Typewriters, Computers, and Creating? 227
saddleupsancho writes "Today's NY Times reports that Cormac McCarthy is auctioning the 45-year-old Olivetti manual typewriter on which all his novels, screenplays, plays, short stories, and much of his correspondence were written, to benefit the Sante Fe Institute where he is a Research Fellow. What would happen decades from now if, say, Richard Powers or Neal Stephenson attempted to auction their desktops or laptops? Setting aside completely any comparison among the three authors, is there something more intrinsically interesting and valuable, less ephemeral and interchangeable, about a typewriter vs. a computer as an instrument of literary creation? Or is the current generation just as sentimental about their computer-based devices as McCarthy's generation is about his Olivetti? Would you offer as much for McCarthy's input device if it were a generic PC, Mac, or Linux box as you would for his Olivetti?"
Neal Stephenson uses a fountain pen (Score:2, Interesting)
Does longevity matter? (Score:1, Interesting)
It would be plausible that his typewriter is still functioning, and possibly still as usable as the day it was made. Thus the reason he was able to use it for "all" of his works, which arguably is the main reason it achieves such high value.
Most computers, on the other hand, last at most 10 years or so, after which the writer necessarily has to purchase another computer, on which they continue producing their works. The fact that the works are split amongst machines, some of which may have produced more popular works, might contribute to lessening their respective intrinsic values.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
I walked up and sat at the computer. It's my new consoler. My writing has doubled in power and output since I have gotten it. It's a magic thing. I sit in front of it like most people sit in front of their tv sets.
"It's only a glorified typewriter," my son-in-law told me once.
But he isn't a writer. He doesn't know what it is when words bite into space, flash into light, when the thoughts that come into the head can be followed at once by words, which encourages more thoughts and more words to follow. With a typewriter it's like walking through mud. With a computer, it's ice skating. It's a blazing blast. Of course, if there's nothing inside you, it doesn't matter. And then there's the clean-up work, the corrections. Hell, I used to have to write everyhing twice. The first time to get it down and the second time to correct the errors and fuckups. This way, it's one run for the fun, the glory and the escape.
You sound like a wanna be poet living in his mothers basement.
Re:Yes (Score:4, Interesting)
I actually write (words, not code), partially for a living. I do all of my writing longhand at first. Then when I fire up the computer, I am already in my second of countless drafts, all edited on paper first by hand.
I actually remember having to use a typewriter in middle school. There's no way you could drag me back to those days. They jam, run out of ink, are unforgiving, etc. Plus the obvious - once a letter is typed, it's typed.
There's no point in idealizing the creative process, or in claiming typewriters - pure technology, if only mechanical - are superior. They're tools, and in good hands, good things result. In bad hands, bad things result.
That said, I'd buy one of Burroughs's typewriters.
And 100 years ago (Score:3, Interesting)
A real writing instrument isn't mechanical. It requires the human hand to function, it lives and breathes the soul of a person, revealing their character and mood with every stroke.
Typewriters are machines. They separate you from the page, making each letter exactly the same. They jam. They're too heavy. Sometimes they break. /postmodern wit
But for real, use what works for you. Writers fall in love with the tools that let them write, not matter how new or old.
I'd like something in between -- an e-ink screen with a super basic word processor and a USB port for my clicky keyboard, as God intended. Hook up the flash drive, dump it to a laptop to do the final drafts. No distractions, and few limitations for moving text around. I don't care who says what, I can write far faster on a computer than I can with any other method. There's just no comparison.
Re:typewriter still works? (Score:2, Interesting)
But you can easily remanufacture an existing ink ribbon, OTOH, you cant do the same with a dead hard disk.
Another advantage of the typewriter over the PC: even if both works, a vintage typewriter will always be compatible with today's office supplements (paper), and its easy to extract the data inserted (read the paper with your eyeballs, or OCR it). A 20+ years old PC uses physical media that aren't produced anymore, and its far more difficult to extract the data (old media, connections).
Physicality (Score:4, Interesting)
The Olivetti has worth because of its link to a physical product. I wouldn't value the PC or Mac of an author as much because it was only a general-purpose machine that happened to be used as a literary tool by virtue of the software on it. And I wouldn't pay anything for a decades-old binary image of Emacs. When writing on computer, the text becomes its own thing, it transcends the physical. In some ways, I dislike it because of that. I really enjoy the physical link with the text I get when writing with pen, when clacking on a manual typewriter, or otherwise. The advantages of text sublimated from the physical are great--better storage and search, versioning, editing, independent control of presentation, logical layout, etc. But it makes the tool used to make it less interesting, more mundane, more merely processing. The Olivetti, like my Pelikan, are precision tools purposely made for writing. In this way they become the paraphernalia of the writer, the adjutants of his talent. You pay for that connection. With stuff like this it's always the connection that's important. Beige boxes--even flashy Macs--don't have it.
Analog (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
So what's the question? (Score:3, Interesting)
Is it "Cormac McCarthy [link to article on author and his work] is auctioning the 45-year-old Olivetti manual typewriter, on which all his novels, screenplays, plays, short stories, and much of his correspondence were written; is there something ... intrinsically interesting and valuable", based on the entirety or on a portion thereof?
Or is it "a guy is selling a thing he wrote stuff with; think it's worth something"?
I'd buy Isaac Asimov's word processor, typewriter or chalk board. I wouldn't buy kdawson's Beowulf cluster of Soviet Russian Overlords running 6 flavors of *nix, and a direct neural-to-keyboard port interface.
I think it's safe to assume the guy is selling his history, not the tech. And certainly not the brand, because (speaking as a past office equipment repairer) Vettis suck.
Underwood and Jar Jar Binks (Score:3, Interesting)
One of my ex-girlfriends had this gorgeous Underwood typewriter which she was given as a gift and she displays in her livingroom. It has a nice aesthetic quality which engages the imagination. --If it had been owned by a famous writer from its age, then it would send thrill-chills down my spine just being near it. --Imagine Mark Twain's fountain pen (or whatever he used) on your desk.
Perhaps when enough time has passed that computers and keyboards are irrelevant, out-moded technology, where few enough still exist that they are museum pieces from a past age, then I imagine they will hold a similar aesthetic quality for people. Especially if you happened to own one which belonged to a famous, culture-shaping individual.
But I suspect we'll have to wait another century or so before we know who will be remembered and revered and who will be lost in time.
Roddenberry? Maybe. I'd place my bets on Charles Schultz and Bill Waterson more than I do on Neal Stephenson. -George Lucas, too, if he'd had the good grace to die before Phantom Menace. (Sorry, George, but it's true.)
-FL
Durability, nothing more. (Score:3, Interesting)
Technology is technology; the more modern, the more ephemeral. People get attached to things that have durability.
My grandmother was a minor author, with five books or pamphlets under her belt. She wrote them all, in addition to her personal correspondence, on an Underwood manual typewriter from the 1890s. I've had it cleaned and serviced, and expect that it will continue to work just fine for another 120 years, assuming we can still get the ribbons (and if not, making them doesn't seem that daunting). Every letter that I type on it, every journal entry, connects me to her because she used it for so long.
In contrast, since my first laptop purchase in 1992 or 1993, I've had eight or nine of them. They don't last. There's only one that I remember fondly (and still have a working model) but the likelihood that it will work in 20 years is quite low. The battery certainly will no longer hold any appreciable charge. My current laptop could disappear and be replaced with a newer model and I'd not really blink.
My grandmother's typewriter has a cast iron frame and steel parts. My best laptops have had cast magnesium frames and mostly plastic parts. In the 50 years that my grandmother used her typewriter, some of the letters started to show wear. My laptops have universally shown keyboard wear in under 2 years, most in under 1 year.
If computers had an appreciable lifetime beyond two or three years, then quite possibly, we might find the same attachment, but we don't. The only real attachment that people have are to some keyboards, most notably the IBM Model M, which is built like an old-style typewriter.
Re:What will happen is plastic in landfill (Score:5, Interesting)
A 45 year old typewriter looks good on display and most probably still types perfectly well. A 45 year old Dell will be a pile of plastic dust with an exploded lithium battery.
Painfully true. Restoring old computers is incredibly difficult. The sad thing about the Computer Museum in Silicon Valley is that almost nothing works. They've succeeded in restoring two IBM 1401 computers, but they had several of the original design team available. None of the their early personal computers are displayed as working devices.
On the other hand, I have a Teletype Model 15, designed in 1930 and built during WWII, working. [aetherltd.com] I've even interfaced it to RSS and SMS feeds. Those machines were very well designed, overbuilt, and can run for decades if properly maintained. All mine needed was a thorough cleaning and oiling. [aetherltd.com] All the metal is high quality steel. The main frame parts are steel castings, and all stamped parts are from stock at least 1/16 thick. And the machine has over 500 oiling points, ranging from a dozen oil reservoirs with spring-loaded caps to hundreds of points that just need a drop of oil.
Don't overrate mechanical nostalgia, though. Most consumer mechanical devices of that period were not very good. Many contain "pot metal", with a composition so awful that parts shatter if dropped, or simply with age. Early low-end wiring materials didn't last. Early plastics became brittle with age. Those gadgets were discarded long ago. The ones still around are the good ones.
typewriters and the Kaypro (Score:3, Interesting)
funny - without knowing what the topic was, when I saw the mention of the Olivetti typewriter I had warm memories of the Olivetti portable typewriter I used to pay my way through college by typing other students' term papers.
I don't think the emotional response is limited to typewriters. I remember fondly my first computer - a Kaypro - a portable computer at only 26 pounds! Back then (1983) home computers were unusual and did unusual things. Now they are pretty routine, and many people don't use them for much more than one could do with a high-end smartphone. (Play some music, display some pictures, connect to the internet, check out Twitter...)
And I don't think the issue is just about whether the item works. I'd pay money to get my old Kaypro back, even if it weren't working (not much money, but some). On the other hand, I wouldn't pay anything for its successor, which if i remember correctly was a Fountain XT computer (a cheap IBM knockoff).
Re:Neal Stephenson uses a fountain pen (Score:3, Interesting)
If you go to the Science Fiction Museum [empsfm.org] in Seattle (attached to the Experience Music Project), they have the pens Stephenson used to write (I seem to recall) the Baroque Cycle along with the original manuscript. It's quite a stack of paper!
A cool museum, especially for the Slashdot crowd.
Re:Neal Stephenson uses a fountain pen (Score:3, Interesting)
As any student knows, it's not the amount of time you write, but how fast you write that causes pain. Most days of the Fall 2008 semester, I spent three hours in math class (math grad student now) taking notes, two hours in a drawing class, and then gone home to do homework (scratch-work by hand, then LaTeX), and had no trouble with pain.
Then one summer I took European history, which was you basic projector-based lecture. That is to say, how often the slides were changed was based on how quickly the professor could read; not how quickly you could write. I remember being in pain by the time class ended every day.
So only writing for about an hour+ each day led to more pain than my usual writing/drawing for closer to 6-7 hours a day.
And on top of speed having a large impact, I believe that if someone spends more time writing than thinking, then the final product will likely be horrendous. I know that I spend more time crossing things off than I do in writing while doing homework.
Re:Let's put this in perspective (Score:3, Interesting)
There are two differences between creating on a typewriter and a computer. First, it's a hell of a lot easier to edit on a computer; no retyping.
But most importantly, no two typewriters leave exactly the same typeface on the paper. Back in the typewriter's day, cops could prove that a (for instance) ransom note was typed on a particular typewriter. Anything written on Cormac McCarthy's typewriter will match the typeface of his original manuscript.
I wouldn't buy the PC Linus used at all; there would be no way to authenticate the machine unless he recorded the serial number or wrote his name on it with a sharpie, etc.