Ebay: Old *1834* Stampless Cover / Formal Court Letter * Premium Piece - Not!

I can't wait to see who bids on this item:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/127375740223
The cover is in extremely good condition, and seems to have a Free franking in red.

But when I look at the insert, something seems rather strange (sorry for the blurry image):

When I asked the seller, they stated that this is an authentic typewritten letter, because that's the way they did it back then. I sent one last followup asking how a letter typewritten in 1834 could have the beautiful right justification style that was perfected by computers in the late 1900's. I'm still waiting for a reply.

I suspect that this is a letterpress printed form letter. The typewriter was not really introduced until 1874 (Wikipedia).

I

Not to mention typewriters were not commercially available until decades after 1834.

So it is possible that this is the original letter from 1834? Was right-justification a thing back then?

For hand assembled type, right, left, centered and left-right justification was possible as well as done.

I have also personally hand set all of the above. Hot metal type machine could do so as well but they too did not appear until decades after 1834. I have done the same with hot metal type.

When you say late 1900s computers, do you mean late 20th century, or late 1900s? I don't know of too many computers from the 1900s personally, but I also don't know much about this subject.

This is interesting. I am going back and forth on whether I think it could be genuine. I did manual typesetting in a class in the early 90s, and while you can fully justify letterpress text, it requires the manual insertion of spaces between words (not individual letters). I can't tell if any words are stretched out - that would be an instant sign of a forgery. If genuine, the letters would leave an impression on the paper. We can't tell that from this image. I can't imagine what profit or purpose there would be in creating something like this if it were a forgery.

I posted the following Post Office document in a thread the other day. It is dated 1833 and is right justified.




Several other documents in that thread were also right justified, but they were dated in the 1840s...

https://goscf.com/t/90244

MikeL

I humbly stand corrected ... based on the various examples and comments, it could indeed be a real document from 1834.



I was referring to computer software from the 1970's and later. (Just a wild guess, but certainly in that timeframe.)

Well the 1900s could refer to the Aughts as 1900-1909 and late in that period would be a bit before computers.Think how we refer to the 2000-2010 period now.