Meet Ms. Violet Evergarden, a fictional alt-universe-WW1 veteran who aspired to become a typist — in the age of manual typewriters:
One day (2018-01-31 17:30) when I came off work at L. C. Smith Tower, I wandered into the telephone switch operator showroom out of curiosity, and there I found a working Underwood No. 5 desktop manual typewriter, apparently kept borderline-maintained for visitors to play with:
Since I work here, I can basically practice typing every day. One day I met a lady who kindly pointed me to Don, a collector of typewriters in Bremerton, WA. When I visited him I showed him the artists’ impression of the machine our Heroine learned how to type on… and it turned out he had almost exactly the same model in his collection!
And it now has a new home on my desk:
This is an Underwood 4-bank portable, S/N 4B22419. Here are some of its siblings:
Take note of its distinctive shift lock key design: a metal tab (instead of an actual key) above the left shift key. All other key features match the anime appearance almost perfectly…
For now, gonna re-learn how to type the old-fashioned way 😉
Frog in the Well 