Tuesday, March 31, 1998

Printer's ink not yet erased by computers

By Rheta Grimsley Johnson

In 1875 the folks at Remington asked Mark Twain to write a testimonial for their new typewriter. Here's how he answered:

"Please do not use my name in any way. Please do not even divulge the fact that I own a machine. I have entirely stopped using the Type Writer for the reason that I never could write a letter with it to anybody without receiving a request by return mail that I would not only describe the machine but state what progress I had made in the use of it. I don't like to write letters, and so I don't want people to know that I own this curiosity breeding little joker."

Twain's main complaint was that the typewriter's novelty caused people to ignore the content of his letters. Technology overshadowed genius. The "curiosity breeding little joker" had become more important than the dictation of one of the great brains of last century.

I found that anecdote in a paperback called The Typewriter Legend, on sale for a pittance at my local library.

It was an ink smudge of a February day, dark and messy, and so I trotted on down to the book sale. Cheap books call out to me like "Night Train" to a wino. I love the feel of used volumes, the esoteric titles that inevitably end up in cardboard boxes labeled "Sale Books."

In all, I bought about 1,000 pages of words for $10. That's a lot of pages, a lot of words. I got Robert Penn Warren's long poem, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, and a book of Herblock cartoons and a stack of children's books for my niece and nephews. All the way home I congratulated myself for enterprise and frugality.

High-tech boosters

If you believe the shibboleths of today's high-tech boosters, the screen has replaced the book as the symbol, the literal repository, the ultimate source of most knowledge. After centuries of use, the book's spine and pages have been replaced with electronic scrolls.

But you cannot do with a screen what I've been doing the past few days with Jacki Lyden's memoir, Daughter of the Queen of Sheba. At least not without a lot of trouble and miles of extension cord.

Sheba has gone to bed with me, and to Pollard's Drive-In, where I sat at the raggedy lunch counter and alternated turning pages and eating turnip greens. I read a few pages while soaking in a hot tub.

The typewriter - this according to my new, old book on the machine - became truly important only after becoming so ubiquitous that it was invisible. That will have to happen to computers, too. Otherwise, novelty will continue to overwhelm content. We'll all be doing things on computers not because we need to, but because we can.

I studied my fellow book lovers at the library sale. We didn't look special, or endangered. There were noisy children, out of school for the day. There was a retired man, searching for books on the Civil War. There was a skinny teen-ager, checking out the hobby section.

A tough-looking woman in jeans picked up a book called Filing for Divorce in Georgia and said to her son, "I wish I'd had this a few years ago."

All of us could have gone into the next room and surfed the Net for free, I suppose, but we wouldn't have left with a satisfying sack, a collection of coverless volumes branded with other owners' names and stamped at the back with ink from the pad of some efficient librarian. "Discard," they say.

Not yet. Not quite yet.

King Features Syndicate