September 11, 2015, 4:40 pm
I spotted this unusual Smith Premier"Junior" portable typewriter - very similar to a Remette - in an antiques store in Fyshwick, Canberra, yesterday. The sellers claim it has a French keyboard, but it is QWERTY. The shift key, nonetheless, says "Majuscules" (uppercase in French).The closest I can find to it in Beeching is "Egyptian (French for Egypt)", but both of these have AZERTY layouts. Beeching's "English for Egypt" keyboard is QWERTY, but has an entirely different layout to this one. There are also some interesting keys, such as two variations of the £ pound sterling symbol. Is the other one Italian (lira)? Turkish perhaps? ₤? It's not Egyptian, as far as I can tell, unless it's simply designed to differentiate with the English pound. As for the P with a stroke through the descender, I cannot say. A form of chi-rho? When the letter P has a horizontal stroke through its descender, it usually means that the letters er or ar should be added to make per or par. Both these characters are on Beeching's three Egyptian keyboards, but only in these spots on the two AZERTY layouts.
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