by Joshua Cohen
The mostly blind, syphilitic Friedrich Nietzsche bought a Malling Hansen writing ball, for 375 reichsmarks (plus shipping and handling), in 1882. One of the first texts he produced was a poem:
SCHREIBKUGEL IST EIN DING GLEICH MIR: VON EISEN
UND DOCH LEICHT ZU VERDREHN ZUMAL AUF REISEN.
GEDULD UND TAKT MUSS REICHLICH MAN BESITZEN
UND FEINE FINGERCHEN, UNS ZU BENUETZEN.
THE WRITING BALL IS A THING LIKE ME: OF IRON
YET EASILY TWISTED WHILE TRAVELING.
AMPLE PATIENCE AND TACT ARE REQUIRED
IN ADDITION TO FINE FINGERING, FOR OUR USE.
Nietzsche believed that this new way of writing influenced the writing itself: “Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts.” As his syphilis worsened, so did his hand, degenerating into a spiky hermetic script, which caused him to rely on the writing ball exclusively. Nietzsche’s style became retooled, aphoristically—STOP—with a Takt (the word also means “stroke” or “tempo”) reminiscent of telegraphy. The writing ball received his thoughts, and transmitted them too—From: the messiness of mind To: a product as neutral in appearance as a form letter. Fit for the files. Archivable. Immediately posthumous.
The mind had lined the page (slab, tablet)—or the stilus did, ruling, creating rules, replaced by the lead plummet, replaced by ink—until 1770, when John Tetlow, British, patented a ruling machine, and thereafter paper was manufactured preruled. In 1844, Charles Fenerty, Canadian, and Friedrich Gottlob Keller, German, independently succeeded in making cheaper paper from pulped wood. Businesses that produced paper went on to diversify margins and line quantity/spacing, even while businesses that consumed paper advocated for standards. Characters were to be contained between two lines of uniform height, unless the paper was to be used in handwriting instruction, in which case there might be an additional line, at middle, indicating where to dot an “i” or cross a “t.”
But the typewriter marked a return to purity (assaulted by noisy clickery). The page was a place not just to express but to set, typeset, yourself—freedom in fictility; each sitting a concrete poem:
MERKE
—
SPÜREN, VERNEHMEN
AUFMERKEN
—
SICH HINWENDEN ZU, DABEIBLE IBEN, GESPANNT WARTEN, LAUERN
BE-MERKEN
—
VORBLICKEN—ÜBERSICHT, »FREI«
AB-MERKEN→
MAL FESTNEHMEN
SICH MERKEN
←MERKMAL BEHALTEN, AUFBE-WAHREN, VERZEICHNEN, VERMERKEN
VERMERKEN
—
IN MAL FESTHALTEN
BEMERKBAR MACHEN
—
KUND GEBEN.
TO NOTICE
—
TO SENSE, TO PERCEIVE
TO ATTEND TO
—
TO TURN TOWARD, TO STAY WITH, ANXIOUS WAITING, LURKING
TO NOTE
—
TO PREVIEW—OVERVIEW, “FREE”
TO DE-NOTE→
TO PREHEND FIRMLY AS SIGN
TO RETAIN
←TO KEEP TRACK, STORE, REGISTER, NOTE DOWN
TO MARK DOWN
—
TO FIX AS A SIGN
TO MAKE NOTICEABLE
—
TO MAKE KNOWN.
Above are Martin Heidegger’s notes for a 1939 lecture on the language-development theories of Johann Gottfried Herder (Vom Wesen der Sprache, On the Essence of Language). Their presentation is inextricable from the process of their creation; they could only have been created on a typewriter; they could only have been published as typed; only Heidegger could have typed them, and interpreted the mnemonic of their formatting. Each line marked an idea to be expanded upon, to be expended in breath.
Heidegger had spent WWI typing meteorological reports and censoring mail for the Wehrmacht. He spent WWII—the war of the Schreibtischmörder, the “desk-murderer,” whose brief was to kill by typewriter alone, with deportation lists and Zyklon B orders—as a Nazified professor at the University of Freiburg, pondering the comparatively trivial effects of technology. In 1942–43, he delivered Parmenides, a lecture on the Eleatics that deals peripherally with the “hand,” and how it discloses itself in the “act” (which includes the act of writing): “Man acts [handelt] through the hand [Hand], as the hand is, together with the word, the fundamental distinction of man.” To Heidegger, the hand is humanity’s basic greeting, farewell, and unspoken “word,” which shakes to seal a vow or oath, and shapes the tools that, as if to return the clasp, shape humanity. By 1949, though, in The Question Concerning Technology, the hand has been converted to its use-value, five fingers’ worth of labor. What effectuates this conversion is the typewriter—a novelty halfway between a “tool” (handheld) and a “machine” (powered). The typewriter reframes the hand by concealing both the hand-as-script (handwriting), and the hand-as-word (speech), behind a black ribbon of inhuman uniformity.
Technology, to Heidegger, is whatever directs existence toward utility. Its expression is solely in its “enframing” (Ge-Stell), or the way by which technology recontextualizes all objects and even subjects by function: stones enframed as cutters of stones, rocks as producers of fire—a painting framed as a material asset, music measured only to rally morale or seduce (reproduced images, and recorded music, popularized these intentions). It follows, logically, that all frames are reversible, and might be hung upside-down: A man makes a thing, until the thing remakes the man. For Heidegger, the only way out of these co-instrumentalizing binds is Gelassenheit—“releasement”—which is to accept technology’s outward convenience, but refuse its inward reconfiguration. How to do this, however, he never explains.
The typewriters used by Heidegger and Nietzsche were not quite the same. Nietzsche’s ball keyboard was positioned atop the paper, obscuring synchronic visual confirmation of the strokes. Text was checked on the Remington only by lifting its shutters. It was the Underwood of 1897 that made text visible the moment it was typed—turning writing into reading, or editing—but not even that provided a substitute ductus. Angelo Beyerlen, first typewriter dealer in Germany: “The spot where the sign to be written occurs,” is “precisely what…cannot be seen.”
* * *
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WITH THE TYPEWRITER, handedness was outsourced/downsized to the fingers, which cramped less easily, or dispersed the cramping—the thumb that opposes man and ape, the forefinger that accuses, the middle that gestures rudely, the ring that betroths, the pinkie almost vestigial, useless. The self would be turned into a secretary, and secretary into a job. Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, 1883, might be profitably read not just as fictionalized autobiography, written for money in a rush, but also as the first work delivered to a publisher in “typescript”—though Twain left its typing to an amanuensis.
Life, then, existed in multiple forms, in multiple locations: Twain’s own handwritten manuscript, the typed copy made by his secretary, Harry Clarke (the first man to type in what would become an almost totally female sector), Twain’s hand cor
rections to the copy, which Clarke either retyped or sent straight to the publisher, James Osgood & Co., which set it. Galley proofs sloughed through the post, for further corrections. The text was reset. The book, at last, was published.
Though it might be stressed what setting, and resetting, meant: the laborious arrangement of text by the character, by the cast-metal sort—by hand. This process had been aided by the cliché, metal sorts containing commonplace phrases, “for instance,” “for example,” “as it were,” “for that matter”—rather, their translated equivalents, as the cliché was first defined in France. The sound made when a phrase was cast, when the hot hackneyed metal words were dumped from their matrix into water to cool, was said to be, in French, cliché—clich, clich, cliché. That steaming onomatopoeia had acquired sense by 1890, with the introduction of the linotype machine, which allowed compositors to enter the text to be printed on a ninety-character keyboard. The typed characters would be retrieved, assembled into lines—“line o’type”—that were then cast to produce the “slug,” capable of making nearly half a million imprints—“stereotypes,” “multiple impressions”—before dulling. The larger the print run, the more useful the clichés: Steel was used for more widely reproduced periodicals (for ads and syndicated columns especially), lead/antimony/tin for lit.
Twain’s books would benefit from this innovation, never Twain himself. He’d invested $300,000 of his royalties and wife’s inheritance in the linotype’s rival, the Paige Compositor, which—though it operated on a similar keying principle (except that the keys didn’t release the sorts, rather directed a mechanical hand to pick them)—wasn’t designed to cast type, only to arrange and set it. Though the Compositor printed 60 percent faster, and wasted no metal, James Paige was a relentless tinkerer, and by the time his invention was ready in 1894, the linotype had prevailed—the printing industry had stopped recycling foundry type and started casting anew for each job. Twain went bankrupt; Paige went flat broke into an unmarked grave.
Life on the Mississippi and the linotype are the beginning and end of a line—the carriage bell ringing on the mechanization of authorship. A book that took an author a year, or months, to write, and took a secretary just a week to type, could take a proficient linotype compositor only a single day to set, and though the book would exist in bound form for the public, and the typescript might be retained for posterity, the metal lines, if the book didn’t sell, could always be melted down to be cast again for another author’s attempt.
The compositor’s great struggle was between accuracy and velocity. Words per minute (WpM) was an invention of shorthand. Proficient writers of Pitman, a phonetic system of single strokes for consonants and single dots for vowels, developed by Isaac Pitman (1813–97), were capable of transcribing up to 300 WpM. The average longhand of the time wrote approx. 30 WpM of memorized text, approx. 22 WpM of copied text, which was also the range of the average telegraph speed, the dots—and dashes—that communicated text neither strictly memorized, nor strictly copied, rather loosely both. In the 1890s, with telegraphy just starting its tap through the radio waves, CpM (characters per minute) became the standard rubric—the conversion rate between C and W commonly taken as 5:1. Speed typists vied for championships to publicize their courses. 123 WpM and 590 CpM were claimed as world records, simultaneously. But such feats were unsustainable beyond the minute mark. Consistency became the distinction, if not in competition then in business.
The emphasis, in courses, was on inculcating blindness—another debility the keyboard had been developed to ameliorate: A true typist would ignore the hands, and produce by touch alone. Early typewriters obscured the paper, but the mastering of later models required a shield over the keys. The focus was to be on the paper, or on nothing: “There are a few operators who can do this,” according to the National Stenographer, 1892, “and I believe the number would be largely increased if they would learn to operate on a machine with a Blank Keyboard, that is, with no letters or signs on the keys.”
The QWERTY keyboard—named for the first five characters of its top lettered row—was set by the Sholes-Soule-Glidden typewriter and popularized by the Remington No. 2, 1878. In America to popularize was to standardize, and the typewriter made this layout, and this principle, mandatory. The QWERTY keyboard, a 1:1 map of characters to the physical placement of the typebars they controlled, was arranged to prevent the bars from crashing into one another, from sticking—jammmming—smutting the page. This is why “w” and “h,” “q” and “u,” common diagraphs or syllabic couplings in English, are separated at such distance. But other languages favor different companions, and even require diacritics—ãe, dž, eû, øy—not to mention umlauts, which are diagraphs themselves: As a refugee in California, Theodor Adorno (1903–69) used an American Underwood that turned his Ästhetik to aesthetic every time. As all German nouns, not just proper nouns, require capitalization, German typists have to make more shifts to and from the SHIFT key—another introduction of the Remington No. 2, before which all typewriters wrote in all CAPS. Depending on the model, SHIFT either lifted the bar “basket,” or dropped the back-and-forthing, rolling “carriage,” allowing the bar to meet the platen, and so the page, across more of its surface. This doubled each bar’s capacity: minuscules were added under Majuscules; the 3 key, when shifted, produced the # sign. In Nazi Germany, G. F. Grosser typewriters shifted the 3 to the rune, while Seidel & Naumann models assigned that same function to the 5 key, which on American typewriters reproduces %.
Electric typewriters, in which pressure on the keys didn’t control the levers that raised the bars, but rather triggered a motor to accomplish that task, were intended to reduce fatigue. Later this triggering was accomplished by a dedicated button or switch, which took even less effort to depress. The 1961 IBM Selectric completed the circle: The stationary bar basket was replaced with a ball containing every character—a successor kugel, turned from input mechanism (the writing ball’s round keyboard) to output, and made to rotate and move laterally with the carriage. This innovation freed the typewriter from jamming, and allowed each language to reconfigure the keyboard’s layout for itself. But all the major movements in this direction—whether seeking a better universal layout than QWERTY, or a better autochthonal layout attuned, say, to word formation across Latin alphabet language groups (pan-Iberian and pan-Slavic keyboards), or within one single Latinesque alphabet language (Turkish)—proved failures.*2
Songs could be recorded and subsequently notated for sheet music; movies could be filmed and subsequently photographed for PR stills, but inefficient habit is not so easily back-engineered. Typewriting practice was as difficult to erase as type itself, and instead of a fresh sheet, corrections abounded. “QWERTY”: an adjective meaning “irreplaceable but obsolete.” “QWERTY”: a contronym to be corroborated by computers.
* * *
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WILLIAM JAMES SERVED AS his own typist. 1896, the first typewritten letter to his brother: “Dear Henry, I hope you will not be too offended at this typewritten letter to read it.” “Dear Henry” preferred dictation. On his deathbed, in 1916, he deliriously dictated letters as Napoleon, and, following his death, his secretary, Theodora Bosanquet, claimed that not only was she still receiving James’s words, but also that Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, and John Galsworthy—though likewise deceased—were nonetheless vying for her stenographic assistance. In the Jameses’ milieu: Point size of fonts was shrinking; space between words (“tracking”), and lines (“leading”) of text, shrinking; more words were fit on the page, which wasn’t the only reason why books were getting shorter: The three-volume Victorian novel was going out of fashion, becoming two volumes, becoming one.
Between 1890, when Henry published The Tragic Muse, and 1910, when William died, the number of books published per year in the United States nearly tripled (from 4,559 to 13,470). Journalism matched that growth. Quarterlies became monthlies became weeklies due to
circulation demand and advertising revenue, while the linotype caused the number of daily newspapers to nearly triple as well (from approx. 1,000 in 1890 to approx. 2,600 in 1910). But expansion for industry was, in terms of individual publications, contraction of readership. There was too much to read, in too many forms (illustrated magazine, Sunday supplement), and by 1900 a new notice was appearing at the bottom of items, “continued on the next page”; the purpose of this “skip,” or “jump,” being to accommodate as many “headlines” as might fit on the “frontpage,” the most pressing “above the fold.” A concerned citizen’s only hope was to read faster. To skim, scan, cluster, chunk. Utterly stripped of religion’s preoccupation with quality, nineteenth-century attention was concerned with quantity, and while in literature the criterion considered was duration—girls musing out windows, boys contemplating the heath—in science it was capacity: how much of what can be handled.
The exclusively literary rhythms of the past—poetic meter, euphuistic and periodic prose—were reconceived as scientific phenomena. To George Eliot, novelistic form was a reckoning between the brevity of important events and the length between the events—the spells of subsidiary action, or introspection—that imparted their importance. While to her companion, George Henry Lewes (1817–78), this flow—whether artificial in booktime, or natural in lifetime—was to be experienced in “waves”: