David Alastair Hayden

Under­wood No. 5 in the REH Museum

You might think the new Conan movie inspired this arti­cle. Alas, you would be wrong. Its source is my immense appre­ci­a­tion of Robert E. Howard’s work and my love affair with vin­tage man­ual typewriters.

To under­stand the blood and thun­der style of REH, indeed all our clas­sics of swords, sor­ceries and hero­ics, I think you need an appre­ci­a­tion of the man­ual typewriter’s effect on the craft of fiction.

There’s this great scene in The Whole Wide World where Robert E. Howard pounds away on his type­writer, dic­tat­ing to him­self with the pas­sion of the pos­sessed. That machine, which Howard pur­chased in 1928 and used till the very end, was the clas­sic Under­wood No. 5.

For decades, when most peo­ple thought “type­writer” this 30 lb. desk­top machine was what they had in mind. Mil­lions were pro­duced between 1901 and 1932, so even today the Under­wood No. 5 isn’t a rare find, nor par­tic­u­larly valu­able unless in mint con­di­tion. When Howard bought one of these machines, he knew he was get­ting a reli­able com­pan­ion for his career. Think about the invest­ment value. Many of these machines still work now. Think your Dell Insp­iron or Mac­book will be work­able in 80 years?

Me nei­ther.

You can get a No. 5 on eBay for $50 or less, non-restored. (For restora­tion you’d need a type­writer repair place, which is becom­ing increas­ingly rare.) You’ll pay almost as much for the machine as for ship­ping. Sadly, I don’t have one myself. Yet. I own ten type­writ­ers already and my wife scowls when I men­tion a new one… I do have an L.C. Smith from the mid-30’s and a Royal Portable from 1929 (mint con­di­tion and ever so pre­cise), so I can well attest to the action and expe­ri­ence of these old machines.

Many of you have likely never used a man­ual type­writer before. Per­haps an elec­tric, per­haps none at all. (I touched my first com­puter in 1983, resented the elec­tric type­writ­ers we learned to type on in school, and didn’t expe­ri­ence the true plea­sure of the man­ual type­writer until early 2010.) If your expe­ri­ence is lim­ited to elec­tric machines, then you only know half the story. It’s just not the same.

There’s an almost pri­mal expe­ri­ence to using a man­ual, like a sculp­tor chis­el­ing or a car­pen­ter ham­mer­ing. The strik­ing of the keys, the smell of oil and metal, the gun­fire stac­cato of strik­ing keys (the sharp feed­back as they rebound), the bell ring warn­ing the end of the line approaches, the scrap­ing return of the car­riage, the scroll of paper. It is a thing of art and beauty.

As for the effect on writ­ing… Take a look at some books from the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s. Notice some­thing? They got big­ger with each decade, huh? There was a mar­ket­ing dynamic, sure. But com­put­ers allowed writ­ers to match the dynamic. Allowed us all to eas­ily become messy and long-winded.

REH Bed­room with Desk and Typewriter

You don’t often see writ­ing with the fast-paced, blaz­ing action you find in old pulps. Some of that is style, but when you type on a man­ual machine the very writ­ing of the story has an imme­di­ate phys­i­cal­ity to it, not unlike the fast-paced action in REH’s work. There is sound and action.

I notice the sounds more in older books. The brevity of the words. The rush of the action. Com­put­ers, gods know I love them, sim­ply don’t have this kind of soul. And writ­ing with them, I think, becomes more cere­bral and less a phys­i­cal act of cre­ation. And it shows. Our books today tend towards lengthy descrip­tion and intro­spec­tion far more than the thun­der­ing heroic fan­tasy pounded out on the old manuals.

When you write some­thing on a type­writer, you have to mean it. Remem­ber, if you mess up or change your mind, that’s the whole page to retype. There’s no time for ram­bling and dither­ing along through a story. You get to the point. You say what you mean. And you say it right the first time. And, I think the nature of the machine itself changes how you write. For bold pulp action, I think it changes it for the better.

Note: I have thus far writ­ten one novel on a man­ual type­writer, a 1955 Her­mes Rocket. I plan on com­pos­ing all my future works on var­i­ous type­writ­ers. Nat­u­rally they will get scanned in and edited on the com­puter. There are advan­tages to our mod­ern world.

This arti­cle orig­i­nally appeared on Rogue Blade’s Home of Heroics.