A Simpler Type

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Last week I made my now more or less annual trek down to Round Top in central Texas (halfway between Houston and Austin, if that helps) with my daughter for the spring antiques show. I've written about Round Top before--I don't think there is anything else quite like it--and it is such a huge treat, and so anticipated. The big ticketed event of the spring week is a place called Marburger Farm , but there are lots of other venues, most set up in tents, like Marburger, but some in warehouse-like buildings and even barns, plus shopping in the town of Round Top itself. 

Last year I scored a couple of real treasures including a beautiful quilt and my now-beloved Staffordshire dog. This year I said I wasn't really looking for anything, but there was something I'd been keeping an eye out for the last couple of years.

Here's a hint, from this little snippet of a scene in A KILLING OF INNOCENTS where Melody visits her father's newspaper office:

Her spirits rose as she came out of High Street Kensington tube station into the Sunday bustle of the street. Across the way, the bells in the tower of St. Mary Abbott’s chimed one o’clock. The midday sun lit the Great War Memorial, still bedecked in fading poppy wreaths. The flower stall in the church forecourt was doing a brisk business, and Melody decided she’d treat herself to a bouquet of something bright on the way home, red tulips, perhaps.

But first, a little research. When she’d checked in at the paper’s security desk, she took the lift up to the top floor. The newsroom never slept, of course, but the paper always felt quieter to her on a Sunday.

When she was a child, she’d been awed by the clatter and roar of the presses under Fleet Street, but those days were gone, with the presses moving first to Wapping in South London, and now to a huge plant in Broxbourne, in Hertfordshire.

In the newsroom, the clack and ding of typewriters had long since given way to the soft taps of keyboards, but her father kept a collection of vintage typewriters on the sideboard in his office. She had been fascinated by them, and the first thing she’d ever typed had been on his mint-green portable Olivetti. No one had wanted typewriters then—now they were worth a small fortune.

And this year I struck gold.

What a great display! And more!

A bonanza of typewriters!

All working, with manuals, although some of the manuals are copies rather than originals.

There was an Olivetti, like the one in Ivan Talbot's office (although not mint green) but it was way out of my price range. I tried the key action on the ones that were more affordable, and there was one that was just the ticket. In the first photo, it's the one on the righthand side, second from the bottom.

It's a 1957 Smith-Corona, and that was the clincher for me. My mom typed on Smith-Coronas. By the time I was in highschool and hunting and pecking a bit on her machine, she had an electric, but she had manual portables before that. (My parents had their own business and worked from home, so my mom was always typing.) Interestingly, the first Smith-Corona portable electric went on the market the year the same year as this manual model, 1957.

I didn't actually learn to type (because I was lazy and my mom would type my highschool papers for me) until my stint in secretarial school between highschool and college, and that was on an IBM Selectric. That's one of the reasons why my laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad--it's the same touch keypad as the Selectric.

I love the way the key action feels on the Smith-Corona, too, although it turns out that the ribbon lifter needs some adjustment (Rick says he can fix it for me) so I haven't really had a chance to practice.

One thing I wasn't prepared for is how heavy the thing is! I complain about my little laptop which is NOTHING compared to the typewriter. The typewriter weighs a ton! (Don't think I'l be carrying it on a plane, or anywhere else, any time soon.) And no, I definitely do NOT want to try to write a book on a manual typewriter. I am incredibly grateful for word processing and all the associated modern technology.

But I'm fascinated by the history and development of typing, and I like to think of writers before me, tapping away on those lovely bouncy keys. Not to mention that in a power outage, like our Julia Spencer-Fleming is experiencing at the moment, I could actually work...

REDS and readers, any fun typewriter memories for you? What did you learn to type on?

And isn't it cool that typewriters (and fountain pens) are a big thing with younger people these days? (Next thing you know there may be a cult for rotary dial phones...)

Did you learn QWERTY without looking?

HALLIE EPHRON: I'm of the generation that took typing (and stenography, heaven help me) in high school because with that in my resume, I'd never be unemployed. According to my mother.

Back then: Ladies typed. Gents dictated.

My summer school typing class was packed. Anyone else remember learning on a typewriter with blank keys?

Do schools teach touch-typing any more, or do kids just arrive in the world with their umbilicus attached to a keyboard? Does anyone give 'thumbing' classes, because I could use one instead of stabbing my index finger at my cell phone's virtual keyboard.

"Touch type" anyone? How did you learn? And do the men in your family do it?

DEBORAH CROMBIE: My parents had their own business and my mom did the typing and the bookkeeping, but I do remember my dad typing his own letters sometimes. I doubt he was a touch typist, though. I managed to finagle my mom into typing papers for me all the way through high school and my first year of college.

Then my parents sent me to secretarial school so that, regardless of future education, I'd have the skills to support myself. For this I am forever grateful!! (Can you imagine writing and editing a manuscript in longhand???)
But I suspect that "secretarial schools" have fallen by the wayside. (Do people even use the term "touch typing" anymore?) So where do people learn all of those skills, because there are certainly still a lot of jobs that require them?

Hallie, I didn't learn to type on blank keys, but my secretarial school used IBM Selectrics (yes, that's how long ago it was) in their classes, and I was permanently bonded to the IBM keyboard. My laptops have for many years been Lenovo Thinkpads--which used to be made by IBM and have keypads that are famous for duplicating the same touch as the IBM Selectric.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I took typing in high school--the keyboards DID have letters. And I am pretty sure there were no electric typewriters.  We had manual ones, Underwood, I think. Anyway.  Sisters, I was TERRIBLE. I never learned to touch type, like we were supposed to, because I was too impatient, and realized I could just memorize the paragraph and then look at the keys and type it, and that was faster.  Also ridiculous.

So, weirdly, now I am a really fast typist, and can touch type amazingly well--as long as I am not trying to. If I try to, disaster. If I just go with it, and Zen it, I'm a whiz.

Now, usually I look at the keys, but I am still so impatient that my brain goes faster than the keys can work, so my work is fraught with typos. FRAUGHT.   And I wind up typing everything twice, essentially, to fix all the mistakes. SO DUMB.

LUCY BURDETTE:  I’m pretty sure I learned in high school, though there was the secretarial track and the academic track, and I definitely was not secretary material. In college, where I majored in French literature, I had a little manual typewriter with all the French accents on it to write my thesis. I am so sorry that I got rid of that little machine now!

By the time I got to graduate school, I was a pretty good typist. Never will be as fast as Hallie, though, I’ve seen her type and it’s like a wildfire! Now I have a special ergonomic keyboard so I had to relearn where the keys are. They gave you a little booklet with all these exercises to do. And boy did I hate dedicating the time. But it was worth it and now I use it easily.

RHYS BOWEN: The typewriter was my enemy! I never learned typing at my highly academic girls school. I was given a portable typewriter for my 17 th birthday and cursed that the ideas flowed more quickly than my fingers moved.

I finally took a typing course in my twenties but I was never very good and actually sent my early manuscripts out to be typed, thus cutting considerably into my profits! Then computers were invented... Happiest day of my life! At last I could type as fast as I could think, and never had to make spelling errors.

INGRID THOFT: I have one name for you:  Mavis Beacon. 

Typing was not on the curriculum at school, but shortly after college graduation when I was job searching, I devoted time each day to learning to type with Mavis Beacon.  Mavis is a fabulous software program—yes, it’s still available!—that makes learning to type a breeze. 

I remember sitting at the kitchen table playing Mavis’ fun games, the result of which is I type like a speed racer today.  I can’t imagine writing without being able to type, and I urge all the young people I know to spend some time with Mavis.  Regardless of the path they may take in life, stellar typing skills will always be an asset.

JENN McKINLAY: I did take typing in high school. It was mandatory for boys and girls. I didn't much care for it. I could never figure out why the letters didn't just go in alphabetical order and it was not intuitive at all, plus I had to sit next to Kevin Smith, football player, who used to get frustrated and punch the keys...with his fist. I'm a better typist now but I still glance at the keyboard occasionally.

I may have to visit Ingrid's Mavis B because if I could type even faster, well, LOOK OUT!

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: In high school, when they offered typing, my mother suggested I NOT take it, since then I'd get stuck doing the secretarial work in whatever job I was in. Which was great advice from an ambitious feminist, right up until the computer revolution, when suddenly everyone was expected to type their own stuff. Well, and I became an author. (Side note: my mom herself is a really good typist, and used to do all my papers in high school. Thanks, Mom!)

For high school graduation, I got a fancy Selectric with the white tape that enabled you to erase without using Wite-Out(TM). I became a fast enough four-fingered typist that I would regularly snarl the elements (for the youth reading this, the letters were on actual, physical slugs of metal, and if you got too many of them near one another at the same time, they would catch on each other.) I tended to use Hank's technique: I would remember the sentence or paragraph in the draft and just reproduce it while looking at the keys. This means that now, as I draft on my laptop, I still look at the keys and not the page as I go along. Not the best form, but I seem to get it done.

BTW - and Jenn may back me up with the Hooligans experience - but none of my kids took formal typing in high school. Instead, they learned playing keyboard games when they were very young, and are all natural touch typists now. And thumb-typists on their phones, but that's a different conversation...


HALLIE: 'Fess up. Do you need to look at the keys? Do you type with all your fingers or just stab the keyboard with your index finger? And how can I learn to thumb?