“The typewriter was invented at least fifty-two times, as one tinkerer after another groped toward a usable design. One early writing mechanism looks like a birthday cake, another like a pinball machine.”
From Joan Acocella’s entertaining review of Darren Wershler-Henry’s new book “The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting” in the New Yorker. The review is titled “The Typing Life: How Writer’s Used to Write” It is worth the click over.
Some nuggets:
-Mark Twain was the first important writer to deliver a typewritten manuscript.
-Jack Kerouac could type a hundred words a minute.
-There was a silent typewriter that hit the market in the nineteen-forties and nobody wanted it.
– William Burroughs and Paul Auster are among the writers that have “felt haunted, controlled, by their typewriters.”
Now that would be a good topic for a book club rotation. Books by “typewriter-haunted authors” then after everyone picked their book they would all watch the Coen brother’s film “Barton Fink”
More:
Jeremy Mayer’s great typewriter assemblages.
Modern Mechanix has a post on the October 1948 article in Popular Mechanics on keyboard art.
Richard Polt’s The Classic Typewriter Page is comprehensive. Don’t miss “Are The Bush Documents Fake” an authorative look at the documents used by “60 Minutes” to support the allegation that President Bush did not properly perform his National Guard duties. This turned into Rathergate.
If you miss the sound of typebars striking paper then add the typewriter sound to your keyboard here.