Series 22 Card 34
RAREWRITER is an homage to vintage embossing label makers made by companies like DYMO, Avery and others. If you are someone who has ever used these labels, I don’t need to tell you how cool these are, and for those of you who are wondering what on earth is this, well you will find it interesting to know that these used to be quite the rage back in their time. It’s a mechanical device which embosses letters on vinyl tapes that have adhesive backing. The tapes come in a few different widths and several colors. The raised letters on the labels hits very differently compared to the digital-electronic-precise-labels which we use for everything now. BTW, the instructions provided in the card exactly describe how these things work.
I have fond memories of finding a small red label maker in the house, very similar to the one depicted on the card, and of me as a kid going around labelling things, a window as ‘WINDOW,’ and a sewing machine as ‘SEWING MACHINE,’ lest someone mistook it for a refrigerator.
If you are not sufficiently bored already, you might be someone who would like to get your hands on an old embossing label maker. The good news is that a few companies still sell tapes for these, though the embossing label makers themselves which are available now are cheap plastic things, but fortunately for us a lot of the vintage models can be bought from sites like eBay, the older models are actually good looking and they were built to last, and then there is a difference of night and day between the embossing quality, the vintage ones produce much better-looking letters too.
The label maker in the first picture below is the DYMO Organizer XPress, I got mine from Amazon, the labels it produce are not as good as the ones you can get from older machines but it is pretty inexpensive and it gets the job done. The one in the second picture is the DYMO Tapewriter 1570, these are real old and I was fortunate to get a complete kit in mint condition on eBay. The kit has spare alphabet wheels which allows for printing of vertical letters and a smaller font.
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