Weirdest thing I'll purge this year

I'm continuing to downsize and this takes up way too much shelf space, so I posted it to my neighborhood's "free stuff" Facebook page with this note: 

Gift cemetery

For my first post on here, I promise this will be the weirdest thing I ever post and then it will be much more normal after that. This is a model cemetery that was clearly someone's art project long ago. Maybe it fits someone's aesthetic or model railroad??? It's about 8.5 inches by 12 inches. Comes with an unattached sheep that is disproportionately sized compared to the cemetery. .... Just want to see if anyone is interested because I'd hate to toss it.

If  there are no takers, I'll at least keep the sheep.

Snapshot & memories: At the Penn State computer lab

Here's a picture that someone (probably Jessica Hartshorn) took of me at a Penn State University computer lab in either 1992 or 1993. Wearing my lucky, lumpy USFL hat, I am surely working on a class paper or project for which I had been procrastinating. I was a bad student in college who didn't put much effort into most classes. Let's just say that my grade-point average would have made me a strong contender for the Cy Young Award if it were my ERA. I was a bad student because I spent most of my time at The Daily Collegian, writing, editing and/or paginating stories for the five-day-a-week student newspaper. I wanted to work in newspapers after college, so I figured that was my hands-on education. And here I am in 2026 still working for one of the dwindling number of newspapers in the United States. It didn't hurt, either, that the folks at The Daily Collegian were awesome and well worth spending endless hours newspapering with.

I have felt bad for years, though, about how little effort I put into my classes. Penn State's liberal arts curriculum offered classes on many fascinating topics that Older Chris would love to spend time on, especially in the realms of history, literature, social sciences, health and the arts. If only some of us could have had our later-in-life passion for continuing education when we were 19, 20 and 21...

I also regret that I haven't yet written much about my college days on Papergreat. When I began this blog in 2010, I was only 17 years removed from graduating from Penn State and it felt far too recent to qualify as "history." But now I wake up and it's nearly 33 years since I left Happy Valley with my diploma. I'm older than the majority of my professors were at the time they graded my low-effort papers, probably while shaking their heads (unless their graduate TAs did the grading).

And now I fear I've waited too long. My memories of Penn State are no longer crisp and detailed. They feel more like dreams I can recall if I close my eyes. I don't have a ton of ephemera from Penn State anymore to spur recollections. And I have very, very few pictures from my four years on campus, which seems bizarre but that was life before these times in which I take two dozen cat photos per day with my phone. There's this photo from my junior and senior year dormitory room (where you can also see the USFL hat in the background), and some photos from THON, but very little beyond that, until Graduation Day. I should have packed a camera for college in 1989! I can think of a hundred things I should have documented with snapshots. Sigh.

I'm going to try to do a better job in the coming months (and years?) of using ephemera as the jumping off point for telling stories about my days at Penn State. They're as worthy of preserving for posterity as postcards from 1915 or vernacular photography from 1935 or travel brochures from 1955. And those stories involve dear friends who represented the very best part of the college experience. 

Other snapshots and memories          

• Adorable little me on Mulberry Street
• Kitchen at Willow Street house in Montoursville
• Me and Pop-Pop in the kitchen
• Commodore 64 corner
• (Missing) snapshot & memories: Thanksgiving
• Me & Cyrano
• Me in a Star Trek shirt
• All kids do these days is play video games
• Posing with a Saturn V in 1982
• The Phillies are hot, and so was I
• Relocated fire engine in Montoursville
• Family outfits of 1972
• Our little bookstore
• Well-dressed for first day of nursery school

Mom's 1968 letter from Hussian School of Art

Continuing with the theme of posting about some items I came across during the sorting and decluttering of family ephemera, here's a letter that Mom (Mary Ingham Otto, 1948-2017) received from Hussian School of Art in Philadelphia in June 1968, when she was 20 years old. 

This would have been after she left Lycoming College. One year after this, in June 1969, she married my father. And another 1½ years after that, in December 1970, I was born. So I really don't know for sure how Mom's second year at Hussian School of Art unfolded. I know she was extremely talented and rightfully proud of her art skills, which included sketching and sculpture. I posted a few of her pieces here shortly after her death in 2017. Excellent works, but I don't know if those few pieces show the extent of her talent. Most of her artwork is in my sister Adriane's possession.

Hussian School of Art had opened in July 1946. According to Wikipedia, "John Hussian, a member of Philadelphia's art community and a renowned lecturer, was encouraged by what is now the Philadelphia Museum of Art to open a school for veterans returning from World War II."

It changed its named to Hussian College in 2015, but then abruptly closed in the summer of 2023. Beth Shapiro, who had been director of the college's bachelor of fine arts program, told The Philadelphia Inquirer, “It is heartbreaking for these students who have put all this time and energy in." 

A nifty Gritty fiddlin' on the roof, saved for posterity

A just want to share this for posterity because it's awesome-sauce and I want to do my tiny bit to help it never get lost.

On Feb. 5, Joshua Raclaw skeeted: "We put on an all-Yiddish community production of fiddler on the roof in Philadelphia and cast member and local artist Sofie Rose Seymour created the most amazing show poster that ever was."

On Instagram, the artist added:

This production of Fidler Afn Dakh was a labor of love, put on by a community of folks with a range of prior theater experience (including none!) and prior Yiddish experience (including none!) who got together and made something impossibly beautiful and unlikely and special

For a little while, there was a shtetl called Anatevke alive in West Philly, where you could hear a whole world in Yiddish, ful mit harts, with queer and diasporic and Jewish joy and grief and love

I made this poster as a thank you gift for our director Isy and music director Tim, who gekholemt a kholem that we’d put this crazy thing together in a month, and for our cast & musicians, who were crazy enough to do it

***

We must preserve and heartily support the arts and history and all cultures and the incredible creative output of human beings. 

Mid-century New Jersey election ephemera

Here's a 75-year-old piece of election ephemera. I'm not even sure where it came from. It urges voters to vote "yes" on the school bond issue and "Elect Experienced Executives" Brace Eggert, Julius C. Engel, James C. Forgione, Martin J. O'Hara and Russell B. Walker.

I say I don't know where this ephemera came from because it's apparently for an election near Stephenville, New Jersey, located in the northern part of that state. There are no family connections to that area that I'm aware of.

I'm sure it's Stephenville (or an enclosing municipality) because all five of these guys show up in the sprawling Wikipedia entry for Stephenville, which goes into massive detail about the political goings-on there in the middle of the 20th century. Forgione was at one point the mayor of the former Raritan Township that became Edison Township in 1954. The other four were township commissioners, with Walker being chairman of the health board. There was much drama over local development and especially issues with septic tanks and the sewer system. The section of the Stephenville Wikipedia page that merely covers the years 1948 through 1953 is nearly 5,000 words. I might suggest it only if you suffer from insomnia. You'd have much more fun with Papergreat's large category of Ruth Manning-Sanders posts.

Book cover: "Big Freeze"

Much of the United States has been suffering through a big freeze in recent days, but it's already 80 here in the Sonoran Desert. We have gnats and dust.

• Title: Big Freeze
• Author: Bellamy Partridge (1877-1960). I was absolutely positive that I'd featured him on Papergreat before, most likely for his 1958 book on the history of auctions, Going, Going, Gone! But I was wrong. Huh.
• Dust jacket illustrator: Paul Galdone (1907-1986)
• Book design: Maurice Serle Kaplan
• Publisher: Thomas Y. Cromwell Company
• Publication date: 1948
• Pages: 236
• Format: Hardcover
• Dust jacket price: $2.75 (the equivalent of about $38 today)
• Dust jacket expert: "Bellamy Partridge's new historical novel tells a dramatic story of old New York, when the city was a small but cocky town of a mere quarter million. It was in 1832 that David Wakeman, a young engineer just out of college, passed through the city when hordes of people fleeing the cholera scourge were streaming to the country. On his way to Philadelphia — to take a job on the new aqueduct — David was appalled at the sight of the panicky fugitives, for he was convinced, as many were not, that it was the medieval system of wells which so many cities still used for their water supply that was spreading the deadly infection. When, in time, New York came round to his way of thinking, David was called back to carry to completion the work on the Croton reservoir and aqueduct."
• Dedication: "This book is dedicated to HELEN my researcher and collaborator, my wife, and still my friend"
• Excerpt from "A Word to the Reader": "In writing this novel I have had access to the century-old collection of books, manuscripts, records, documents, and diaries belonging to the American Institute. Back in the days when New York was a small town — small in the sense of having none of the utilities and modern conveniences which make city life worth the living — the Institute was a great power for progress and improvement, and for a way of life it called The American Plan. Among the ambitious aims of the Institute was a determination to get an adequate water system into New York City; for even after the population of the place had passed a quarter of a million, New Yorkers were still pumping water from their own wells and cisterns. The only plumbing they possessed was in the back yards. Almost inevitably there was a big water fight which lasted for years; but the library of the Institute was, so far as I know, the only organization which compiled a fairly complete record of these hostilities."
• About the protagonist: Of David Wakeman, Partridge writes: "The plot ... concerns the love affairs of an imaginary young engineer I have called David Wakeman. That I have ascribed to David a large part of the credit and responsibility for building the Aqueduct was a matter of necessity as well as convenience."
• Excerpt from 1948 review by Charles Lee in The New York Times: "The plumbers will hail Mr. Partridge for serving, in a sense, as their laureate in this oblique tribute to their essential place in modern society. Aqueducteers ought to drink his health in the vital liquid of their profession. And readers with a touch of old-fashioned conscience and a taste for somewhat lavendered narrative and poeticized justice will give him their huzzahs. This reader must put it on the record, however, and with full appreciation of the story's simple charms, that 'Big Freeze' is not top-shelf Partridge. Some interesting historical footnotes are worked into the text, but the story is thin and slow, and the characterization trite."
• Related reading: An in-depth November 2019 Smithsonian Magazine article by Jonathan Schifman is headlined "How New York City Found Clean Water." It details the long process that led to the building of the Croton Aqueduct. It fears Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, among many other figures, and covers some of the same ground as Partridge's novel.  

A nice gig for your mid-70s

Continuing with items I came across during the recent sorting and decluttering of family ephemera, here's a letter that my great-grandfather, Howard Horsey "Ted" Adams (1892-1985), received in August 1968 to confirm a post-retirement consultant position with The Welsbach Corporation of Philadelphia. I hope to write more about Welsbach and my great-grandfather's work there at some point (add it to the list, right?). For now, suffice to say that he was an electrical engineer and in the late 1960s Welsbach was still involved with electrical construction and infrastructure contracts.

The contract was for $6,000 and was set to begin on October 1, 1968, a few weeks after Howard's 76th birthday. It included having an office at his disposal and required that he be available to the chairman of the board for consultation on company matters. Today's equivalent of $6,000 is about $56,500, so this was a pretty lucrative gig atop my great-grandfather's retirement plan and other savings. Having specialized expertise was valued and paid well! Somehow I don't foresee anyone retaining me as a consultant for journalism or copyediting matters if and when I reach age 76. 

"With a judicial finger in the constitutional dike ..."

U.S. District Judge Fred Biery issued this sharply worded three-page order today that is important to share and amplify for the historic record during this semiquincentennial year in our fractured nation. 

Biery's words are worth your time. 

Cat photo memories from 2020

In the COVID-19 summer of 2020, I tweeted this out with the caption "a Bergman film, but with cats." Someone wittily replied that it could be Purrsona. I have long since deleted my Twitter/X account, for obvious reasons. But I still have a record of this tweet because I printed it out and tucked it away inside a Roger Ebert film review book.

Titan, in the front, passed away in 2024. But Mr. Angelino (middle) and Monkey (back) are still with us as our two oldest kitty-cats. They are good boys.

Here's another photo of Monkey from that same year, when I documented all of my bookshelves in Shelfie 2020. My bookshelves have changed a good bit since then.

My Weekly Reader: "Kentucky Has a Singing Festival"

Kismet! This is a companion post to a Papergreat post from exactly nine years ago today. Nine years! Gosh, it especially seems like time flies sometimes. With regard to the June 10-14, 1940, edition of My Weekly Reader, I had previously featured the front page photo of photographer/folk festival promoter Jean Bell Thomas (1881-1982). 

Here's the entire front page of that issue, with the photo of Thomas plus the article headlined "Kentucky Has a Singing Festival." The article states that the festival is held not far from Ashland, Kentucky, "near a little log cabin" in which Thomas lives. The 1940 article indicates that the festival had been going on for 10 years. That jibes with what I read on this website, which states that the American Folk Song Festival, founded and organized by Thomas, was held from 1930 until her retirement in 1972.

The website (which seems to pull from Thomas' Wikipedia biography) further states: "The festival followed an unchanging script that Thomas said was intended to show 'authentic sequences in America's musical history.' Overall it reflected the belief of Thomas and many of her contemporaries that the speech patterns, songs, and other traditions of early British Isles settlers still survived in Appalachia." 

Fortunately, some recordings of the festival have been preserved.

My grandmother's 1981 trip to China

In 1981, the year before she took a safari trip to Africa, my grandmother Helen traveled from Wallingford, Pennsylvania, to China. My non-expert understanding is that tourism to China only began to be easily accessible to Westerners around 1978, as part of the "Reform and opening up" following the 1976 death of Mao Zedong, whose Great Leap Forward was arguably the deadliest and most disastrous policy implementation by any leader in world history.

This is a letter from Tours A La Carte that my grandmother received prior to the trip. It contains some "helpful tips" from another tourist who had recently returned from China. You can read the whole thing for yourself, but some of the highlights include encouraging anti-pollution masks, a reminder to take lots of Kleenex and a fork and knife (because some places offer only chopsticks), and a suggestion to pack granola bars to serve as snacks. 

It also has some tips on what to wear to the Great Wall of China, which my grandmother did visit, as you can see from some of these snapshots she took:

My grandmother's 1982 trip to Africa

Continuing with last week's theme of posting about some items I came across during the sorting and decluttering of family ephemera this month, here's the itinerary for my grandmother Helen Ingham's February 1982 trip to Africa, through Holbrook Travel of Gainesville, Florida. 

As you can see, the nearly-three-week trip involved parts of Kenya and Tanzania, including Serengeti National Park, Maasai Mara National Reserve and Ngorongoro Conservation Area. 

Here are some of my grandmother's better snapshots from that trip:

And here's a neat picture that someone else took of my grandmother...

Finally, here's a picture of my grandmother (left) and her good friend and companion on the trip to Africa, Betty Livingston. My grandmother died in 2003. Betty is still alive as of this writing and will hopefully be celebrating her 106th birthday this upcoming May!

My favorite first-time watches of 2025

Fanny and Alexander (1982)

The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973)

I watched about 125 movies in 2025, topping the previous year by about 25%. The year started with 2017's Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and concluded with the 1948 Japanese film Taifuken no onna (The Woman in the Typhoon Area), which is basically Key Largo but with Setsuko Hara.  

I think 1982's Missing by Costa-Gavras was the best and most shattering first-time watch for me, but the top seven or eight were all pretty brilliant and interchangeable, and it would be a fool's errand to try to rank them. It was a year in which I finally caught up with a number of classic or iconic films I should have seen years ago. Following on the heels of the 2024, 2023 and 2022 lists, here, in chronological order by release year, are my 25 favorite first-time watches of 2025:

• The Immigrant (1917, directed by Charlie Chaplin)
• Yuwaka, aka Temptation (1948, Kôzaburô Yoshimura)
• Othello (1951, Orson Welles)
• Tokyo Sweetheart (1952, Yasuki Chiba)
• Bad Day at Black Rock (1955, John Sturges)
• The Curse of Frankenstein (1957, Terence Fisher)
• A Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960, Mikio Naruse)
• High and Low (1963, Akira Kurosawa)
• Blow-Up (1966, Michelangelo Antonioni)
• Daisies (1966, Věra Chytilová)
• The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973, Ivan Dixon)
• Enter the Dragon (1973, Robert Clouse)
• Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural (1973, Richard Blackburn)
• The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975, Jim Sharman)
• The Ninth Configuration (1980, William Peter Blatty)
• Missing (1982, Costa-Gavras)
• Fanny and Alexander (312-minute TV version, 1982, Ingmar Bergman)
• Mulholland Drive (2001, David Lynch)
• Parasite (2019, Bong Joon Ho)
• Godzilla Minus One (2023, Takashi Yamazaki)
• The Vourdalak (2023, Adrien Beau)
• Riddle of Fire (2023, Weston Razooli)
• The Life of Chuck (2024, Mike Flanagan)
• Weapons (2025, Zach Cregger)
• One Battle After Another (2025, Paul Thomas Anderson)

One Battle After Another is the only one of the 10 nominees for Best Picture that I've seen so far, so don't consider the exclusion of the other nine to be a criticism or dismissal. I'll catch up with most of them eventually.

Special high honorable mention: Tokyo Godfathers (2003, Satoshi Kon) was a rewatch for me. But it had been 20+ years since I had seen it and I remembered nothing other than it involved a lost baby. So it felt like a first-time watch. If I were including it in the rankings, it would have made the Top 10.

Honorable mention: Murder by Decree (1979), The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971), Paperhouse (1988), La Jetée (1962), The Horrible Dr. Hichcock (1962), Leptirica (1973), Lake of Dracula (1971), The Vampire Doll (1970), The Damned (1962), Detour (1945), Cisco Pike (1972), Phantom of the Paradise (1974), Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914), Corridors of Blood (1958), Creature from the Black Lake (1976), Easy Street (1917), The Celluloid Closet (1995).

Vincent Price Is Always Good honorable mentions: Theater of Blood (1973), Diary of a Madman (1963), The Tomb of Ligeia (1964)

Bizarre but mostly entertaining: Psychomania (1973), The Amusement Park (1975), Don't Look in the Basement (1973), Nothing But the Night (1973).

Bizarre and only entertaining while Roddy McDowall is in it: Arnold (1973).

Best movies that I just didn't vibe with (aka The Asteroid City Award): Giants and Toys (1958), Carmen Comes Home (1951), Invaders from Mars (1953). The two 1950s Japanese films, in particular, I think will hit much better on a rewatch. In the case of Invaders from Mars, I'm not sure if it works if you didn't first watch it as a kid, through the eyes of childhood.

Surprisingly fun family Christmas films: Holiday in Handcuffs (2007), Spirited (2022).

Historically important horror but not great films: The Cat and the Canary (1939), The Raven (1935), King of the Zombies (1941), Frankenstein (1910).

Dreadful films with good casts: Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering (1996) and Puppet Master (1989).

Best rewatches: Popeye (1980), The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002), Seems Like Old Times (1980), Trafic (1971), Boogie Nights (1997), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Ed Wood (1994), Erin Brockovich (2000), Fright Night (1985), Casablanca (1942), Cat People (1942), Amadeus (1984), The Long Goodbye (1973), Nashville (1975), Punch-Drunk Love (2002), The Exorcist (1973), Spirited Away (2001), Trick 'r Treat (2007), Midnight Mass (2021), The Godfather (1972), King Kong (1933), Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987), Superman (1978), The Godfather Part II (1974), Black Christmas (1974), Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1961).

Most fascinating rewatch of a train-wreck film: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978), featuring St. Elsewhere's Kim Miyori in a small role.

Rewatch I truly didn't need to rewatch: Hot Stuff (1979). But at least it has Ossie Davis.

WTF did I just watch: Italian Spiderman (2007)

Watching and listening...   

High and Low (1963), with Tatsuya Nakadai on the right.

Mulholland Drive (2001)

Parasite (2019)

Saturday's postcard: Nicollet Avenue

Linen postcard of Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on a brighter day.

Handmade postcard of Wan-Long Tailor in Tainan West Market

This month I received this amazing handmade postcard via Postcrossing member Jyayu in Taiwan. It's an oversize card, measuring 5¼ inches by 7¼ inches, and was clearly drawn and painted with great care and love. It's one of my favorite cards I've received in more than 13 years of Postcrossing.

Her message on the back states:

Hello Chris!!

The Wan-Long Tailor store shown on this postcard has been in business for over 30 years. It's located in the Tainan West Market (opened in 1905). It was once the largest market in Southern Taiwan. In my hometown, Puli, there is a widely circulated story about a "Black Sorcerer - Maxa-daxedaxe."

Legend has it that the sorcerer feeds on the hearts of child to increase his magical power. Reportedly, He can fly as long as attaching banana leaves to his back. If he needs to go out at night to seek his targets, he will replace his own eyes with the cat's eyes, allowing him to see clearly in the dark. Because of this, in earlier times, parents would carry their children on their chest rather than on their back to prevent Maxa-daxedaxe from forcefully snatch the child.

This English-language website has a little more information about Maxa-daxedaxe as it relates to Indigenous storytelling. If anyone from Taiwan or with Taiwanese heritage knows any more about this legend, I'd love to read it in the comments section.

My grandmother's 1942 Medical Technologist card

Short post today today with an item from 84 years ago. It's my grandmother's (Helen Chandler Adams Ingham, 1919-2003) wallet-size blue card indicating that in 1942 she was certified as Medical Technologist as defined by Board of Registry of the American Society of Clinical Pathologists.

According to its website, the society was founded in 1922 by a group of 39 physicians to achieve important goals to further the laboratory in health care. Today, "ASCP continues to drive change in the U.S. and around the world through its many initiatives including the Leading Laboratories Recognition Program; Partners for Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment in Africa, which provides rapid cancer diagnostics, care, and treatment to Sub-Saharan Africa; the ASCP Foundation to support diagnostic medicine and public health; and numerous collaborations with PEPFAR to bring pathology and laboratory medicine to under-resourced countries," the website further states.

Around this general time (World War II), my grandmother was working at Bushnell Army Hospital in Brigham City, Utah. So this card may have been issued to her while she was there. I should try to piece together more information from that time of her life at some point.

Related posts

• My grandmother on the Wilmington Friends School basketball team
• Snapshot & memories: Family outfits of 1972
• A handful of artistic travel snapshots taken by my grandmother
• 100th anniversary of Bingham "rediscovering" Machu Picchu

Mid-century Christmas letter from Richland

During the recent sorting and pruning of old family ephemera I came across this homemade Christmas letter from some family friends who lived in "Richland" and said of it, "This is the town that 'Sam' built." 

That would be Richland, Washington. The area that became Richland was acquired by U.S. Army in 1943, built up by "Uncle Sam" and turned into a fully closed, secretive community — it didn't appear on maps! — in which many people worked on the Manhattan Project, though few people knew that's what they were actually doing. The veil of secrecy wasn't lifted until after the mid-1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the surrender of Japan and the end of World War II.

Of course there were other cities that Uncle Sam built, such as Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

I'm going to guess this Christmas letter, with its nifty illustrations, dates to sometime between 1948 and 1952.

1964 receipt for my grandmother's Olympia SM3 typewriter

When Mom, Adriane and I moved from Florida into my great-grandmother's and grandmother's house on Oak Crest Lane in Wallingford in 1986, the upstairs room that had been used for storage and my grandmother's desk/office supplies was converted into my bedroom. It was absolutely filled with office supplies at first: pens, pencils, paperclips, tape dispensers, notepads, gummed reinforcements, staplers and much more. I still have a stapler and tape dispenser from that bedroom. Probably one or two other things, too.

There was also the typewriter that belonged to my grandmother, Helen Chandler Adams Ingham (1919-2003), and today's post features the receipt for when she originally purchased it. It was an Olympia SM3 and it cost $65 in 1964, which is the equivalent of a whopping $677 today! I remember using it for some schoolwork and hobby stuff, although at some point I would have fully converted to my Commodore 64's dot-matrix printer. Later, I had a lightweight electric typewriter that I took with me to Penn State and that I used for the final Steve Jeltz Fan Club newsletter. (And, yes, I STILL need to do the damn post on the history of the Jeltz Fan Club.)

The typewriter was purchased at Central Typewriter Exchange on 3433 Walnut Street in Philadelphia. I can't find anything specifically about that business, but maybe someone who knows something will see this post and leave a comment. I have to think this is one of its few receipts still in existence. The purchase came with a guarantee for one year on shop parts and labor, according to the cursive note added to the receipt. 

There is a lot of information about Olympia SM3 typewriters online. On Paper Blogging, Michelle Geffken writes of "the gorgeous lines of a stylish typewriter body, with the heavy-duty work capacity that is true of all machines in the German Olympia line, the Olympia SM3." Geffken adds that Olympia SM stands for Schreibmaschine Mittelgroß or Medium-sized Typewriter, and that 800,000 were made between 1953 and 1957. It was apparently a favored typewriter of the likes of Harlan Ellison, John Updike and Patricia Highsmith. Geffken has a whole subsection called the Typewriter Diaries that you'll definitely want to check out if that's your jam.

Meanwhile, on Typewriter Review, Daniel Marleau describes the Olympia SM3 as "a reliable workhorse, from a solid body construction to keys that provide good response and feedback. When you first sit at this thing, you marvel at the beauty and how it exudes a certain egalitarian work ethic. These machines were meant for typing — lots of typing. Rolling paper in for the first time, a reassuring clicking sound is made, like loading a weapon for words. The platen moves with rigid precision."

I'm sure I have a photo of Beembom's Olympia SM3 somewhere in the family photos, but that would involve a search and will have to be a post for another day. 

A bookmark to finally begin the year

I've been in a bad rut to start 2026, and the spiraling state of our nation (to put it mildly) in what should be its celebratory 250th anniversary year certainly is a big contributor to that daily depression.

We have to find ways to keep plowing forward and I'm starting Papergreat's 17th calendar year with some short posts about items I've come across during some recent sorting and decluttering of family ephemera. Every January brings a fresh urge to purge stuff for sanity's sake. I hope this year sees more meaningful progress by me in that regard.

This is a greeting card that was designed to be a bookmark, if you detach the front cover of the card. It's stained and there's a tear at the bottom, but I've fixed that with tape and I'm going to put this in my pile of bookmarks and toss the rest of the card, along with the generic cursive message.

The bookmark was produced by Yorkraft and the card is printed with the following explanatory message: "Hand colored Book-Marks (Lese Ziechen), similar to this, with designs derived from religious symbolism, were used to mark the place many old Pennsylvania Dutch Bibles and Hymnals."

For some information about Yorkraft we turn to the York Daily Record and a 2016 Universal York blog post by June Lloyd. The company dates to at least the mid 1940s and manufactured "decorative signs and novelties, including Pennsylvania Dutch trinkets." Lloyd's post cites a 1946 advertisement that states: 

"YORKRAFT Pennsylvania Dutch… Greeting Cards and Gift items, for inspiration, draw upon a rich store of folklore and folk-arts of the Pennsylvania Dutch who have probably contributed more than any other group, to the Early American Folk Arts. Yorkraft has caught the charm and spirit of their decoration and design, their quaint speech and humor and their picturesque dress and customs, which still persist in Pennsylvania and to some extent in other parts of the country settled by Pennsylvania Dutch folks."

There are hundreds of Yorkraft items currently for sale on eBay, some dating to the late 1970s. I'm actually a little surprised that this is the company's first-ever mention on Papergreat. Items range from a set of blank Amish-themed notecards for less than $10 to faux stained-glass display pieces to Pennsylvania Dutch recipe booklets to a 1969 "Make Love Not War" wooden sign that's pretty damn cool and is listed for $329.99.