Unsatisfying because Mr. Waldstein did not tell the story on how this feller, Steve Soboroff, tracked down all the typewriters of famous people that he now plans to offer at auction.
Fun because it was fun to think about owning such a machine.
This past summer I was able to sit at a desk with one of James Thurber’s typewriters.
Maybe a musician sitting at a piano used by Stevie Wonder would feel something.
Mr. Leonard Bernstein is on film describing what it was like to direct an orchestra and standing what had to be standing somewhere near the spot Ludwig Beethoven stood when his 9th Symphony was debuted.
Something about a typewriter.
I haven’t owned one in years but I have a bunch.
The last one I got was a gift that had a small computer screen and could store up to three lines of text.
You could set it to type each letter or to wait and type out each line.
I never caught the rhythm of the line by line.
A funny thing, but the last typewriter I ever bought was vintage manual Royal typewriter I got at the Salvation Army.
The machine worked fine, but finding typewriter ribbon was a problem.
The place where I worked had just thrown out all there old adding machines, along with boxes of adding machine ribbon and with a little winding, these ribbons could be retro-fitted onto my typewriter.
Friends and neighbors let me tell you that when the time comes to move cross country, a 20lb manual typewriter quickly makes it on the list of things you don’t need to bring.
Mr. Waldstein writes, The machine has no delete buttons, no cut-and-paste. Just the click-clack of history.
Sitting at the Thurber machine, I imagined his fingers on the keys and a story coming out, letter by letter, return by return.
I could hear the click-clack and the bell and the grrrrrrrr of the carriage and the thump when the the next line came into place.
John Steinbeck said, “Sometimes just the pure luxury of long beautiful pencils charges me with energy and invention.”
There is much to be said for those pencils.
I cannot remember the source of line, but someone pointed out that the American Space Programs spent millions developing a pen that could insure the flow of ink and write in zero gravity while the Soviet Union sent their astronauts into space … with pencils.
I use a comuter.
I hear the rattle of my keyboard.
That qwerty keyboard that connects my typing with the old machines.
But I back space.
I delete.
I highlight and copy and paste.
I print multiple copies.
And …
I miss that old Royal typewriter.
no delete buttons, no cut-and-paste, just the click clack of history
James Thuber’s Typewriter … As I said before, the first person who would have ignored the signed and banged on the computer would have been James Thurber.
booksellers about as uncommercial breed of people possible
In a world gone crazy, when I am grasping at anything that points the compass in a positive direction, I found the recent article in the New York Times, Barnes & Noble Sets Itself Free ByMaureen O’Connor to be something of a word of hope.
To quote Big Bill or better to quote Portia in the Merchant of Venice, So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
Or maybe best to quote Willy Wonka and say, “So shines a good deed in a weary world.”
At least, for a moment, this story about how Barnes and Noble is pushing the chain to act more like the indie stores it was once notorious for displacing under the direction of a new CEO, James Daunt.
“The curious trick has been that if you actually let the local book-selling teams do what they think is best, you suddenly get much better bookstores,” Mr. Daunt said. Then he quickly added a caveat: “About a quarter of them become dramatically better, and a quarter become dramatically worse — but it is much easier to focus on that quarter and improve them.”
The change goes along with his strategy of embracing the mind-set of his typical employee. “Booksellers are about as uncommercial a breed of people as it’s possible to come across,” Mr. Daunt said. “The irony is that the less concerned we are with the commercial, the better it works commercially.
“You need to love books, and you need to know how our customers shop for books,” says a long term Barnes and Noble employee.
I read and I believe it, but only because I want to believe it.
I spent 12 years working for a chain bookstore.
For many employee’s it was a job.
For me and many employee’s and many of my good good friends that I worked with, it was a calling.
And it was a fight against those who went into it as business and tried to make it business while we tried to keep the faith.
So to read, “The curious trick has been that if you actually let the local book-selling teams do what they think is best, you suddenly get much better bookstores.” almost makes me want to cry.
I worked for Waldenbooks.
But I lived in Michigan.
If you loved books and you lived in the State of Michigan, at some point in your life you ended up at Border’s Book Store, a stand alone, independent love-affair with books in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
If you went down that path, you also at some point ended up at John King Used Books in Detroit but that’s another story.
Among booksellers in the State of Michigan, Border’s was the gold standard.
It had sofa’s and chairs and probably some sort of cafe before Starbucks.
They had a service desk set up and staffed by three people, in the pre computer era, who did nothing but researched hard to find titles so a customer could order the book.
They had floor upon floor of books.
The had an art print / map section and I still have prints on my office wall that I purchased there, using my grocery money instead of using my grocery money for groceries.
When I started with at my bookstore in a mall, I saw how it could embrace some of what Border’s was.
I fought for chairs in the store.
I fought for more and more copies of different books rather than 100 copies of the same bestseller.
We worked to create displays of content that meant something.
I started as a bookseller then assistant Manager and finally, Manager.
Though I used label tape and put the title, GUY IN CHARGE on my name tag.
One of the many, many things I did that got me trouble.
My battles can be kind of summed up when I made a display of books for Valentine’s Day.
Regardless of the topic or author, I took over a wall and made a display of every red book we had in the store.
My District Manager came in, took one look at Car Repair manuals next to Novels next to books on Knitting but ALL WITH RED COVERS surrounded by cardboard hearts and he ran back out to his car to get his camera.
“That’s the type of thinking we want to see Mike!,” he told me.
I banged a big red American Heritage dictionary against my head.
“This is Walden’s, Mike”, he would say, “Not Border’s.“
The really funny part of this story is that after I was asked to leave the employ of company, another long story, Walden’s relocated it’s headquarters from Stamford, CT to ANN ARBOR and then bought out Border’s and in an effort to change the brand, changed the name of the Company TO Border’s Books!
In the end I guess I won.
To read Booksellers are about as uncommercial a breed of people as it’s possible to come across is a tonic to my soul.
Some where I have a book, I think it’s an autographed copy of Lake Wobegone by Garrison Keillor.
It was picked up for me by a Waldenbooks Regional Vice President.
Her office was in Ann Arbor and I got to know her when I worked at the Walden’s in Ann Arbor when I was in College.
I was allowed to switch back and forth between Grand Rapids, where I lived and Ann Arbor.
I would have long talks with this VP on bookselling as a calling and she would explain bookselling as a business.
She knew I liked Keillor and arranged to get an autographed copy when he made an appearance at some other Walden’s.
Inscribed above the author’s autograph was this sentiment.
“To the most un-corporate person I know.”
And she signed it.
When James Thurber’s dog Mugg’s (The Dog that Bit People) died, he writes, “Mother wanted to bury him in the family lot under a marble stone with some such inscription as “Flights of angels sing thee to thy rest” but we persuaded her it was against the law. In the end we just put up a smooth board above his grave along a lonely road. On the board I wrote with an indelible pencil “Cave Canem.” Mother was quite pleased with the simple classic dignity of the old Latin epitaph.“
To the most un-corporate person I know.
Should I have a tombstone someday, I would be quite pleased with the simple classic dignity of that sentiment.
computers often in reality too dumb to avoid hurting us
Inspired by the guest Opinion Essay, “Autonomous Vehicles Are Driving Blind” by Julia Angwin a contributing Opinion writer to the New York Times and an investigative journalist and the passage, “There’s an irony here: So many headlines have focused on fears that computers will get too smart and take control of the world from humans, but in our reality, computers are often too dumb to avoid hurting us.”
Ms. Angwin writes, “For all the ballyhoo over the possibility of artificial intelligence threatening humanity someday, there’s remarkably little discussion of the ways it is threatening humanity right now. When it comes to self-driving cars, we are driving blind.”
Ms. Angwin explains, “The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regulates the hardware (such as windshield wipers, airbags and mirrors) of cars sold in the United States. And the states are in charge of licensing human drivers. To earn the right to drive a car, most of us at some point have to pass a vision test, a written test and a driving test. The A.I. undergoes no such government scrutiny before commanding the wheel.”
I am reminded of The Glass in the Field by James Thurber from Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated: as in appeared in The Thurber Carnival.
A short time ago some builders, working on a studio in Connecticut, left a huge square of plate glass standing upright in a field one day. A goldfinch flying swiftly across the field struck the glass and was knocked cold. When he came to he hastened to his club, where an attendant bandaged his head and gave him a stiff drink. “What the hell happened?” asked a sea gull. “I was flying across a meadow when all of a sudden the air crystallized on me,” said the goldfinch. The sea gull and a hawk and an eagle all laughed heartily. A swallow listened gravely. “For fifteen years, fledgling and bird, I’ve flown this country,” said the eagle, “and I assure you there is no such thing as air crystallizing. Water, yes; air, no.” “You were probably struck by a hailstone,” the hawk told the goldfinch. “Or he may have had a stroke,” said the sea gull. “What do you think, swallow?” “Why, I–I think maybe the air crystallized on him,” said the swallow. The large birds laughed so loudly that the goldfinch became annoyed and bet them each a dozen worms that they couldn’t follow the course he had flown across the field without encountering the hardened atmosphere. They all took his bet; the swallow went along to watch. The sea gull, the eagle, and the hawk decided to fly together over the route the goldfinch indicated. “You come, too,” they said to the swallow. “I–I–well, no,” said the swallow. “I don’t think I will.” So the three large birds took off together and they hit the glass together and they were all knocked cold.
A grizzly bear who had been on a bender for several weeks following a Christmas party in his home at which his brother-in-law had set the Christmas tree on fire, his children had driven the family car through the front door and out the back, and all the attractive female bears had gone into hibernation before sunset returned home prepared to forgive, and live and let live. He found, to his mild annoyance, that the doorbell had been replaced by an ornamental knocker. When he lifted the knocker, he was startled to hear it play two bars of “Silent Night.”
When nobody answered his knock, he turned the doorknob, which said “Happy New Year” in a metallic voice, and a two-tone gong rang “Hello” somewhere deep within the house.
He called to his mate, who was always the first to lay the old aside, as well as the first by whom the new was tried, and got no answer. This was because the walls of his house had been soundproofed by a soundproofer who had soundproofed them so well nobody could hear anybody say anything six feet away. Inside the living room the grizzly bear turned on the light switch, and the lights went on all right, but the turning of the switch had also released an odor of pine cones, which this particular bear had always found offensive. The head of the house, now becoming almost as angry as he had been on Christmas Day, sank into an easy chair and began bouncing up and down and up and down, for it was a brand-new contraption called “Sitpretty” which made you bounce up and down and up and down when you sat on it. Now thoroughly exasperated, the bear jumped up from the chair and began searching for a cigarette. He found a cigarette box, a new-fangled cigarette box he had never seen before, which was made of metal and plastic in the shape of a castle, complete with portal and drawbridge and tower. The trouble was that the bear couldn’t get the thing open. Then he made out, in tiny raised letters on the portal, a legend in rhyme: “You can have a cigarette on me If you can find the castle key.” The bear could not find the castle key, and he threw the trick cigarette box through a windowpane out into the front yard, letting in a blast of cold air, and he howled when it hit the back of his neck. He was a little mollified when he found that he had a cigar in his pocket, but no matches, and so he began looking around the living room for a matchbox. At last he saw one on a shelf. There were matches in it, all right, but no scratching surface on which to scratch them. On the bottom of the box, however, there was a neat legend explaining this lack. The message on the box read: “Safety safety matches are doubly safe because there is no dangerous dangerous sandpaper surface to scratch them on. Strike them on a windowpane or on the seat of your pants.”
Enraged, infuriated, beside himself, seeing red and thinking black, the grizzly bear began taking the living room apart. He pounded the matchbox into splinters, knocked over lamps, pulled pictures off the wall, threw rugs out of the broken window, swept vases and a clock off the mantelpiece, and overturned chairs and tables, growling and howling and roaring, shouting and bawling and cursing, until his wife was aroused from a deep dream of marrying a panda, neighbors appeared from blocks around, and the attractive female bears who had gone into hibernation began coming out of it to see what was going on.
The bear, deaf to the pleas of his mate, heedless of his neighbors’ advice, and unafraid of the police, kicked over whatever was still standing in the house, and went roaring away for good, taking the most attractive of the attractive female bears, one named Honey, with him.
MORAL: Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.
From Further Fables for Our Time by James Thurber (Illustrated by the Author) First published in Great Britain 1956, by Hamish Hamilton Ltd, 90 Great Russell Street London W.C.1.
a word to the wise is not sufficient if, IF it doesn’t make sense
The Weaver and the Worm
A weaver watched in wide-eyed wonder a silkworm spinning its cocoon in a white mulberry tree.
“Where do you get that stuff?” asked the admiring weaver.
“Do you want to make something out of it?” inquired the silkworm, eagerly.
Then the weaver and the silkworm went their separate ways, for each thought the other had insulted him. We live, man and worm, in a time when almost everything can mean almost anything, for this is the age of gobbledygook, doubletalk, and gudda.
MORAL: A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn’t make any sense.
From Further Fables for Our Time by James Thurber, Hamish Hamilton, 1956.
No Haiku For You 