Fewer damaged cases through more manuals

The increasing availability of typewriter user manuals must surely help with the preservation and use of the machines. Over the past year or so, there were a few online listings that illustrated I think a small example benefit for especially the Remington portable typewriters of the 1920s.

Over the past decades, these have mostly lost their instruction booklet and the knowledge on how to lock the carriage has been forgotten. So when the machine was 'played with', the knob would not have been pushed back into the carriage to lock the carriage and the machine would not quite fit in the case. The net-effect is usually a damaged case (distorted, scratched).

Over the last year however, a few online listings explicitly mentioned the instructions - and how the machine fits inside the case. A few, like the example July listing shown, included one or more pages printed from the scanned user manual that's available online.

So in addition to the odd 'services' that'll sell print-outs of freely available manuals, the digital files are probably being found by more and more people. And more manuals online -> better kept typewriters (again sold with instructions).  Good show, that :-)