shipping which is notoriously tricky, expensive, and risky.

You'll be sitting there with a typewriter that you don't care enough about to have known anything about it or if it had any particular value. This also probably means that you don't know enough about what goes into cleaning and properly adjusting a typewriter either. If someone is a sucker enough to pay the crazy mark up, it means that someone who wants to try out a typewriter will be buying a sub-par machine and have a sub-par experience.

unposted reply to u/DistributionPure6051 at https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1dqr02l/is_this_worth_it/<br /> (Most of context is hiding because of downvoting)

reply to u/virtualellie at https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1ds1aps/typewriter_suggestions_for_newbie/

aggregated links from prior notes:

I'd generally endorse most of the advice on models you'll find in these sources which are geared specifically toward writers, all three sources have lots experience and reasonable bona fides to make such recommendations.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9dXflhDed0
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKMt-aCHZZk
• https://typewriterreview.com/2020/01/10/top-10-writerly-typewriters/

Obviously, you'll want to steer towards the smaller portables in the lists, but most of what's represented should fit your criteria. You'll notice a lot of overlap but with different positioning, so there's obviously some personal preference at play. If there's a nearby shop to you, it may be worth driving over to try out the touch and feel of some machines to see which you like best. Try https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/tw-repair.html

There was also some sage advice from u/Thylacine33 about purchasing the other day which may be helpful: https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1drj32h/comment/lawb2h7/

Beyond this Just My Typewriter has a few short videos that'll give you a crash course on Typewriter 101: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJtHauPh529XYHI5QNj5w9PUdi89pOXsS

reply to u/Rabbits16 at https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1df7o2t/request_type_writer_suggestion_please/

For that budget range, pick up something cleaned and fully serviced from a nearby shop https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/tw-repair.html

Too many resellers are pushing overpriced machines that say "works" or "may need servicing" on some online shops like ebay or Etsy for top end pricing when you can get something truly spectacular and ready for the next 50 years from a serious pro that needs the support for the same price.

As for particular machines to look at, I can't find much to fault in Joe's advice here https://youtu.be/aKMt-aCHZZk?si=CGPduwA4A3HPDm3u

Too many people fetishize Luhmann and his system. Yes he wrote a lot and yes he was productive, but was he as influential as any of the thousands upon thousands of writers and academics who used broadly similar methods? A lot of Luhmann's productivity boils down to how one chooses to define productivity. As an example: Isaac Newton, John Locke, Taylor Swift, and even Eminem had broadly similar not taking methods and though their note corpuses are dramatically smaller than Luhmann, their influence on art, culture, and humanity dramatically exceeds that of Luhmann.

I would posit that most serious note takers' productivity boils down to their utter simplicity and easy ability to replicate that method for decades. The largest part of Luhmann's productivity was that he not only had a simple system, but that he was privileged to use and practice at full time for the length of his academic career. (He also didn't face the scourge of peer-review that most academics are forced to run today.)

As an example of someone whose methods were very similar to Luhmann's, but who was dramatically more productive (from a generic definition of it), take a look at S. D. Goitein who wrote out about 1/3 the number of slips that Luhmann did, but used them to write almost a 1/3 more articles and books! Luhmann: 90,000 slips, 550 articles, 50 books versus Goitein: 27,000 slips, 669 articles, 69 books. Interestingly Goitein's method of organization was much closer to the topical organization to the vast majority of zettelkasten/card index users (as well as Obsidian users) than to Luhmann's alpha-numeric organizational method. There isn't nearly enough scale in (psychology, cognitive psychology) research to reasonably compare analog versus digital methods, much less enough research to distinguish between methods at the scale of individual people. Everyone will respond differently to different modalities because the breadth of neurodiversity within the population. The psychology research you're citing is painfully, painfully thin and is far from reaching the level of replicability. As a result, the best practicable advice to any individual is to experiment for themselves and choose the method they feel works best for them from a sustainability perspective.

reply to u/Quack_quack_22 at https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/1doqgar/why_can_luhmann_manage_information_better_than/

I found that Luhmann's information management system is not more complicated, but it is more effective than the influencers talking about taking notes on Obsidian. Because he took notes by hand:

Studies show that taking notes by hand has a positive impact on many different brain areas. Writing by hand is slower than typing: The slowness of handwriting helps Luhmann consider and select important words to write in literature notes. -> he will remember better the brain is relaxed -> the brain is more creative: when writing literature notes -> he will come up with more ideas so he can write permanent notes. To put it more simply. Luhmann takes notes to find as many ideas as possible to write in permanent notes, then these permanent notes will become a complete essay after Luhmann connects them together. And writing citations, summaries of content and citing sources in literature are just proof that his ideas are correct (ironically, people who make content about obsidian (also Tiago Forte) just encourage copy-paste).

Thus, copying highlights from Kindle to Obsidian becomes useless if you don't understand anything about highlights and don't get any ideas from them. I don't claim that typing makes us stupid, because people who write on computers have a habit of carefully correcting spelling and arguments, which helps them think more deeply = more smart.

Sources: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nancyolson/2016/05/15/three-ways-that-writing-with-a-pen-positively-affects-your-brain/ https://www.psychiatrist.com/news/handwriting-shows-unexpected-benefits-over-typing/

P/s: I think this guy is very precise about the zettelkasten method: he takes notes on paper like Luhmann to get ideas, then he just starts copying them into Obsidian. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrvKHFIHaeQ&t=0s)

If you've got heavy impressions going to the level of the backing sheet or things like your period cutting holes directly through your paper, then it's not really so much an issue of typing too hard, but your carriage is slightly out of alignment with respect to your type bars.

Your typeface shouldn't actually hit the platen when pressed (or held forward), but should just kiss the ribbon which then places the imprint onto the paper. Holding your typeslug forward against the type guide you should have just enough space to slip a piece of paper between your slug and the platen. If there isn't a tiny bit of space, your typeface will chew up your ribbon and paper over time. The typing thunk sound that typewriters make isn't the slug hitting the platen (aka cylinder), but the typebar hitting the anvil (aka ring).

The proper adjustment for fixing this is thus commonly called a ring and cylinder adjustment and how it's effected depends on whether you have a segment shift or a carriage shift machine. On many machines it requires adjusting two screws on either side of the machine. It changes the distance of platen from typeface and can prevent your making holes in the paper and/or ribbon, which isn't good. Sometimes using a simple backing sheet can remedy a bit of this distance problem, especially on platens which have hardened or shrunk slightly over time. Searching YouTube for your make/model (or similar models) will usually show you the adjustment you'll need to make to remedy these problems.

See also: https://hypothes.is/a/AegRziHnEe-Ud_stVcPQLA

Reply to u/Bitter_Rent_141 at https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1dnnh2n/is_this_normal/

I only have a few very specific memes indexed in my box: https://boffosocko.com/tag/zettelkasten-memes/ and a few more at https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=zettelkasten+meme

Historically, Aby Warburg had a large image-based zettelkasten for his work on art which predated Richard Dawkins' conception of meme, but I think qualifies. See: https://boffosocko.com/tag/aby-warburg/ or his Bilderatlas Mnemosyne project: https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/archive/bilderatlas-mnemosyne

It's digital in nature, but Shawn Gilmore has a large collection of images of string walls, Anacapa charts, walls and floors littered with paperwork by obsessives, etc. for his cultural research. It also includes some popular memes. https://www.vaultofculture.com/nst

replyy to u/a2jc4life at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1ddhn9n/memes/

Let's turn your question around: What exactly are you hoping to get out of it for yourself? Do you have specific goals for your own use?

You may like the idea of having and using a hammer, but if you don't have a project that requires a hammer, then owning and trying to hammer on random things in an unfocused way is probably not the right tool for your needs.

reply to u/arealnamestakenreal at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1dko10r/success_histories_4_years_into_zettelkasten_and/

Removing rust from typewriters

Steel wool can be useful for removing rust from keylevers and other parts on typewriters, but can leave dust/slag behind which can be a bear to clean up especially when used on typebars.

De-rusters like Evaporust can be useful, but should be tested against causing harm to other parts of a machine. Some rust removal chemicals can strip galvanization from machine parts. Olympia typewriters in particular are infamous for galvanized steel parts.

Another option can be to use a rotary tool (like a Dremel) with a wire brush head to remove rust.

Take care and be sure to use proper eye protection against dirt, dust, and chemicals when doing this sort of work. Also make sure you have proper ventilation and/or a mask to avoid breathing in dust and toxic chemicals.

Richard Polt's site has additional resources for typewriter restoration: https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/tw-restoration.html

Reply to https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1da2zg6/how_do_i_remove_rust/

Not sure if it may help your Typewriter Typefaces Bible project or not, but I'll mention that Marcin Wichary used the Internet Archive to collect a lot of the materials for his massive 3 volume 2023 book "Shift Happens: A Book About Keyboards": https://archive.org/details/wicharytypewriter

In addition to lots of material which he found and collected on the Archive, he added a huge number of resources, catalogs, and books which are either rare or incredibly difficult to find by uploading them to the Archive for others to potentially find and use. You and others may find it valuable and or useful to follow his pattern of uploading and storage there.

syndication link

For yellowed glass keys on typewriters, there's usually a key top covered by a piece of paper with the key glyph on it which is sandwiched in with a small piece of glass and a metal ring that holds it down with several metal tabs underneath the key to hold it all in place. There are custom keyring pliers for quickly removing and replacing the papers which needs care not to crack the glass. Otherwise you can manually bend the metal tabs on all your key rings to remove them and replace the papers. (This is generally a LOT of work either way.) See: https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1csni4d/neat_find_on_clients_kmg/

I prefer the yellowed patina of the older key papers, so I tend to leave them versus spending the time and effort to replace them.

To be more specific on solvents for beginners, potentially try mineral spirits (white spirit in UK), paint thinner, naphtha (lighter fluid), kerosene, varnish remover, PB B'laster, or carburetor or brake cleaner. Be careful as many of these are flammable and some can remove paint or decals; use all of them in a well ventilated area. You may see some recommend household variations of alcohol, but these do contain water and generally aren't very effective solvents for the types of oil/grease/dust you'll probably want to remove; professional typewriter repair shops would not use alcohol on a machine. And for those in the back, no one but a psychopath would use WD-40 on a machine's internals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjumGF9NFE8 is a pretty solid cleaning primer. Searching YouTube will uncover some potential additional advice in addition to what you can find at https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/tw-restoration.html

Good luck. That's a lovely machine!

Everyone mentioned most of the usual tricks, but one.

To get your sticky typewriter keys working again, while you're flushing out the segment with your solvent of choice (lacquer thinner, paint thinner, mineral spirits, alcohol, etc.), actually move the typebars using the keys or by other means. This will help to get them moving and allow the solvent and subsequently compressed air to help flush the oil, dust, hair, etc. out of your machine. You've already got a mechanical cleaning device of sorts (the typebar itself) inside the segment, so move it while you're flushing it out!

It may take a few repeated treatments/attempts to get it all clear for all the keys, but it's far easier than taking everything apart.

reply to u/nogaesallowed at https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1cp75ln/how_do_you_clean_a_1mm_gap/

People were recommending all sorts of ideas and solvents here, including folded card stock, tooth brushes, floss, toothpicks, interdental brushes, wood cuticle sticks, Swiss Army knife tweezers, microbrushes, and even an ultrasonic cleaner.

Reply to Nidhi Sachdeva: Nidhi Sachdeva, PhD Just went through the micro-lesson itself. In the context of teachers using to generate instruction examples, I do not argue against that. The teacher does not have to learn the content, or so I hope.

However, I would argue that the learners themselves should try to come up with examples or analogies, etc. But this depends on the learner's learning skills, which should be taught in schools in the first place.

Reply to Nidhi Sachdeva: I agree mostly, but I would advice against using AI for this. If your brain is not doing the work (the AI is coming up with the story/analogy) it is much less effective. Dr. Sönke Ahrens already said: "He who does the effort, does the learning."

I would bet that Cognitive Load Theory also would show that there is much less optimized intrinsic cognitive load (load stemming from the building or automation of cognitive schemas) when another person, or the AI, is thinking of the analogies.

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7199396764536221698/

Alan Clark True. As Dr. Sönke Ahrens says, "The one who does the effort does the learning."

What goes on in the mind is how learning happens, it is the learner that must do the learning.

I think what you mean is that when YOU are teaching, it does not mean OTHERS are learning.

What I meant was that when the LEARNER is doing the teaching, HE consolidates his own learning.

Comment link: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7197621782743252992?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A%28activity%3A7197621782743252992%2C7198233333577699328%29&dashCommentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_comment%3A%287198233333577699328%2Curn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7197621782743252992%29

Link for Hypothes.is context: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7197621782743252992/?commentUrn=urn:li:comment:(activity:7197621782743252992,7198233333577699328)&dashCommentUrn=urn:li:fsd_comment:(7198233333577699328,urn:li:activity:7197621782743252992)

Reply to John Whitfield: I think that one is mostly a semantic issue. In some definitions of learning, learning does equate to a change in behavior. In parenting for example, how is learning measured? If the behavior is changed. Therefore, for parenting, learning is a change in behavior.

I'd argue for many books the same is true, what is the use of a book if the knowledge is only in your head. Application, thus changing one's behavior, is essential for the proper use. Obviously this is not for everything the case, but I am highlighting a few scenarios where it would be accurate to say that learning is a change in behavior.

Nothing is ever black and white, it is quite simplistic to say such things, often there is a lot of nuance going on.

Comment link: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7197621782743252992?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A%28activity%3A7197621782743252992%2C7198233333577699328%29&dashCommentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_comment%3A%287198233333577699328%2Curn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7197621782743252992%29

Link for Hypothes.is context: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7197621782743252992/?commentUrn=urn:li:comment:(activity:7197621782743252992,7198233333577699328)&dashCommentUrn=urn:li:fsd_comment:(7198233333577699328,urn:li:activity:7197621782743252992)

Reply to Alan Clark: Alan Clark Perhaps teaching is not learning, but teaching is an excellent way of consolidating and verifying knowledge. Depending on how one does it, the teaching improves both comprehension and retention. See, for example, the whole-part-whole reteaching method that Dr Justin Sung teaches in the advanced parts of the iCanStudy course.

Comment link: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7197621782743252992?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A%28activity%3A7197621782743252992%2C7198233333577699328%29&dashCommentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_comment%3A%287198233333577699328%2Curn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7197621782743252992%29

Link for Hypothes.is context: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7197621782743252992/?commentUrn=urn:li:comment:(activity:7197621782743252992,7198233333577699328)&dashCommentUrn=urn:li:fsd_comment:(7198233333577699328,urn:li:activity:7197621782743252992)

Congratulations on that beautiful machine!

Don't listen to the nay-sayers who likely have very different priorities and esthetics. If this is your machine, and you love it, then "own it".

It does look like a standard (as opposed to portable) typewriter. (Standards are often better and more robust typers due to their size and design.) Likely a Model 1 or Model 2, but I don't have specific knowledge beyond a cursory glance at the typewriter database. You can start by looking at examples of machine types and bodies at https://typewriterdatabase.com/smithcorona.86.typewriter-serial-number-database.

From there, the Model 1 says "Electric Serial Numbers Concurrent with Standard", so scroll down the page and see if you can identify a year based on a serial number you should be able to find underneath the hood. You can try https://typewriterdatabase.com/Smith+Corona.Standard.86.bmys, but I don't see any later models there, so perhaps no one has documented one before and you could be the first.

Then start with Richard Polt's site https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/ where you may likely find a manual and if you're lucky a repair manual. Surely there will be a few manuals for similar 50s standard S-C manual typewriters which should at least get you started. His site has a wealth of other information to give you pointers. His book The Typewriter Revolution (2015) has good intro chapters on cleaning, basic repair, and restoration. YouTube may have some useful videos as well. The typewriter database will have some later model S-C electric machines which you might try searching for on YouTube as well and it's highly likely that the design changes weren't so drastic that those may help you significantly.

For basic cleaning, try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjumGF9NFE8 which has some solid advice. Obviously take care with respect to getting the electrical portion of your machine wet.

I've not done any electric machines before, but if I recall, I seem to have read/heard (maybe from Tom Hanks who I know has a 50s electric Smith-Corona) that the early electrics only went as far as doing power for the keys, so it should be reasonably repairable if it doesn't work out of the box.

I'm sure you'll love it. With any luck, you'll also get some serious enjoyment and sense of accomplishment out of cleaning it up. If nothing else, it'll give you a wealth of experience in making the attempt and you can apply that to other machines if you continue collecting and typing. Some of my first machines weren't immediate "successes" until after I'd been able to tinker with others and was able to come back to them with a more experienced hand.

Have fun with it!

reply to https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1cuzy04/please_can_someone_identify_this/

I've looked and looked for such a template and printer method to no avail myself. Your best bet here is probably either Avery Multi-use labels (maybe 5418 or 5428 depending on your card tabs) which have templates you can print a sheet at a time, or buying a labeler like the Brother P-touch which has a variety of different colored labels available. A third method is to line up multiple tabbed cards in your typewriter and do 3-4 at a time.

Tabbed cards are significantly more expensive than standard index cards, so if you're all in on this, I'd recommend contacting one of the manufacturers directly and buying in bulk to drive the price down. Alibaba can also be your friend here for a bulk order too. Last year I got a bulk order of 15,000 4x6" index cards for well under $0.005 per card, while the current going rate on Amazon or most office supply stores is $0.02 - $0.03/card.

Let me know if you find someone manufacturing inexpensive tabbed dividers in 1/5, 1/6, 1/7, or even 1/8 cut tabs. I'd love to buy a couple thousand of these in bulk as well.

Knowing the extra work involved in this method, I HIGHLY recommend you try it out by hand for a bit to see if it's something you'll do for more than a few months before going all-in. I've read some of Joseph Voros' work, which I understood to be theoretical only. Did he ever fully implement it himself? Before you try, you might want to read up on others' earlier work like that of Paul Otlet, Mortimer J. Adler, et al. Many here will lionize Luhmann's method, but recall that S. D. Goitein managed to take a 1/3 of the notes that Luhmann did while creating a published output a 1/3 larger than Luhmann all while using a method similar to that of Adler and company which is also very close to the method recommended by almost all academics from Jacques Barzun to Umberto Eco.

Definitely think about what you're hoping to accomplish before going straight down the rabbit hole too far.

If you do go all-in, then buying a big storage box upfront can save you a lot of time and expense, try https://boffosocko.com/2022/12/26/the-ultimate-guide-to-zettelkasten-index-card-storage/ for some ideas. My daily driver now is a 60,000+ card index from Steelcase that I picked up on the used market for $125.

LIFE. “The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog.” January 26, 1948.

Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis. Translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina. 1977. Reprint, Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2015.

Barzun, Jacques, and Henry F. Graff. The Modern Researcher. 6th ed. Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2004.

Reply to u/SpacePatrician at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1ctsu78/blank_tabbed_4x6_cards/

Replacing the key cap [as a means of switching from QWERTZ to QWERTY] isn't going to help at all, it's just a label. You'd have to swap out internal parts too. Depending on the model, you'd either have to remove and swap typebars or remove the head off the typebar and resolder it onto the appropriate alternate (and ensure that it's properly aligned, not an easy task). Then you'd have to swap the key caps (labels). It's definitely a mechanically doable process, but it's probably almost never done in practice. Doing it as a newbie probably isn't recommendable; you're better off having a repair shop do it for you if you decide to go this route. Depending on the keyboard/model, you'd also have to deal with accents, umlauts, etc.

Given the difficulty (or cost) of the process and the potential end results, you're assuredly better off locating a QWERTY machine and paying a bit more for shipping to your area if necessary.

Your mileage may vary depending on model.

reply to u/imprisoningmymemory at https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1cg1avp/replacing_keys/

If you go the white out fluid route, there are some bottles that use mini-sponges versus the old brush-types which are easier to apply. If you're worried about dripping on/in your machine with fluid, there's now also a variety of small handheld dispensers of white out tape which allow some incredibly precise use at the level of individual letters. Scroll the paper up a line or two, white it out, scroll back down and be on your way. (I only do this for things approaching mission critical applications; generally I just x things out or overtype and continue.)

My typing technique has gotten better using a typewriter versus computer keyboard.

reply to u/AlexInRV at https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1cc6oci/typewriter_correction/

reply to u/judugrovee at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1cb1s8j/so_how_do_you_actually_transfer_a_book_with_a/

Others here have written some good advice about the note taking portions, but perhaps some of your issue is with your reading method. To reframe this, I recommend you take a look at How to Read a Book: The Classical Guide to Intelligent Reading (Touchstone, 2011) by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren and Adler's earlier article “How to Mark a Book" (Saturday Review of Literature, July 6, 1940. https://www.unz.com/print/SaturdayRev-1940jul06-00011/)

The careful reader will notice that they recommend a lot of the same sorts of note making and annotation practices as Ahrens does (and by extension Luhmann), though their notes are being written in the margins and in the front and back pages of the book. On the reading front, you may be conflating some of the reading/understanding/learning work with the note taking and sense making portions. If instead, you do a quick inspectional read followed by a read through prior to doing a more analytical read you'll find that you have a stronger understanding of the material conceptually. Some of the material you took expansive notes on before will likely seem basic and not require the sorts of permanent notes you've been making. Your cognitive load will have been lessened and you'll instead spend more productive time making fewer, but more useful permanent notes in the end.

On the first reads through, reframe your work as coming to a general understanding of what is going on while you're creating a quick-and-dirty personal index of what is interesting in the work. On subsequent focus, you can hone in on the most important pieces of what the author is saying with respect to your own interests and work. It's here that the dovetailing of good reading method and good note making method will shine for you, and importantly help cut down on what may seem like busywork.

It's not often discussed in some of the ZK space, but reading method can be even more important than note taking method. And at the end of the day, your particular needs and regular practice (practice, and more practice) will eventually help hone your work into something more valuable to you over time. Eventually you'll more quickly rise to the level of what C. Wright Mills called "intellectual craftsmanship" (1952).

reply to u/bastugubbar at https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1ca8nwk/i_for_one_welcome_our_new_taylor_swift_overlords/

Let's be honest here, the most recent typewriter reference (presumably to that of an ex-boyfriend) is certainly not her first. I'm a modest Swiftie at best (from a trivia perspective), preferring to think of her work as poetry rather than musical pop-culture, so I imagine her more as a quill pen sort of writer, though my notes indicate she does take some of her notes for composition using her cell phone.

This being said, a few years back she did feature a red Sears Cutlass in All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor's Version) at the 8:28 mark, which hasn't driven the cost of these through the roof, though I have seen one listed for $1,000 (it unsurprisingly didn't sell for that.) For more here see Robert Messenger at OzTypewriter and Ryan Schocket for Buzzfeed. It's not listed anymore, but this past Christmas, she also had a red typewriter Christmas tree ornament in her online store.

Those who were privileged to attend the recent Eras Tour (or see it on Disney+) saw groups of typewriters in the background during several songs.

She's been featuring typewriters for a bit now and it hasn't driven prices through the roof any more than the typewriter renaissance that's been going on for the last few years or so. I suspect that this new round of references isn't going to shift things significantly.

If she does go full-typewriter, which model(s) do you suspect she'd be using amidst the pantheon of other writers? I'd suggest she may be romantic enough to do a late 40's Smith-Corona Clipper... or perhaps while jet-setting a Skyriter?

Type on!

reply to https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1c4kaps/giving_you_notes_a_unique_id_the_debate_continues/kzop2yh/

I'm with you on some of this, but let me play devil's advocate for a moment, so that we might hew closer to the question u/atomicnotes has posed:

If a Dewey Decimal Number is equivalent to a topic heading or subject, then what is the difference between using these subject/category/tag headings and forgoing the work of translating into a DC number (a task which is far less straightforward for those without a library science). If there is a onto to one and onto correspondence there should mathematically be no difference.

And how does one treat insightful material on geometry (516), for example, which comes from a book classified about political science (320-329)?

In a similar vein, why not use Otlet's Universal Decimal Classification which more easily allows for the admixture of topics as well as time periods?

Separately, I'll echo your valuable statement:

"I think everyone stumbles into a system of their own. I suspect the best practice here is the one that works for you!"

reply to u/scihuy at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1c2b2d6/note_taking_in_the_past/kzcg3qa/

I posed your question to my own card index:

Generally scientists haven't spent the time to talk about their methods the way those in the social sciences and humanities are apt to do. This being said, their methods are unsurprisingly all the same.

If you want to look up examples, you can delve into the nachlass (digitized or not) of most of the famous scientists and mathematicians out there to verify this. Ramon Llull certainly wrote, but broadly memorized all of his work; Newton had his wastebooks; Leibnitz used Thomas Harrison's Ark of Studies cabinet; Carl Linnaeus "invented" index cards for his work (search for the work of Staffan Müller-Wille and Isabelle Charmantier); Erasmus Darwin and Charles Darwin both used commonplace books; physicist Mario Bunge had a significant zettelkasten practice; Richard Feynman used notebooks; engineer Ross Ashby used a combination of notebooks which he indexed using a card index.

For historical reasons, most used a commonplace book method in which they indexed against keywords rather than Luhmann's variation, but broadly the results are the same either way.

Computer scientist Gerald Weinberg is one of the few I'm aware of within the sciences who's written a note taking manual, but again, his method is broadly the same as that described by other writers for centuries:

Weinberg, Gerald M. Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method. New York, N.Y: Dorset House, 2005.

I identify as both a mathematician and an engineer, and I have a paper-based zettelkasten for these areas, primarily as I prefer writing out equations versus attempting to write everything out as LaTeX. I'm sure others here could add their experiences as well. I've previously written about zettelkasten from the framing of set theory, topology, dense sets, and have even touched on it with respect to the ideas of equivalence classes and category theory, though I haven't published much in depth here as most don't have the mathematical sophistication to appreciate the structures and analogies.

/reply at Digital Fitness in response to Agnes Lausen about folgezettel

Hey Agnes, thanks a lot for attending. I rlly loved the energy and loved doing the workshop. As to your question, yes I do use obsidian for my zettelkasten. As to the numbering, it gives me a few benefits. Firstly, it forces me to make a link. If I am going to import a new note, I will have to link the note to another note, because I have to give an ID (number). This prevents orphan notes. And, it gives me a visual sense of what is going on in my zettelkasten. I can see at a glance if a section has more notes than others (my section 4, for example, has more notes.) Both the ID and the statement title, for me, gives me so much context just seeing the title without looking at the contents.

reply to u/Aponogetone at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1bideq7/comment/kvjwhzf/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

I'm not 100% sure I understand your first point from a contextual perspective. What are you trying to get across here with this comment? Generally I tend to learn and understand the basic ideas of a text on my initial inspectional read. Often these are so basic as to not require any real note making at all. The second, more analytic read of the material usually clarifies anything missing and this is typically where I create some of my most valuable notes.

While I philosophically appreciate your second point, and over time it can build some intriguing insights, one should remember, that like many systems, it's only a tool and is thus useful for the timespan and project(s) for which that tool is fit for purpose. Holding onto ideas like this too tightly don't allow enough space for future creativity and flexibility. The executives at the buggy whip factory also felt that theirs was a lifetime job once.

reply to u/oursong at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1bideq7/literature_notes_question/

My bibliographic/literature notes are my personal (brief) index of what I found interesting in the book. I can always revisit most of what the book contained by reviewing over it. When done I excerpt the most important and actionable items on their own cards with a reference back to the book and page/loc number. Depending on my needs I may revisit at later dates and excerpt other pieces from my indexed items if it turns out I need them.

From an efficiency perspective, I find that it seems like a waste of time to split out hundreds of lower-level ideas when I may only need the best for my work.

Colleen Kennedy has a nice primer: https://www.academia.edu/35101285/Creating_a_Commonplace_Book_CPB_

It may also help to have an indexing method so you can find things later. John Locke's method is one of the oldest and most compact, though if you plan on doing this for a while, having a separate book for your index can be helpful. You can also create your index using index cards the way that Ross Ashby did; see: https://ashby.info/index.html

For John Locke's method try: - https://archive.org/details/gu_newmethodmaki00lock - https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-lockes-method-for-common-place-books-1685/

If you're into history, development, and examples of how people did this in the past, Earl Haven's has an excellent short book:<br /> Havens, Earle. Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 2001. https://www.oakknoll.com/pages/books/99718/earle-havens/commonplace-books-a-history-of-manuscripts-and-printed-books-from-antiquity-to-the-twentieth

Let's reframe things here in part because it's highly illustrative of both the phrases as well as the specific question you raise.

Imagine Andy Matuschak reading Sonke Ahrens' How to Make Smart Notes (CreateSpace, 2017) and making notes on what he feels is important. As he reads, he does what is prescribed, namely, he restates the idea in his own words based on what he's read. In doing this he takes the idea of "evergreen" content from journalism settings (and later SEO settings) which he was familiar with and applies that name to what Ahrens called permanent notes to expound on his understanding of Ahrens! (An evergreen article in newspaper work is an article which was written for a particular recurring holiday, event, or story and is regular. Why spend huge amounts of staff time writing that truly original Valentine's day article? The broad stories about gifts to give and restaurants to visit really don't change from year to year. Just dust it off and reprint it, as readers are unlikely to have saved or remembered it and it becomes free re-purposable content.)

Of course, in rewriting this definition, Matuschak adds in some additional baggage for those who aren't carefully reading his work. He adds some additional emphasis on revisiting one's ideas and rewriting them over time, which is certainly fine, but I think the novice note maker puts too much emphasis on this portion thinking that each permanent or evergreen note must eventually become polished to perfection. In practice, most seasoned writers don't and won't do this. In fact, I suspect if you looked at Matuschak's note on evergreen notes, you'd find that it probably hasn't changed since the day he wrote it other than agglutinating links from other notes.

This doesn't mean that one can't modify or change their ideas over time, this is certainly useful and good, but I suspect that the majority aren't doing it the way that might be imagined by Matuschak's original statement or the way that his idea was picked up by the (niche) digital gardening community and spread primarily in the work of Maggie Appleton. It's some of this evolution of Matuschak's definition which bled into digital gardens, which have some overlap with zettelkasten and the note taking realms, which have muddied the waters. As a result, one should take it as general advice and apply it to their own situation, needs, and practice.

For those who use their own notes for writing, one will often mark their cards/notes to indicate that they've used those ideas in various projects so that they're not actively repeating themselves ad nauseum. Some of the additional tweaks one might make to their notes from a style or context specific perspective are also left to the editing portion rather than being done in the notes themselves. As a result of some of this, unless there is a dramatic flaw in a note, there isn't generally a lot of additional work one would come back to it to revise it. If it does require that sort of major revision, then perhaps the better method would be to make a new note and linking it to the original along with an explanation of the error. I typically wouldn't recommend polishing individual notes to some Plationic idea of perfection. Doing so is often just make-work which distracts from one's time which could be better spent doing additional reading or actual thinking. If you're going to do that sort of polishing work, do it at the end when you've got a longer piece of writing you're including your note in.

The real question now, is how are you personally going to define permanent notes, evergreen notes, or other related phrases like atomic notes? This practice is called by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren "coming to terms" with an author's work and is part of their analysis for how one should read a book to get the most out of it. I highly recommend reading How to Read a Book (Simon & Schuster, 1972 or Touchstone, 2011) as a companion to any of the usual note taking manuals.

If you want to continue the experiment on a better unified definition of permanent notes, evergreen notes, atomic notes, etc., you can find a pretty solid bibliography of note making, writing, and reading manuals to peruse at https://boffosocko.com/2024/01/18/note-taking-and-knowledge-management-resources-for-students/#Recommended%20reading.

While one could certainly go down the rabbit hole of reading all these resources, I would recommend only looking at one or two and spending your time working on actual practice. It's through practice that you're more likely to make actual progress on your own problems and questions.

reply to u/franrodalg at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1azoo9m/permanent_vs_evergreen_notes_am_i_thinking_about/

If you're into music producers and creativity, Brian Eno and his collaborator Peter Schmidt created and sold a custom "zettelkasten" called "Oblique Strategies" which Eno frequently used in the recording studio during live sessions when he hit creative walls. There are various digital versions of his card set online for playing around with in your own creative work.

Thanks for this mini-review. I've had Rubin in my reading pile for a while, specifically to see what he says with respect to the idea of combinatorial creativity. Perhaps it's time to bump him up the list?

syndication link

Your zettelkasten, having a perfect memory of your "past self" acts as a ratchet so that when you have a new conversation on a particular topic, your "present self" can quickly remember where you left off and not only advance the arguments but leave an associative trail for your "future self" to continue on again later.

Many thoughts and associations occur when you're having conversations with any text, whether it's with something you're reading by another author or your own notes in your zettelkasten or commonplace book. For more conversations on this topic, perhaps thumb through: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%27conversations+with+the+text%27

If you view conversations broadly as means of finding and collecting information from external sources and naturally associating them together, perhaps you'll appreciate this quote:

No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them.—Umberto Eco in Foucault's Pendulum (Secker & Warburg)

(Reply to u/u/Plastic-Lettuce-7150 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1ae2qf4/communicating_with_a_zettelkasten/)

reply to u/chasemac_ at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/19ep9rc/comment/kjempeu/

I'm curious from where you draw your "original purpose" claim? This presupposes having identified a zettelkasten progenitor who has clearly made such a statement. (If you're thinking Luhmann, you're missing the mark by centuries. And even if you're thinking Luhmann, where did he say this specifically?) While Konrad Gessner seems to have been an early progenitor in 1548, the broader idea goes much further back. Even in the early days of the commonplace book, the primary analogy was using them as "storehouses" for collecting treasure (thesaurus) aka knowledge or wisdom.

Even Luhmann's framing of his zettelkasten as his "second memory" was old by the time he wrote it:

In a short academic dissertation on the art of excerpts, Andreas Stübel described the card index as a ‘secondary and subsidiary memory’ (‘memoria secundaria and subsidiaria’), summing up in just three words the dilemma scholars had been struggling with for two centuries with respect to the use of commonplace books. As far as I know, Stübel was the first among contemporaries to speak of secondary memory. —Alberto Cevolini in “Where Does Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index Come From?” Erudition and the Republic of Letters 3, no. 4 (October 24, 2018): 390–420. https://doi.org/10.1163/24055069-00304002.

If we look even further back we read Seneca the Younger in Epistulae morales, writing positively about collecting with respect to classic rhetoric:

"We should follow, men say, the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in;

Without a clear originator, I might suggest that historically the first purpose was for memory followed closely by learning and then accumulating wisdom and knowledge (sententiae). Using them for output only came much later.

Why is there so much bad ink in the zettelkasten space about about "collecting"? (a la the "collector's fallacy") If you collect nothing, you'll have nothing. You have to start somewhere. Collecting happens first before anything useful comes out of the enterprise. Where are all these "people [who] do nothing but boast about the amount of cards in their box"? I'm not seeing lots of evidence of them in fora or online certainly. Show us your collection of examples of those to back up the claim. Are there index card hoarders out there who honestly have tens of thousands of notes with absolutely no purpose? I suspect it's rare.

If you're a collector, collect away! Take solace in the words of historian Keith Thomas:

Unfortunately, such diverse topics as literacy, numeracy, gestures, jokes, sexual morality, personal cleanliness or the treatment of animals, though central to my concerns, are hard to pursue systematically. They can’t be investigated in a single archive or repository of information. Progress depends on building up a picture from a mass of casual and unpredictable references accumulated over a long period. That makes them unsuitable subjects for a doctoral thesis, which has to be completed in a few years. But they are just the thing for a lifetime’s reading. So when I read, I am looking out for material relating to several hundred different topics.

Reply to @Denny @richnewman @patrickrhone at https://beardystarstuff.net/2024/01/16/i-finished-reading.html

I started reading Parable of the Sower exactly one year to the date mentioned at the start of the book at the public library in Pasadena where she grew up. As a 49 year old father of a 12 year old daughter, it was a much more visceral and eerie experience than I could ever have expected. She has forever changed the perspective I have driving down the streets of our shared neighborhood.

I'm not sure if they'll have open remote registrations for it or if it will only be broadcast locally, but the local Octavia Butler Book Club has an upcoming zoom session on Feb 24 which can be found in the Pasadena Public Library's newsletter (.pdf). It will feature Dr. Kendra Parker via Zoom from Georgia to present her lecture: "Walking a Mile in Her Shoes: Exploring Octavia Butler's Archives."

The nearby Huntington Library houses her papers and some of her materials there may be accessible online.

read [[Dan Allosso]] in Peer to Peer?

Not sure if you've seen/found it before, but as academia has been having bigger problems with granting tenure over the past 20 years, there's been a rise of discussion of alternate academia pathways, often under the term #AltAc in social media and other locations. Careers in writing in other spaces have certainly abounded here.

I could totally see this UI with a video generated version of Niklas Luhmann answering questions using the training set of notes in his online zettelkasten at https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/tutorial

syndication link: https://bavatuesdays.com/ai106-long-live-the-new-flesh/comment-page-1/#comment-388943

reply to https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/19278/#Comment_19278

@JasperMcFly I'll presume that given the time differential, you may have missed my post just before yours which touches on the frivolity of the proposition of creating a single definition?

Most on this forum are going to presume that zettelkasten is precisely a slipbox in a similar form to that of Luhmann, but in practice some here and many elsewhere aren't going to see the distinction (or care). Some will unpopularly insist that a zettelkasten cannot be digital in form, but they'll also do so while simultaneously (heterodoxically and confusingly?) suggesting that one should use Wikipedia's Academic Outline of Disciplines, an idea which didn't exist during Luhmann's life.

You can make an attempt to force a definition, but I guarantee that it's a losing proposition as in practice people are going to use the word in almost any way they want—whatever you do, don't trust Humpty Dumpty's definition. It's the difference between prescriptive and proscriptive definitions. It can be seen in your very question if you look closely at your own phrase "beg the question", which in classic rhetoric means something very specific going back centuries, but in common use it has a dramatically different meaning. As ever, context will always be the king on these questions of definition, though some of us are still converging on a happy commonality.

For a bit more history here, try The Two Definitions of Zettelkasten.

reply to Andy at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/19108/#Comment_19108

I've got no evidence for nor against the presence of a box for these or any idea what the earlier portion of his process looks like at present. The bulletin board slips pictured were held up with pins and those on the table appear to be taped down, ostensibly to prevent accidental movement. Given their temporary nature and placement in this context, and the fact that they were highly portable for at least the span of the five shows he was preparing for in the documentary, there was certainly some container (even if it was as simple as a binder clip or a simple rubber band). Having seen shows like this roll in and out of venues before, I'm reasonably sure it was in a box at some point, so only a pedant would worry about it.

Box aside, the point here is that it shows a version of how he manufactures his output and manages his arrangement—portions of an overall process which are less frequently discussed and incredibly rarely visualized or pictured within the general community, much less in mass popular culture.

Many have argued that Eminem didn't have a zettelkasten either, and he definitely had both slips and a box. There's obviously no winning here... I won't worry too much about it until the naysayers' own Zettelkasten can manage to help them sell out Jones Beach Theater, The Prudential Center, PNC Bank Arts Center, Barclays Center, and Madison Square Garden.

Caveat pedanticus: Anyone talking about "Chris Rock's box" in public, might be held up to ridicule in his next sold-out tour. After Headliners Only and the Will Smith incident, I'm not taking any chances. 😜🃏🗃️

Your having said "Friends of the Library" makes me think that your set likely isn't actually ex-Library (reference or otherwise), but likely was privately owned and donated directly to the library or their friends, who then sold them to raise money for the library itself. This is a common pattern in libraries across America and explains how you've gotten such a pristine copy.

reply to u/whiteo3 at https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/comments/18aggj9/best_organizationindex_system/

One of the most common methods may be using John Locke's indexing system. https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-lockes-method-for-common-place-books-1685/ (And, yes, it's THAT John Locke...)

You could have a single notebook you use as your index which indexes the rest. Not sure how you number pages (or not), but you could keep a running page number from one notebook to the next to make differentiating notebooks a bit easier.

W. Ross Ashby was known to keep running page numbers across notebooks like this, however, instead of a notebook-based index, he actually used index cards to index them (the way libraries used to index books by subject, but instead of indexing books, he was obviously indexing quotes, ideas, and notes). So you could use a card with your index word on it with page numbers (and potentially brief notes). Then just file the category headings alphabetically to find them later. His collection has been digitized, so you can view it online to see what he was doing: http://www.rossashby.info/journal/index.html

If you want to do hybrid paper/digital you could look at https://www.indxd.ink/, a digital, web-based index tool for your analog notebooks. Ostensibly allows one to digitally index their paper notebooks (page numbers optional). It emails you weekly text updates, so you've got a back up of your data if the site/service disappears.

I've used Obsidian in combination with Hypothes.is and documented the way I created a subject index out of it: https://boffosocko.com/2022/05/20/creating-a-commonplace-book-or-zettelkasten-index-from-hypothes-is-tags/

I've also used WordPress as a commonplace of sorts and documented what I did to make an index for that: https://boffosocko.com/2021/09/04/an-index-for-my-digital-commonplace-book/

Searching the entire sub may also unearth other options to get your creative indexing juices flowing: https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/search/?q=index&restrict_sr=1

Good luck!

How to fold and cut a Christmas star<br /> Christian Lawson-Perfect https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S90WPkgxvas

What a great simple example with some interesting complexity.

For teachers trying this with students, when one is done making some five pointed stars, the next questions a curious mathematician might ask are: how might I generalize this new knowledge to make a 6 pointed star? A 7 pointed star? a 1,729 pointed star? Is there a maximum number of points possible? Is there a minimum? Can any star be made without a cut? What happens if we make more than one cut? Are there certain numbers for which a star can't be made? Is there a relationship between the number of folds made and the number of points? What does all this have to do with our basic definition of what a paper star might look like? What other questions might we ask to extend this little idea of cutting paper stars?

Recalling some results from my third grade origami days, based on the thickness of most standard office paper, a typical sheet of paper can only be folded in half at most 7 times. This number can go up a bit if the thickness of the paper is reduced, but having a maximum number of potential folds suggests there is an upper bound for how many points a star might have using this method of construction.

reply to u/ethanzanemiller at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/185xmuh/comment/kb778dy/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Some of your methodology will certainly depend on what questions you're asking, how well you know your area already, and where you'd like to go. If you're taking notes as part of learning a new area, they'll be different and you'll treat them differently than notes you're collecting on ideas you're actively building on or intriguing facts you're slowly accumulating. Often you'll have specific questions in mind and you'll do a literature review to see what's happing around that area and then read and take notes as a means of moving yourself closer to answering your particular questions.

Take for example, the frequently asked questions (both here in this forum and by note takers across history): how big is an idea? what is an atomic note? or even something related to the question of how small can a fact be? If this is a topic you're interested in addressing, you'll make note of it as you encounter it in various settings and see that various authors use different words to describe these ideas. Over time, you'll be able to tag them with various phrases and terminologies like "atomic notes", "one idea per card", "note size", or "note lengths". I didn't originally set out to answer these questions specifically, but my interest in the related topics across intellectual history allowed such a question to emerge from my work and my notes.

Once you've got a reasonable collection, you can then begin analyzing what various authors say about the topic. Bring them all to "terms" to ensure that they're talking about the same things and then consider what arguments they're making about the topic and write up your own ideas about what is happening to answer those questions you had. Perhaps a new thesis emerges about the idea? Some have called this process having a conversation with the texts and their authors or as Robert Hutchins called it participating in "The Great Conversation".

Almost anyone in the forum here could expound on what an "atomic note" is for a few minutes, but they're likely to barely scratch the surface beyond their own definition. Based on the notes linked above, I've probably got enough of a collection on the idea of the length of a note that I can explore it better than any other ten people here could. My notes would allow me a lot of leverage and power to create some significant subtlety and nuance on this topic. (And it helps that they're all shared publicly so you can see what I mean a bit more clearly; most peoples' notes are private/hidden, so seeing examples are scant and difficult at best.)

Some of the overall process of having and maintaining a zettelkasten for creating material is hard to physically "see". This is some of the benefit of Victor Margolin's video example of how he wrote his book on the history of design. He includes just enough that one can picture what's happening despite his not showing the deep specifics. I wrote a short piece about how I used my notes about delving into S.D. Goitein's work to write a short article a while back and looking at the article, the footnotes, and links to my original notes may be illustrative for some: https://boffosocko.com/2023/01/14/a-note-about-my-article-on-goitein-with-respect-to-zettelkasten-output-processes/. The exercise is a tedious one (though not as tedious as it was to create and hyperlink everything), but spend some time to click on each link to see the original notes and compare them with the final text. Some of the additional benefit of reading it all is that Goitein also had a zettelkasten which he used in his research and in leaving copies of it behind other researchers still actively use his translations and notes to continue on the conversation he started about the contents of the Cairo Geniza. Seeing some of his example, comparing his own notes/cards and his writings may be additionally illustrative as well, though take care as many of his notes are in multiple languages.

Another potentially useful example is this video interview with Kathleen Coleman from the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. It's in the realm of historical linguistics and lexicography, but she describes researchers collecting masses of data (from texts, inscriptions, coins, graffiti, etc.) on cards which they can then study and arrange to write their own articles about Latin words and their use across time/history. It's an incredibly simple looking example because they're creating a "dictionary", but the work involved was painstaking historical work to be sure.

Again, when you're done, remember to go back and practice for yourself. Read. Ask questions of the texts and sources you're working with. Write them down. Allow your zettelkasten to become a ratchet for your ideas. New ideas and questions will emerge. Write them down! Follow up on them. Hunt down the answers. Make notes on others' attempts to answer similar questions. Then analyze, compare, and contrast them all to see what you might have to say on the topics. Rinse and repeat.

As a further and final (meta) example, some of my answer to your questions has been based on my own experience, but the majority of it is easy to pull up, because I can pose your questions not to my experience, but to my own zettelkasten and then quickly search and pull up a variety of examples I've collected over time. Of course I have far more experience with my own zettelkasten, so it's easier and quicker for me to query it than for you, but you'll build this facility with your own over time.

Good luck. 🗃️

reply to u/ethanzanemiller at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/185xmuh/taking_notes_for_historical_writing/

Rather than spending time theorizing on the subject, particularly since you sound like you're neck-deep already, I would heartily recommend spending some time practicing it heavily within the area you're looking at. Through a bit of time and experience, more of your questions will become imminently clear, especially if you're a practicing historian.

A frequently missing piece to some of this puzzle for practicing academics is upping the level of how you read and having the ability to consult short pieces of books and articles rather than reading them "cover-to-cover" which is often unnecessary for one's work. Of particular help here, try Adler and Van Doren, and specifically their sections on analytical and syntopical reading.

• Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book: The Classical Guide to Intelligent Reading. Revised and Updated ed. edition. 1940. Reprint, Touchstone, 2011.

In addition to the list of practicing historians I'd provided elsewhere on the topic, you might also appreciate sociologist Beatrice Webb's short appendix C in My Apprenticeship or her longer related text. She spends some time talking about handling dates and the database nature of querying collected facts and ideas to do research and to tell a story.

• Webb, Beatrice Potter. My Apprenticeship. First Edition. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1926. https://archive.org/details/myapprenticeship0000beat/page/412/mode/2up.
• Webb, Sidney, and Beatrice Webb. Methods of Social Study. London; New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1932. http://archive.org/details/b31357891.

Also helpful might be Mill's article which became a chapter in one of his later books:

• Mills, C. Wright. “On Intellectual Craftsmanship (1952).” Society 17, no. 2 (January 1, 1980): 63–70. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02700062.

Perhaps u/danallosso may have something illuminating to add, or you can skim through his responses on the subject on Reddit or via his previous related writing: https://danallosso.substack.com/.

Enough historians and various other humanists have been practicing these broad methods for centuries to bear out their usefulness in researching and organizing their work. Read a bit, but truly: practice, practice, and more practice is going to be your best friend here.