This Magazine Nov/Dec 2005
“Typewriters may have been consigned to the dustbin of history,” writes Darren Wershler-Henry in the introduction to his new book from McClelland & Stewart The Iron Whim, “but their ghosts are everywhere.” Tracing not only the historical, but also the spiritual, socio-cultural, gendered and writerly significance of the old clickety-clack, Wershler-Henry offers insights into what he calls our “bizarre nostalgia” for the typewriter.
He describes typewriters as a “symbol for a non-existent historical moment when it ‘meant something’ to be a writer.” Even though computers and laptops occupy the real estate of writers’ desks, the typewriter icon still finds its way onto innumerable sepia-toned book covers and grainy writing workshop advertisements. Wershler-Henry calls it “one of the biggest visual clichés of our age.”
Wershler-Henry is a poet, editor, cultural critic and university instructor, and his book is keyed with references to star scholars such as Michel Foucault, Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard, vestiges of the fact that The Iron Whim began life as a Ph.D. thesis. Self-described as both a historical archeologist and a CSI buff, Wershler-Henry was eager to expand his book’s scope. He gathered plenty of research from beyond the dusty library stacks, including an extensive eBay survey, comics, typing manuals and an analysis of typewriters in pop culture, TV, art and literature. “I wanted to write something that would be accessible to people interested in cultural history,” he explains over a latté in Toronto’s Annex district.
Indeed, the book gives equal space to postmodernist academic theories on typewriting-as-discourse and contemporary commentary by writers such as Paul Auster, David Sedaris, Henry James and Sherlock Holmes. Perhaps the most culturally revealing section, however, involves Wershler-Henry linking the trajectory of women in the workforce and the rise and fall of the typing pool. “Women typists came to be seen as mechanical entities where the typewriter meant both the person typing and the machine itself,” he says. According to Wershler-Henry, typewriters not only were sexualized as a result—proof of which can be seen in the crude illustrations of some Tijuana Bibles he uncovered—but it also became impossible to disentangle the roles of dictation, typist and machine.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when mysticism and science captured the cultural imagination, this particular confluence of roles resulted in the widespread belief that the typewriter was a spiritual medium. “There are dozens of stories of haunted typewriters,” Wershler-Henry explains, pointing to the fact that Henry James’s typist took dictation from the Modernist writer for many years after his death, first through a psychic and later on her own.
While Wershler-Henry observes that sci-fi writer William Gibson uses eBay as a “shamanic induction device,” the ghost-in-the-machine mysticism of the typewriter era has been replaced with a powerful nostalgia. Wershler-Henry documents the collection and sale of valuable antique typewriters available online, with sample listings for myriad rare vintage Smiths, Remingtons and Underwoods. Each “Vintage 1913 Oliver Typewriter #9 Unusual” or “Lot of 5 IBM Typewriter Font Balls” are relics whose only function is to “serve as signs for the passing of time.”
As for the answer to the inevitable question: no, Wershler-Henry did not pound out The Iron Whim on an IBM Selectric, accumulating the ubiquitous pile of crumpled papers in the process. “It would have been hell,” he explains. “The way that I write is profoundly influenced by not just writing on a computer, but on a networked computer.” Wershler-Henry’s PowerBook has a wireless internet port providing ready access to information via the latest invisible medium, which for now is haunted only by spam.
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