My first writing instrument was the "straight pen," which was more durable but not different in conception from the goose quill -- simply a metal nib set into a wooden dowel. It was quite a trick for a six-year-old to carry a small drop of ink from the inkwell and draw a line or circle without blotting -- especially since there was a wartime shortage of quality paper and the the stuff that was substituted was coarse and maximally absorbent. At P. S. 217, in the 1940s, each classroom had an "ink monitor," whose job was to mix a dry powder with water in a tall jug and fill all the inkwells. Every desk had an inch-in-diameter hole in the upper right corner -- southpaws were expected to conform -- with a brass fitting into which a small glass removable "well" was inserted. I got myself into serious trouble for dunking the end of one of Josephine Casalino's long black braids into my inkwell-- though I believe that I was neither the first nor only boy who succumbed to so obvious a temptation. From the perspective of 2007, it's hard to believe that dexterity with the straight pen was still part of the curriculum -- it was as though we were being prepared to clerk in some gloomy Dickensian counting-house.
I think that ballpoint pens arrived in the early 50s, but they were flighty at first and regularly leaked onto the page or in the pocket. I remember that my right thigh was dyed a perpetual blue. In 1956, setting off for college, I invested $20 in a second-hand self-styled "portable" but nevertheless very heavy Smith-Corona. I would not have plunked down so much cash if I hadn't thought that I was making the purchase of a lifetime. After all, the typewriter had represented the state of the writing art for eighty years -- ever since Remington had taken Christopher Latham Scholes' invention into the mass market -- and I had no suspicion that it would ever be superseded. Nevertheless, the mechanical typewriter was obsolete by the 1960s, when I composed a document of several hundred pages on a borrowed IBM Selectric. Not only did the electric typewriter produce a more handsome page, but it made acceptable carbon copies. (Carbon paper is unknown to younger generations and is now only found in archaeological digs; it's shocking that internet-era folks have no clue that "cc" abbreviated "carbon copy".) The heyday of the electric typewriter was brief --twenty years or so. Sometime in the early 1980s, I was introduced to word processing -- at first on an Apple 2+. Its dot-matrix printer was nasty (no true extenders) and the hazardous program took perverse pleasure in displaying ominous messages, such as "Fatal Error # 45." After a while, I moved to Wordstar, then to WordPerfect, and now, to whatever Typepad provides for this essaylet. Could my straight-pen self have possibly imagined that I would someday amuse myself with a self-published, self-edited internet blogazine? Meanwhile, my once-magnificent writer's bump has atrophied. It's gone the way of carbon paper and white-out.
Information-gathering has been equally transformed. In the 1950s, data had to be painfully copied by hand onto index cards, which were easy to misplace, misfile, and misread. Sometime in the late 1960s I first started to make copies of book and journal pages -- at first using a very smelly, expensive process, the name of which I can't recall, which could only make crude and blurry negatives, but was still far more efficient than copying by hand. It wasn't long before Xerox rendered all previous copy systems obsolete. Then came the internet which made things easier still -- although for any depth of knowledge --let's not fool ourselves -- books are still the only way.
At a library that I patronize, someone has taken fifty or so old wooden card files and assembled them into a sculpture of sorts. It's titled Top Drawer Society. For a donation -- I haven't inquired how large -- you can have your name inscribed on a drawer's brass plate. I couldn't begin to estimate how much time I spent searching through card catalogs in my lifetime: thousands of hours, I'd guess. I never anticipated that so useful an item as a tray of cards would be transformed into mere ornament and into a gesture to an antiquated technology.
There's no question that innovations in writing and researching in my lifetime are greater than anything that's happened since Gutenberg. I now know that change will continue, but I have no more insight into the future than I did when I plied my straight pen in first grade. What could possibly be out there beyond the wordprocessing horizon?
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