Customer Reviews

The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

This work is about a fascinating subject, especially I suspect to all those who have known the transition, first from the handwriting to the typing , and then from the typing to the word- processor modes of human expression. Wershler- Henry is interested in revealing to us the way the parts of the machine work together, and as he indicates the way to do this is to look at them when they have been discombobulated, when they are taken apart and seen not as the height of progress and invention, but as mere random pieces put together. Even more importantly he tells us his goal in writing this book is " to understand how typewriting shaped and changed not only Literature, but also our culture and sense of ourselves".
He ranges over a wide variety of subjects and includes descriptions of how the typewriter influenced the writing lives of some of the great literary masters. He too surveys what the change from the relatively harder - work of typewriting to the smooth more soundless touch of computer keys means for us.
His chapters are interestingly titled for example: Typewriting and Dictation, Typewriter Nostalgia, , Typewriting and Speed, Typewriting and Discipline, Writing Blind, Poet's Stave and Bar, Typewriters at War, Typewriting After the Typewriter.
He certainly tells us more about 'typewriting' than we who for years stabbed and banged on our favorite instrument could have ever understood of its complexity and significance.
Ah for my old Smith- Corona .

This is an awful book! It is not a history, but a random haphazzard discussion of "the typewriter as discourse".

I really wanted a good social history of the typewriter. I wanted to read about the science, economics, business, and politics that created it and vice versa. But this is a sort of stream-of-consciousness meandering of seemingly random thoughts about the typewriter, people who wrote about typewriters, people who used them in various ways.

It makes little sense, seems highly contrived, and I really very amazed that the respected Cornell Univ. Press would publish this. They must owe this guy.

I heard an interview with the author on NPR which was fascinating. Unfortunately that did not carry over to his writing style. I found this book to be a bit like reading a stream-of-conciousness history of typewriting. It seemed that whatever entered the author's mind was then placed on a page with no logical progression. I also felt the book covered very odd things that had very little to do with typewriting, like an entire section devoted to rambling about EBay and random typing knick knacks. Overall I was very disappointed when I had been hoping for so much more.

I bought this book because I needed to know more about the typewriter in occupation and enjoyment since I'm a history buff, and I learned about it at the Arlington University Typewriter Store up beyond North Cambridge, so I accessed Amamzon.com and located it - easy as pie! Thank you so much for helping me obtain this book - sincerely, Laura A F

Did you know that in 1857, Dr. Samuel Ward Francis invented a "printing machine" that looked like an abbreviated piano keyboard attached to a huge daisy wheel? You can find it on p. 58 in the book.

Did you know that in the early days of typewriting, it was the humans, not the machines, that were known as "typewriters"? Wershler-Henry devotes several chapters just to the concept of dictation and amanuensis (look it up).

Did you know that the concept of double-spacing after a period in a sentence can be pretty much ignored now, in this age of word processing? It's because characters in most word processing font types are proportionally spaced (not so in the old typewriters). So now, when you type a long paragraph in Word, for instance, you might notice what's called "rivering", as typographers call it -- the tendency for a stream of white to gulley down a page where all the doublespaces gather. Because we're adding space where it's no longer needed.

Did you know that in the 1960s, Elisabeth Mann Borgese (daughter of Thomas Mann) taught her beloved English Setter (Arli) to "type"? He got up to a vocabulary of 60 words, using 17 letters. He even got to the point where he was communicating simple feelings about himself. Or so she imagined. You'll find his cute picture in the book, punching big oversized letter keys with his nose.

Did you know that an experiment with a zillion chimpanzees typing several months non-stop eventually produced a real typewritten word? (It refers to one of our favorite holidays.) There was more. It had to do with Shakespeare... and Hamlet.

This book has other fun tidbits, including glimpses at non-QWERTY keyboard configurations that failed to take off, such as the "Dvorak Simplified" keyboard. Oh, how we resist change, even when it makes sense! Think how little relevance QWERTY now has in this age of text-messaging, when we use phone-centric keypad arrangements.

Did you know that the adding machine was invented by the grandfather of William S. Burroughs (another William S. Burroughs), famous novelist of such rambling and free-form cut-n-pasted texts ("cut-ups") as The Naked Lunch? Novelist Burroughs spoke about the "soft machine" and said, "Words don't belong to anyone... they have a vitality of their own." I like that. This brings to mind the famous mid-60s pop-art soft sculpture, "The Typewriter" by Claes Oldenburg.

There's more too .. such as a discussion of the Dan Rather CBS cover-up incident with the doctored document on Bush's preferential treatment in the Texas Air National Guard. Well, "typewriter forensics" helped clear up that little lie. You might also like the description of the World War II enigma machine.

Anyway, this book's packed with fun facts about that clickety-clackety machine and its typewriter tappers. It is a bit disjointed, but that's what makes it fun.

Reading all about typewriting made me want to back-track and read about pencils. So I picked up a related book, The Pencil, by Henry Petroski, but this much drier book didn't intrigue me nearly as much. Just sharpened my mind a bit. The Iron Whim did more than that -- it entertained me.

While this is fascinating when the author actually recounts the effect typewriters had on society, it frequently dips into pseudo-analysis where the author intrudes and makes unsustainable claims (for example, that the typewriter was developed as an instrument of "truth"). The author would have been much better off sticking with the story and anecdotes, which illustrate his points better than any bilious, self-conscious asides. It is worth reading, overall, if you can ignore the academic effluent.

I would have rated it higher except for the exremely poor copy editing. What percentage of Arli's errors were simple keying errors? We'll never know, because the number is missing.

Other places, sentence fragments are arbitrarily repeated.

You'd think this thing was typed on a typewriter by a monkey. Or a cow. Or a cockroach.

Overall, quite a fun book.