The Collection
I can imagine that, when looking through the table of machines, and clicking through pages with pictures of machines under four different angles on a wooden floor, one would wonder what the collection would look like in the house, how it is stored, and how it fits in with the rest of the interior. Since the house is now finally "fit for publication", I thought I'd give you an insight in how everything is organised so it can be enjoyed.
We start with a picture that is pre-digital photography, and shows what the collection looked like in roughly the year 2001, when I was still living in a fourth floor appartment without elevator. You can imagine that the move in 2004 was rather painful.
In our current home, with the collection in its current state, we start in my own office. You will still recognize the same shelf though, and one of the Mignon typewriters still lives there. Apart from that typewriter, a large part of my machines is based in my office, in a funny stair-shaped cabinet, which was originally designed to fit next to the stairs to the attic, but since we made that part of the house into a landing next to the bathroom, it couldn't stay there, and had to go in my office.
Here we have a glass medical cabinet, standing in a corner of the hallway. It contains the smaller machines, the more recent colourful and recent machines, and anything else that can fit in a leftover spot.
On to the living room. We have the good fortune of having a large and versatile library cabinet, in and around which a number of machines find a spot. The little table with the Millionnaire and the B183 is on casters, so it can be moved easily for cleaning.
A few Britannics have sneaked on to the top of the library ...
On the opposite wall is another shelf which contains some more machines, many of them double calculators, and since the shelves are wide apart, also very high machines, such as the Sanders, even though it is always on the verge of falling off.
Then we move on to the first floor (second floor for the Americans ...). This picture is taken from the stairs to the attic, and shows the shelving filling the entire back wall, completely filled with calculators. The best girlfriend in the world negotiated her way onto the top left part of the shelf, since she owns as many excess books as I own excess calculators. Those are small sacrifices to make...
Notice that a Brunsviga J found its way to the small piece of floor left over under the pitched roof of the attic.
On to the attic - this is my domain, where I can do what I want. Unfortunately there are no walls to speak of to put anything, as the roof is pitched, and of the end walls one is half taken up by the access stairs, and the other one has a door to a second part of the attic, as well as a large brick chimney. So this is the best I could do - an Ikea display cabinet with machines that fit:
...as well as an antique display cabinet which I bought cheaply with the glass shelf in pieces. I had one cut out of strong 8mm glass, keeping in mind it would have to carry about 50kg of calculators, then it transpired that even though it would fit inside, we couldn't get it inside ... so one of the curved glass windows had to come out. A very stressful moment, because that would have been very expensive and difficult to replace should I have broken it. Luckily, everything went well.
Finally, here is one more picture, which is the one part of the collection that in the minds of visitors transforms my hobby from "on the edge/slightly eccentric" to "over the top". The funny thing is that they usually see it last. You be the judge. Every machine has its individual spotlight,a nd of course the Jion B had to go here, as it fits the colour scheme of the toilet.
