Mini-review/Side-by-side comparison: 7 types of vintage typewriter paper

[mehlodious]

After recently learning that vintage erasable typewriter paper is supposed to be well-suited to fountain pen ink, and devouring several threads on here to that effect, I went out & bought what at first looked like a fairly straightforward lot of assorted typewriter paper on eBay. When it arrived, though, I found that aside from the obvious tablets & packets, one of the bundles was actually several different loose kinds combined - an unexpected goldmine once I managed to squint at the various watermarks & separate them out.

 

I thought it might be useful to someone out there to do a simple (well, relatively simple) visual comparison of each of the types I got with all of my currently-inked pens, since past FPN threads about vintage paper were of great use to me in narrowing down various starting points - so this is me paying it forward!

 

These are camera phone photos, but trust me, it's better than the absolute hack job my scanner made of the inks when I tried to scan them.

 

Images: https://imgur.com/a/KRjAH1w
 

Featured: 

Five erasable typing papers:

• Eaton's Corrasable 25% Rag Content Typewriter Paper, "medium Weight" 16 lb. 25% cotton fiber - cover says by Sheaffer-Eaton. good condition, all sheets white and unblemished
• Mead Management Series Erasable Bond Typing Paper, "medium weight" - good condition, sheets white
• Eagle-A Type-Erase Paper, 25% cotton fiber - starting to yellow but still solid condition; found loose so no additional info from cover
• Fleet-Erase Bond Paper - starting to yellow, decent condition but only found 3 sheets of this, so no additional info from the cover
• Pen-Tab Prudential Erasable Bond Typewriter Paper - heavily yellowed, but sheets intact

Two outliers:

• Unlabeled/unwatermarked onionskin paper - yellowed, very very thin, no watermarks.
• Student's Special Typewriter Tablet - the cover said nothing else on it. Heavily yellowed, but sheets intact. Probably not erasable - much smoother/less toothy than all the others.

 

Basic impressions:

• Ink beaded up on it the unlabeled onionskin paper severely as I wrote so that the lines looked unclear and inconsistent until the ink dried. Even so, you can see in some of the lines where the beads are distinct, e.g. in the left-hand column of the Eversharp Skyline & TWSBI Eco writing samples. 
• The same thing happened on the Pen-Tab paper to an extent as well - in both cases, it also felt like any potential flow issues that a pen might have were just exacerbated several times over because they were so unabsorbent with some inks (until I used Organics Studio Copper Turquoise on them in an Architect nib; the onionskin feathered like hell. I wonder if the extra nib contact was just too much for it?). I wonder if this also has anything to do with the aged-ness of the papers?
• Student's Special, being seemingly uncoated, provided the least toothy, smoothest writing experience. However, it also sheened and shaded a tiny bit less as a result. Diamine Polar Glow, my most dramatic super-sheener here, was a solid wall of sheen on all papers tested except for that one.
• The remaining 4, the less-yellowed erasable ones - Fleet-Erase, Mead, Eagle-A, and Eaton Corrasable - were almost indistinguishable in performance, actually. They all showed plenty of sheen from the sheening inks (Diamine Polar Glow, Diamine Holly, Organics Emerson, J. Herbin Emerald of Chivor), showed some minor sheen halos from the two inks that sometimes will show sheen on high-quality papers (Waterman Mysterious Blue, Lamy Turmaline, Diamine Arctic Blue) and showed shading from all the inks you'd expect to as well (the two Robert Oster inks, Waterman Mysterious Blue, etc.)
• All of the erasable ones are also *quite* toothy. The papers are coated evenly - the pens never caught, and there are no fibers exposed, it seems - but they're textured in a way that makes any phone, no matter the smoothness, have a slightly surreal feedback to them. If writing on rough, low-quality paper is like writing on sandpaper, then this is like writing on stone pavers - not rough, but definitely not smooth.

 

In summary --

Positive properties:

Sheen: all (slightly less for Student's Special)

Shading: strong shading in the four erasable papers, less so in the Pen-Tab, Student's Special, and the onionskin paper

 

Negative properties:

Ghosting: all (slightly less for Student's Special)

Bleedthrough: none except for Student's Special (with J. Herbin Emerald of Chivor in M nib) and the onionskin paper (Emerald of Chivor in M, Organics Emerson in 0.6 stub, Lamy Turmaline in F nib)

Feathering: none except for Student's Special and onionskin paper

 

Other properties:

Texture: all toothy as heck except for, of course, the uncoated outlier

 

tl;dr - vintage erasable typewriter paper makes ink look very good; The Well-Appointed Desk described their vintage erasable typewriter paper tablets (made of Esleeck erasable paper, which I've also tried & I'd say is just about identical to the Fleet-Erase, Mead, Eagle-A, and Eaton Corrasable tested here) as "toothy Tomoe River", and that's pretty accurate. The writing experience itself is a bit unique because of the toothiness - it's a very specific kind of feedback, and if you don't like it, you're not going to like any of them - and the heavy ghosting means they're best suited to things like writing letters on one side of the paper.

[JonSzanto]

Thanks, interesting for the aspect of how similar most of the papers were. As it turns out, I just received a couple of tablets 2 weeks ago from Ana at The Well-Appointed Desk. She found a source for a bunch of this stuff and made it up into writing tablets (all sold now, unfortunately) and it has been interesting to use for writing letters. Very much as you describe, with good visual results but man, what a rough ride!

Here's the cover, which has info about the paper to add to your above list; I would say this stuff performs as you specified in describing the erasable papers you tried.

[LizEF]

I don't know that I'll ever have a practical use for this information, but I enjoyed your review - thanks for sharing your findings with us!

[kernando]

So how well do they print and erase in different typewriters?

 

I wonder what the pad cover image is meant to resemble. My guess is an Olivetti Lettera, whichever model number.

[mehlodious]

On 3/20/2021 at 2:34 AM, JonSzanto said:

Thanks, interesting for the aspect of how similar most of the papers were. As it turns out, I just received a couple of tablets 2 weeks ago from Ana at The Well-Appointed Desk. She found a source for a bunch of this stuff and made it up into writing tablets (all sold now, unfortunately) and it has been interesting to use for writing letters. Very much as you describe, with good visual results but man, what a rough ride!

@JonSzanto I actually got a blue tablet of that as well, and that's what prompted all this! I was like, hmm, that's sold out...how can I approximate it? Turns out you can still find quite a lot of it in bulk from various sources, and having sliced up my own, now I have a good stash of it for less than the unit cost per page of the tablet, although of course not as neatly packaged. 
Yeah, the writing looks gorgeous, but it sure feels like wearing ice skates on a concrete path!

 

@kernando unfortunately, fountain pens are as far as my vintage writing instrument expertise goes - no idea on the typewriter performance; I hear that they do erase as promised, though!