Category: Literature

When design was soft and kind


My IBM Selectric I, made in 1974, restored by a former IBM field engineer. The Selectric I typewriters were introduced in 1961. Click here for high resolution version.

I have written in the past about how today’s taste in automobile design is for aggressive-looking, mean-looking, vehicles. Even Volkswagen, whose designs used to charm people, now makes cars that look like they’re sneering at you. The 300-horsepower Arteon Volkswagen looks like a bully, with a vaguely sadistic expression. The sociology of this is no doubt disturbing. But let’s talk about designs that charm, and soothe, and purr, and lower one’s blood pressure, like petting the cat.

The IBM Selectric I typewriter, I believe, is not only the most beautiful typewriter ever made, but also is one of the most beautiful machines ever made. It was designed by Eliot Noyes. It first came on the market in 1961. The Selectric II came along in 1973, and the Selectric III in 1980. The Selectric II and III, though still beautiful machines, don’t have the please-pet-me cat-like curves of the Selectric I, and they’re too wide and industrial-looking to be charming.

Maybe not everyone would see a cat in the design of the Selectric I, but I do, not least because it reminds me of the Jaguar S-type, which was introduced during the same era as the Selectric I, in 1963. I have not been able to find the name of any particular designer for the Jaguar cars. But it seems clear that Jaguar design reflects the taste of Sir William Lyons, also known as “Mr. Jaguar,” who ran the company until he retired in 1972.

For five years, I have been driving a Fiat 500. It’s mouse gray. Though the Fiat 500 is one of the most popular cars in the world, Americans (other than a few people like me) wouldn’t buy them, and Fiat stopped selling them in the U.S. My guess is that the unpopularity of the Fiat 500 is not just because it’s small. It also looks like a mouse, or maybe a vole. Driving a Fiat 500, I suspect, is very healthy for one’s blood pressure, at least until some mean-looking car with a mean driver gets behind you.

It pleases me greatly that typewriters are having a renaissance. And it’s not just typewriter veterans like me. Most of the interest is coming from members of Generation Z. There is a very active Reddit group. It’s charming, really, that young people buy typewriters before they have the slightest idea how to use them. For example, with manual typewriters, they don’t understand that one strikes the keys rather than pressing them. A common question with older typewriters is: Where is the “1” key? That drove me crazy, too, when I was about nine years old, until someone told me to try the lower-case “L” key. Nor do the Generation Z types know that, to make an exclamation point, one first types a period, then backspaces and types an apostrophe. The Selectrics, though, all along had enough room on those tilt-and-rotate type balls for a “1” and a “!”.

Restoration of the IBM Selectrics is very challenging. Fortunately there are still a few old guys around who used to work for IBM. Some younger people are learning. Parts, of course, are no longer made. Some nylon parts in the Selectrics, such as the main drive hub, almost always have cracked, and that doomed an old Selectric. This problem has been solved by people who use 3D printers to make replacement parts, usually out of aluminum.

There also is a lot of interest in learning what kind of typewriters our favorite writers used to use. J.R.R. Tolkien favored the very expensive Varityper machines. Isaac Asimov loved his Selectric I. There are photographs of Hunter S. Thompson with his Selectric I, which was red, like mine. According to the Washington Post, Jack Kerouac used an Underwood portable, Ernest Hemingway used a Royal Quiet Deluxe, and Ayn Rand used a Remington portable. It is sometimes said that it was from Remington Rand that Ayn Rand chose her last name (her birth name was Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum), but I believe that has been disproven. I have rarely typed on Remington typewriters, which is fine with me since I can’t stand Ayn Rand.

Still today, IBM is proud of the Selectric typewriter’s history, and there are articles on IBM’s web site including an article on the Selectrics’ cultural impact.

My bossy 15-year-old cat, Lily, would never tolerate another cat in the house, preventing me from becoming a crazy old cat person. But homeless and scroungy old typewriters, like cats, beg to be rescued, fixed up, and looked after in a forever home.


⬆︎ A 1966 Jaguar S-type saloon. Source: Wikimedia Commons.


⬆︎ A Fiat 500. Source: Wikimedia Commons.


⬆︎ Isaac Asimov with his IBM Selectric I. The illustration, by Rowena Morrill, was for the cover of Asimov’s Opus 200.


⬆︎ Type sample from my IBM Selectric I, which uses a fabric (as opposed to film) ribbon.

Euell Gibbons, 1974


Euell Gibbons, near High Point, North Carolina, February 1974

I came across this photo today while going through an old box of photos. I have sometimes mentioned to people that I once went foraging with Euell Gibbons and took a nice picture of him, but I had never scanned the picture, and I had forgotten what box the photo was in. Today I came across the photo while sorting through my disorganized archives.

It was February of 1974. A reporter friend at the Winston-Salem Journal (which was the first newspaper I ever worked for) had arranged an interview and a foraging trip with Gibbons, who probably was on a publicity tour. My reporter friend asked me to go along, since I at least had a bit of experience with foraging while she had none.

Even on a strawberry farm in February, Gibbons found plenty to eat. After the foraging, the owners of the strawberry farm had invited us to fix lunch in their kitchen, using our foraging finds.

I still remember taking that photo. I saw the row of ducks on the far end of the field, and I realized that if I made a quick dash to get into position, I could get a photo of Gibbons with the ducks in the background. The Winston-Salem Journal, of course, had photographers, and copy-editing, not photography, was my job. But rather than sending a staff photographer over to the next county, they trusted me to come back with pictures.

Sadly, Gibbons died the following year. He was quite a cultural phenomenon in the early 1970s — outdoorsman and natural foods advocate. I am pretty sure that Stalking the Wild Asparagus has been kept in print for all these years. I lost my first edition years ago but replaced it with a new edition that doesn’t seem to have a date other than the date of the first edition, 1962.

WorldCon will be in Glasgow in 2024

I have never been to a World Science Fiction Convention, but I hope do that in August 2024, when it will be in Glasgow.

The annual Hugo Awards for science fiction and fantasy are given at WorldCon. Hugos are voted on by the fans who attend the convention (unlike the Nebula Awards, which are given by Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America).

Preparations for WorldCons begin way in advance. You can follow the progress here. You can also follow the preparations on Facebook by searching for “Glasgow 2024.”

My first thought was to attend only for a day, mostly because Glasgow is such a gloomy city compared with Edinburgh. Yet I respect Glasgow for what it is — an old industrial city working hard to re-invent itself. Though WorldCon is reserving rooms in at least eight hotels, the main events will be at the Crowne Plaza. That’s also where the parties will be, and I think it’s pretty much a certainty that there will be a cèilidh. This may be the only occasion I’ll ever have for attending a proper Scottish cèilidh. So instead of ducking in for only a day, I think I’ll buy a ticket for the entire event and see how it goes.

This year’s WorldCon, by the way, is in China.

A seriously good novel, now 85 years old

The Hopkins Manuscript. R.C. Sherriff, Macmillan, 1939.

This book got to me. I finished it just before sunset, and all evening, as a nearly full moon rose, I was spooked by a sense of unreality as I worked my way out of the world of the novel and back to the real world. I considered pouring myself some Scotch (but didn’t). How did R.C. Sherriff tell his story so compellingly that, in spite of the improbable science of his falling moon, we suspend all disbelief and enter that state of total immersion that, as readers, we long for?

First of all, the novel is beautifully written. As for why it’s so compelling, I think it’s because he tells the story through the eyes of very ordinary people living in very ordinary circumstances — a village and small farm in Worcestershire. The main character is Edgar Hopkins, a former schoolmaster and rather dull man who, upon inheriting some money, settles down on his little hilltop farm and breeds poultry as a hobby. There are side trips by train to London, but it’s on this farm and in the nearby village where most of the story takes place.

The novel was first published in 1939. My copy of the book, which I bought from a used book seller, is a book club edition from 1963. A third edition (or possibly the fourth or fifth including a paperback in the 1950s) was published this year and was reviewed in the Washington Post: The moon falls to Earth in a 1939 novel that remains chillingly relevant.

Robert Cedrick Sherriff was better known as a playwright and screenwriter than as a novelist. He wrote Journey’s End, a play about World War I that opened at London’s Savoy Theater in 1929 and ran for 594 performances. Sherriff was a veteran of that war, and it seems certain that his experiences during the war had much to do with the emotional tone of The Hopkins Manuscript, a strange blend of optimism and pessimism that Sherriff skillfully pulls off. Sherriff was born in 1896 and died in 1975. After the war, in which he was badly wounded, Sherriff led an ordinary life as an insurance adjuster. He returned to Oxford in 1931 to study history. He probably was gay and was probably an ephebophile. Journey’s End was originally written as an all-male play, a fund-raiser to buy a new boat for the Kingston Rowing Club, which he coached. There are two characters in The Hopkins Manuscript that, I think, were inspired by his ephebophilia.

Much of the beauty of this book is in the clear, elegant, and yet modest writing. I’m reminded of Isaac Asimov’s author’s note for Nemesis:

“Another point: I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing — to be clear. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize. I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics– Well, they can do whatever they wish.”

Asimov steers clear of snark, but it’s clear enough what he thinks of writers who bamboozle the critics (and even some readers) with quirky and affected writing styles. And Asimov is being a touch ironic with his choice of the word merely, because Asimov certainly knew that to write clearly is hard. Only the best writers can do it. I wish I’d known about R.C. Sherriff a long time ago.

My edition of the book includes illustrations by Joseph Mugnaini.

Yesterday’s fiction


Robert Cedric Sherriff, circa 1928. Source: Hear the Boat Sing.

Unless a novel becomes a classic, it will become obscure. It may or may not show up on book lists. There probably won’t ever be a Gutenberg edition. The review industry, of course, is concerned with what’s new. How might we discover now-obscure books that were published before we were born?

With R.C. Sherriff’s The Hopkins Manuscript, first published in 1939, a kind of miracle brought it to our attention. The publisher brought out a new edition, and the Washington Post wrote about it: “The moon falls to Earth in a 1939 novel that remains chillingly relevant.”

I ordered the book immediately, of course. It’s a post-apocalyptic novel that never showed up on the many lists of post-apocalyptic novels that I had scoured. I bought a used hardback copy on Amazon that I assumed would be the 1939 edition. But when the book arrived I was surprised to discover that it’s from 1963 and is some sort of book club edition. That means that there have been three editions of The Hopkins Manuscript.

I’m only 52 pages into the book and will write more about it later. It’s beautifully written, something we might expect from an author who was educated at Oxford and who also was a playwright.

Yesterday Ken, who knows I’m on the lookout for memorable science fiction and fantasy that has fallen into obscurity, sent me a link to an article about Hope Mirrlees: “Hope Mirrlees and her curious masterpiece.” Mirlees was a lesser-known member of the Bloomsbury Group. One of her poems was published by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press. The novel is Lud-in-the-Mist, first published in 1926 and now in the public domain. I’ve ordered a copy of Lud-in-the-Mist from a used book seller. I assume it is the 1926 edition, though someone — I’m not sure who — has reprinted it in paperback now that the book is in the public domain.

Why was it so easy to find good science fiction and fantasy up through the 1980s? Was it only because, 35 years ago, there was so much that I had not yet read? Or has something changed, either in what people want to read or what publishers choose to publish?

I’m very suspicious about the current state of the publishing industry. This piece in the Times of London increased my suspicion: “Publishers cower in fear of ambush by woke critics.” (Unfortunately the article is behind a paywall. I read it through my subscription to Apple News.) As I’ve said here before, as very much a liberal I’m in accord with the principles that conservatives deplore as “woke.” But that doesn’t mean that I want to read novels that have been pre-policed to make sure they don’t offend anyone. While I’m gasping for a good space opera (which were plentiful in the 1980s), that’s not the sort of thing that publishers seem interested in these days. (I do note, though, with some optimism, that John Twelve Hawks reported on Facebook yesterday that he has finished the draft of a new novel.)

The classics are always there for us, if publishers let us down. I greatly enjoyed the time I spent reading seven of Sir Walter Scott’s novels. Thus I was particularly amused to find this passage on page 42 of The Hopkins Manuscript:

“But I knew that I must do something to preserve my sanity, and after long thought I resolved upon what may seem a pathetic attempt to alleviate my awful loneliness. I resolved to read from beginning to end the works of Sir Walter Scott. I possessed these in thirty volumes, and one a week would carry me far into the winter — even until the day when I should no longer need to nurse my secret.”

The Hopkins Manuscript is often laugh-out-loud funny. I understood the passage above to be an example of Sherriff’s dry humor: Just how pathetically bored would someone have to be to read so much Walter Scott, which lots of people possessed in thirty volumes, but none of which had been read? You can still buy those sets, complete or not, on eBay and in used book stores.

Is there someone, somewhere — part historian and part booklover — whose mission it is to keep obscure old novels from being forgotten? It would be hard work, and it would require access to the right kind of libraries. These days, shops that sell out-of-print books list them on Amazon or eBay. But how do we figure out what to look for?

As an aside, I might mention here that the World Science Fiction Convention, also called WorldCon, will be in Glasgow next year (August 8-12, 2024). I’m overdue for a trip to Scotland, so I’m hoping to attend. Maybe I’ll be able to pick up some intel on what readers are thinking versus what publishers are thinking. There has been a good bit of protesting at WorldCons during the past few years, mostly from the right.

Don’t we have heretics anymore?

Babel: Or, the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. R.F. Kuang, Harper Voyager, 2022. 546 pages.

I almost never read bestsellers, and this book reminded me why. This book makes me want to go read some Jordan Peterson or something to wash the politically correct taste out of my mouth. Please don’t misunderstand me. My own liberal political views would almost surely be classified as 100 percent politically correct. But that doesn’t mean that I think that political correctness makes for good literature. Do we really need to be harangued and hectored about what we already know? There’s something insulting and condescending about that.

R.F. Kuang’s harangues in Babel: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution, are about capitalism and British imperialism. Good grief. Isn’t it about 150 years too late for that? Then again, make that 250 years, because writers should be ahead of their time, not behind.

There was another clue that I should have checked in advance before I bought this book or spent umpteen hours reading it. That’s the rating that Babel got on Goodreads, a wretched hive of mean and mediocre-minded readers if there ever was one. Truly good books (if they get read at all) will almost always get marked down by vindictive readers ganging up to push a book’s ratings down if the book contains the slightest whiff of heresy. Goodreads doesn’t think very highly of heresy or boat-rocking. Whereas books like Babel will get mostly 5-star reviews from the hive. Babel would be boat-rocking only if Charlotte Brontë had written it, when Victoria was on the throne.

R.F. Kuang is a good writer with, obviously, a remarkably good education and many interesting ideas. But that’s no guarantee that she can write a good novel (though she can write novels that are guaranteed to get published). Sure, the world is still dealing with the consequences of British imperialism and slavery. But we know that. A novelist’s job — particularly a scholarly novelist like Kuang — is to be on the leading edge, not to grind (at great length — 546 pages) a very old axe. What could she add to what ahead-of-their-time scholars have already written?

As for the mediocrity and vindictiveness of Goodreads, check out some of the 1-star reviews of, say, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, or John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, both of which rocked the boat a little too hard. Kuang’s Babel has a higher Goodreads rating than either of them. Babel also got a slightly higher Goodreads rating that Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), which rocked the boat too much for mediocre readers and told us things that some people weren’t ready to hear. The Color Purple was not, as far as I can determine, a bestseller, and it’s on a list of the 100 books most frequently targeted for bans. Alice Walker was brave and heretical. Books like Kuang’s just invite approval.

Kuang’s characters are really very sweet, though. The atmosphere she stirs up in old Oxford is appealing. Some of her asides on linguistics are very interesting. But would you be surprised if I told you how diverse her four main characters are? One is Black, one is Chinese, one is an Indian Moslem, and one is white. The white character’s cluelessness is a foil for the what the other characters say to educate her.

Though, as I said, Kuang is a good writer, I think she lost control of this novel. Three-quarters of the way through, the dialogue loses it polish and the plotting grows careless.

But the greatest weakness of this book is plain old failure of imagination. All the gothic frills of fantasy are present, but all that remains underneath that is a rant and a harangue with no new insights. And not a whiff of heresy to redeem it.

Now fully in the public domain: Sherlock Holmes


Illustration from the December 1892 issue of Strand Magazine

Each year on January 1, copyrights that are 95 years old expire. It was 95 years ago, in 1927, when the last Sherlock Holmes stories were published. (Copyright laws vary by country. In the U.S., copyrights expire after 95 years.)

Those who profit from copyrights will attempt all sorts of novel legal arguments to keep the profits going. Think Mickey Mouse and Beatrix Potter, as well as Sherlock Holmes. Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain is one of the few institutions that track the public interest in copyright laws. Here is a link to their post on Public Domain Day 2023, with a list of some of the books, movies, and songs that are in the public domain as of today.

My last Walter Scott post for a while, I promise

I had high hopes for The Bride of Lammermoor, the sixth novel by Sir Walter Scott that I have read. But it let me down. Though there was some fine Scottish gothic atmosphere — seaside castles, witches, and violent storms — the story really came down to little more than youthful folly and parental cruelty ending in pathos. I use the word pathos in a literary sense, as distinguished from tragedy. In pathos, unlike tragedy, there are no teachable moments in the calamity with which the story ends. There is only meaningless sadness. I was going to lower my estimation of Sir Walter Scott as a writer until I thought of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, which also came down to little more than youthful folly and parental cruelty ending in pathos. It’s entirely possible that readers in the early 19th Century would have found some teachable moments, perhaps in the wrongness of older generations trying to control the emotional lives of young people.

The Bride of Lammermoor was published in 1819, so it’s just over 200 years old. A friend asked me if I thought that Scott’s novels, and the social issues he raises, are as relevant today as those of, say, Jane Austen. I would say definitely not. But even so, Scott does not deserve to be completely forgotten. I may, in years to come, return to Walter Scott, but for now I think my curiosity about his novels is satisfied. If anyone is considering reading Scott, of the novels I have read I would recommend The Heart of Mid-Lothian.

I have moved on to something completely different. I rarely read bestsellers, but I’ve just started Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. It’s a new novel by R.F. Kuang. When I learned that the novel is about linguists and that it is set in London and Oxford, I bought it immediately.


I bought an 1869 edition of Lammermoor, published in New York.

Scott-Land

Scott-Land: The Man Who Invented a Nation. Stuart Kelly, Polygon (Edinburgh), 2010. 328 pages.

First, a disclaimer. I did not read the entire book. By the time I was halfway through, so much of the book seemed only obliquely relevant to the subject of Sir Walter Scott’s novels that I scanned the remainder of the book for the bits that seemed relevant and ignored the rest. Others, I grant, may see this book differently, if they’re interested in such matters as how Diana Gabaldon, Tony Blair, or Dr Who may relate to Walter Scott. I wasn’t particularly interested.

However, I greatly commend the author for writing a book about Walter Scott, given that Scott is hardly ever mentioned anymore, except maybe by travelers who emerge from Waverley Station in Edinburgh and see the enormous Scott memorial for the first time. The author, in fact, seems to assume that the readers of Scott-Land have not read any Scott, since few people read Scott anymore.

It’s an odd thing, isn’t it? Walter Scott as a cultural phenomenon is deemed to be worth writing books about. But few people are willing to go out on a limb and make the case that Scott is still worth reading and taking seriously, or that Scott’s books are still worth talking about the way we still talk about Jane Austen or George Eliot, or even Charles Dickens.

This is not an academic book. It’s meant to be entertaining. It’s often flippant and even snarky. Kelly seems to think that if he — or even we — took Walter Scott too seriously, that would be embarrassing, like liking the Pet Shop Boys. Kelly’s connection with Scott isn’t even particularly literary. Kelly grew up in the Borders area of Scotland near Scott’s baronial home at Abbotsford, so Kelly’s connection to Scott has a cultural rather than a literary origin, though Kelly studied English at Oxford. This is purely a guess on my part, but I’d guess that Kelly writes about Scott the same way that one would have to talk about Scott today at Oxford — with a knowing smile or even a touch of smirk.

But I’m probably an odd duck of a reader, because I have read Scott. I also take Scott seriously. A part of my personal view, though, is that we probably wouldn’t want to read Scott today because of an interest in the history of Scotland but rather because of an interest in the history of the English novel, with the bonus that in reading Scott we also get a great deal of the Scots language as well as English. A friend asked whether I’d agree that Scott’s themes are less relevant today than, say, Jane Austen’s or Charles Dickens’. I would agree. I’m certainly not arguing that Scott should be at the top of our reading list in 19th Century novels; only that he should be on it, for dedicated readers, anyway.

The first question one might ask if one is considering reading Scott is, “What should I read?” My suggestion would be — anything but Ivanhoe. Scott is at his best, I think, when he is writing not about his beloved kings and heroes but when he
is writing about ordinary people in ordinary places. I’d suggest The Heart of Mid-Lothian or The Antiquary as a good place to start.

I’m still looking for a recent academic book about Sir Walter Scott. Meanwhile, I very much agree with what the academic says in the short video below, in which she answers a question after a lecture.

No more chaos on the book shelves

What do two nerds do on a rainy day? They empty all the bookshelves, stack the books on the floor, scan all the titles into a database, and put the books back onto the shelves, in alphabetical order by category. Including the scanning that I had done before Ken’s visit, this was a total of about 30 hours of work. This gives me a whole new appreciation of what librarians do. Now the abbey’s seven bookshelves are all in order.

The database is an app that runs on smartphones named BookBuddy. If a book has a scannable ISBN number, then the app will do all the work. If the book has an ISBN number but no scannable bar code, then the app will recognize the title and lots of other information after the ISBN number is keyed in. For older books with no ISBN number, the app can search by title and identify most books, even books more than a hundred years old.

All of Ken’s books — or at least all of Ken’s books in the U.S. as opposed to his current home in Scotland — are here at the abbey. Ken’s books and mine are remarkably compatible and complementary, as might be expected of literary confederates and former housemates in a house where six books have been written in the last ten years and nursed through the publication process. As for the books that Ken has written, you can find out more at his web site.

Ken is on a speaking tour in the U.S. When he arrived here from Scotland, he brought me bottle of GlenDronach Scotch. That Scotch is from Forgue, 35 miles north of Aberdeen.