The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

Wershler-Henry didn’t want to write a history of typewriters. Others
have been there, done that. Instead, he presents the development of the
machines along the way as he pursues his real interest, the typewriter
as a symbol of our system of work, education, and social interaction. He
is fascinated with the three-part unity of author (“dictator”) of
material to be typed, the machine operator, and the machine. He looks
into the “archaeology” of typewriter nostalgia, and mines eBay for
evidence that typewriter collectibles are in considerable demand. He
sees this nostalgia as a religion, a search for meaning, and a sign of
the passage of time. He sees typewriters as having changed and shaped
literature and culture to the extent that the machine and the product of
the machine become blurred. In his review of the literature on typing,
he explores the typewriter as ghost and as vampire, and says that
“typewriting creates a situation where pieces of dead and living souls
combine.” Typewriting, he says, allows “the dead to speak” and
“allows the living to speak with the dead.” Typewriters give power,
but demand discipline and have a “problematic relationship to
truth.”

The work deals with typing monkeys, time-and-motion studies, typists in
literature (including Archy, the typing cockroach), typing speed
contests, a comparison of typewriter to computer, and copious amounts of
typewriter-related figures and observations. The result is an
indigestible stew of history, sociology, trivia, and psychobabble. The
unappetizing mess started life as an academic paper; unfortunately
efforts to pare it down and edit it for general consumption didn’t go
far enough, leaving the reader to gag on masses of tangled information,
seasoned generously with enthusiasm but lacking in coherence.