This summer we got a gift from a friend: a portable A3 typewriter!

I say portable because it came with this good-looking travel suitcase, very practical to transport its 10.9 kilograms of pure beauty around:

We got an expert helping hand from Achille (check his blog, he writes about typewrites and other geekeries) to dust off some rust (not crab-related) and put a touch of oil at the right places.

We've tested it to write some Brazilian songs for child for future reference:

(the author of this blog does not condemn any violence against cats, especially in the presence of Dona Chica)

It was so nice to hear Achille explain to us all the features of the machine! I didn't know a bunch of them, like:

• it's possible to set tab stops that the machine mechanically records. This way, you can come back to the exact column
• there's a small hole to put a pen into and make nice borders for tables
• there's no key for the numbers one and zero! Instead, we just use the letters l and o
• the ding! (so lovely) indicates that you have 7 more letters before the end of the line. But there's a button to override the lock and continue anyhow
• when the ink band fully unrolls in one direction, it will automatically reverse rotation and start unrolling in the other one

He also presented a community of typewriter lovers that exchange paper letters over the mail. Hhahaha, people are fun.