{"id":14489,"date":"2012-11-18T23:50:33","date_gmt":"2012-11-19T04:50:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/?p=14489"},"modified":"2012-11-27T12:09:19","modified_gmt":"2012-11-27T17:09:19","slug":"jack-kerouac-tech-pioneer-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/2012\/11\/18\/jack-kerouac-tech-pioneer-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Jack Kerouac: Tech Pioneer (1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A.<\/a>Typewriter as Tool<\/strong><\/p>\n

In his 1974 essay “Technology of Writing,” William Burroughs advised new writers, “One more thing: Sinclair Lewis said: ‘If you want to be a writer, learn to type.'” This was neither facetious nor an avoidance of the question. By Lewis’s day, and certainly by Burroughs’s, the basic skill of typewriting had become as necessary as handwriting in the preceding centuries for anyone launched on a writing career.<\/p>\n

\"Remington<\/a>

Remington Typewriter Co. ad, Harper’s, 1905.<\/p><\/div>\n

What had originated as genuine manuscripts, in the literal sense of the word (manu<\/em>=hand, script<\/em>=writing) had by the 1920s become typescripts. When the 20th century got going, professional usage everywhere \u2014 book publishing, magazines, newspapers \u2014 all expected material to arrive in typewritten form. (We might remember that Mark Twain<\/a>, seeing the future, believed in the typewriter, invested in its manufacture, and in 1883 submitted Life on the Mississippi<\/em> to his publisher in typewritten form.) We still refer, anachronistically, to pre-publication drafts of texts as manuscripts, but I’ll wager that editors and publishers stopped accepting handwritten material three-quarters of a century ago, if not even earlier.<\/p>\n

So unless one could afford a secretary to transcribe handwritten texts to typed pages (as Twain did), the 20th-century writer needed to know how to type, for purely practical reasons. Submitting material for publication meant submitting it as typescript. But I like to think that Lewis had something beyond the economics of the writer’s life in mind when he made his helpful suggestion.<\/p>\n

\"Virginia<\/a>

Virginia Woolf, “Time Passes,” typescript (1926), p. 1.<\/p><\/div>\n

Seeing a typewritten text, as distinct from a handwritten one, gave the writer some foretaste of how his or her writing would appear in print \u2014 an approximation of how it would look to the reader once typeset and issued for consumption on the published page. This anticipatory experience of the material’s move from the private sphere of the writer’s desk to the permanence and public life of printed matter surely affects the writer’s conception of the work.<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

Some writers have actually had the privilege of witnessing that transformative moment, myself among them. Few writers make a point of going to the shop or factory where their work gets typeset for publication. But those of us who worked on or for newspapers in the pre-digital era (a list that includes authors as diverse as Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Harris), or who worked for printing shops during the era of letterpress and linotype printing, got to experience that transition in a visceral, material way.<\/p>\n

In a post several years ago I recounted my own earliest role as a published writer<\/a>, working for (and eventually editing) my college’s newspaper, the Hunter Arrow<\/em>, in the early 1960s. As a staffer, I spent countless hours on the premises of Citywide Printers, the grimy, low-ceilinged street-level Lower East Side print shop where we produced the paper.<\/p>\n

One memorable aspect of that involvement I wrote about in a 1994 essay, “An Arranged Marriage: My Life with the Computer,” as follows:<\/p>\n

My favorite part of it [editing and supervising the production of that paper] was watching the Linotype operator set something I’d written myself. If I stood at the side of the machine, I could observe out of one eye as his hands flew over his keyboard, entering in my text from the typescript before him; with the other eye, I could see the slugs of hot lead drop down a slot, my words in metal, fixed, permanent, ineradicable.<\/p>\n

\"AB<\/a>

AB Dick Offset Printing Press<\/p><\/div>\n

Seeing my writing in print changed me, to put it mildly. And by the time I started to think seriously about writing as a component of my life, the step before achieving print had become, except in increasingly rare cases, the typewritten page.<\/p>\n

In fact, those decades, the 1950s and ’60s, saw an explosion of “little” magazines, small-press and self-published books, and other publications \u2014 mostly literary, some political \u2014 printed directly<\/em> from typewritten matrices without ever getting typeset, using such methods as mimeograph stencils, plates made from photographing typed pages, and the thin metal plates of the AB Dick Offset Printing Press<\/a>. (My parents started their publishing enterprise on the last of those. I helped my father Earl<\/a> run ours in that project’s early days, so I began mainlining printer’s ink before I’d turned ten.)<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

Others of his generation and subsequent ones would take Lewis’s understanding a step or more further:<\/p>\n