It sounded like thunder, the percussive stroke of my father’s fingers on his Royal typewriter. It was a word engine: a factory of print hammering letters onto the paper winding down through the levers, rods, connecting pulleys and metal type that lurked under its ’55 Buick hood.
Dad’s typing broke the silence of the house at bedtime as he wrote his newspaper stories. The notes of his keys striking paper wafted upstairs, the certain cadence of his thoughts punctuating summer twilights. It melded with the sprinklers and cicadas outside. And every 10 or 15 words, the typewriter’s little bell would sound and its carriage would zipper back to start the next line of words. Then: four-bar rest – the nonsound of pondering – a few phrases murmured to test the next passage. More thunder, another pause, then backspacing to X-out a clinker.
This was music. The Royal had sharps and flats, bass and treble; a staccato space bar; the timpani capital letter shift; the triangle of the bell. It had 16th notes of familiar patterns and convenient phrasing, words that alternated hands allowing more speed or syncopation of a jaunty thought. Boom, clatter-clatter-clatter, ta-ta-ta-ta-Boom. Ting. The song of words pecked out of silence. He didn’t know it, but Dad was telegraphing to me that writing was something you worked at. It charged my fourth-grade storytelling with the goal to be correct, clear, even stylish.
Dad’s newspaper career bridged the evolution from lead type to computer layout. A visit to his newsroom meant filling my pockets with leftover lead banner headlines awaiting smelting before their return to the Linotype machines as fresh ingots. Alchemy: base metal turned into stories on paper by men who typed for a living. In the mysterious composing room, their fingers flashed above a keyboard attached to a machine the size of our furnace, and just as hot.
Lead slugs of type sluiced into place, letters aligning paragraph by paragraph, until a whole broad sheet of mirror-written typeface was assembled in the press. On a good day, visiting after deadline, I might even be awarded a fresh slug with my own name in 24-point type, and return to school with an artifact of publishing.
My own children have never used a standard typewriter. As they peck their way through book reports, their words flicker on the computer monitor. Writing has become television. And my laptop replaces a whole newsroom and composing room without weighing more than a paragraph of lead type. Hundreds of fonts; any size type; even color and justified margins reside in its circuitry. It is the apotheosis of Gutenberg’s revolution, but it has corrupted the rhetoric of invention. This paragraph has no history, no hard copy of clinkers, deletions or verbal lineage – only its current avatar. Digital writing and editing is sleight of hand, as letters and words simply evanesce –
– Without music. This is sterile clicking to Dad’s reverberant Royal percussion. No inky ribbon. No Buick hood. No “diesel” thunder. To my children, this is the sound of writing. But in my mind, real writing sounds like the engine of my father’s words.
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