Congratulations and welcome to the club.

For some insane reason, the majority of typewriter collectors like 15-20 pound machines that fit into rectangular cases. This means that the value of fantastic machines like yours which are fully featured, better engineered, and which will last centuries aren't as high. With a solid clean, oil, and repair, this is the sort of machine that can do nearly everything you could want from a typewriter. This is a true writer's machine. I've got about six of these around in various colors as well as typefaces and type sizes.

Yours is a Royal FP made sometime between '57 and '62 and can be more closely dated using the serial number under the hood and comparing with the database.

Historical users of the vaunted Royal FP include the likes of Herb Caen, Peter De Vries, Stephen King, Melissa Ludtke, Frank O'Hara, and Morley Safer. Amongst many other appearances, this typewriter was also used by Sgt. Joe Friday in the TV show Dragnet, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (S5, E2), and was in the opening scenes of Miami Vice when Crockett first meets Lt. Castillo.

Your manual, should you need it: https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/RoyalFP.pdf

Joe Van Cleave has a solid video intro and review of it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOnQRBo7YqA.

The spools for the standard Royal typewriters (Ten, H, KH, KHM, KMM, KMG, RP, HH, FP, Empress, 440, 660, etc.) have a custom metal mechanism for their auto-reverse. The spools are known as the T1 (which is the same as General Ribbon part # T1-77B , T1-77BR, and Nu-Kote B64.) If winding on universal ribbon onto them, remove the eyelette which isn't needed and may interfere with the auto reverse. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMDfGkKqbgE If necessary, Ribbons Unlimited carries these spools, but it's much cheaper to just buy 1/2" ribbon on cheap plastic cores or bulk ribbon on cardboard hubs and wind your own on by hand.

More resources: https://boffosocko.com/research/typewriter-collection/

Reply to u/zoke10 at https://reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1s3mngq/thrift_store_find/