Am I a trendsetter for once?

I was in downtown Olympia the other day, and one of the many quirky little shops down there now has about half a dozen typewriters in the window. Mostly they were new-ish Smith Coronas (one older flat top, it looked like), and the prices were in the hundred dollar range, which puts them outside of what I'd pay except possibly from a real typewriter shop, but I still found it interesting. Apparently typewriters are hot stuff!

I was with a friend and didn't get a chance to go in and look to see if they're really display only or if they were cleaned up or not, but considering that the rest of the shop's mercantile mostly consisted of Communist literature and hemp jewelry...I'm thinking it's unlikely they're serious repair people. Still...very interesting!

There's also a really fascinating little antiquey shop called "Finders Keepers" just a few doors down from there that has an Olympia SM-9 from the seventies and an Underwood desktop from, I'd guess, the late fifties or early sixties. Both of those were priced fairly reasonably - I think the Olympia was about $20, which isn't super bad, in my opinion. And they provided paper for folks to try them out. They also have a section in the back of the store with old magazines, and also ads from old magazines that weren't in good enough condition to preserve whole. Yes, there were typewriter and fountain pen ads. I didn't buy any, but I *must* return and go through them more thoroughly. Way cool...