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.

The power went out here after a storm yes­ter­day after­noon. A small storm. We live deep in the woods. Lots of places where a tree could strike the lines along the way. We were sup­posed to have power back on at 6 pm. Didn’t hap­pen until 12:30 am. Grumble.

Nat­u­rally, the bat­tery went out on my Mac­book, delay­ing com­ple­tion of the ebook I was work­ing on. (I unplugged the Mac­book dur­ing the storm.) And I hadn’t charged my iPod Touch in a few days, so I couldn’t read any books or write on it.

The solu­tion?

Why pull out a type­writer, of course. Specif­i­cally, my gold-speckled Olympia SF from the 1950’s (?). Lap-sized with the sweet action you’d expect from an Olympia. And of the ten type­writ­ers I own, it has my favorite font. (I’m a 12 char­ac­ters per inch kinda guy.)

The rub, of course, is that I’m not work­ing on com­pos­ing any­thing new at the moment. I have two nov­els in first draft state that I’m work­ing on revis­ing. I’m gen­er­at­ing two ebooks. I have new things planned, but I don’t want to start them until I take care of the afore­men­tioned projects.

I could have read by my bright LED Cole­man lantern. (A Hunger Games reread is next up.) But I wasn’t in a read­ing mood. I wanted to work damn it.

So I started a new story: THE BONES OF KAZARDAHL. Novel, short story, nov­el­ette, novella? I don’t know really. Though I’d wage money on novella. It’s adven­ture fan­tasy. Not too seri­ous or grim, though that might change. I have barely an inkling of where it will go. Just the notion of a few char­ac­ters. Should be fun.

How it starts:

With fire and sword and a thirst for some­thing, any­thing but the relent­less cold and howl­ing winds of the North Mark, the reavers descended on the sleep­ing town of Kazardahl. Sleep­ing save for one man who had retired there. One man, but not just any man. Once he had been the great­est wiz­ard in the King­dom of Bregh. And awake this late at night he was because retired or not, it is not the habit of a wiz­ards to sleep at night.

If you are going to offer authors copy­edit­ing or other pub­lish­ing ser­vices, please don’t quote prices in terms of pages.

I have no idea what the page-length is for any of my nov­els. I’m cer­tain I don’t care. I’m cer­tain that if I knew it would tell me noth­ing of value. Yes, if I for­mat the work for a stan­dard sub­mis­sion, I will know how many pages there are, if I bother to look at the total. (Never have before.) Assum­ing every­one uses the same beau­ti­ful Courier font and mar­gins, though…

But if I’m look­ing to pro­duce an ebook myself, I’m never going to use stan­dard sub­mis­sion for­mat­ting. Why would I?

And if you quote your by-page ser­vices along with spe­cific for­mat­ting require­ments, that would work. How­ever, the mes­sage it sends to me is that you’re stuck in the past.

Pages are vari­able in the 21st cen­tury. Stick to word counts.

(Yes, I could tell you how many pages are in any of my new short story drafts because I do those on man­ual type­writ­ers. How­ever, those are only rough drafts, not even close to fin­ished works. Plus, the pitch sizes and line spaces are very dif­fer­ent on the ’29 Royal Portable, the ’56 Olympia SM-3, and the ’55 Her­mes Rocket. So that doesn’t tell you much, either. And really, this bit here is beside the point. I just wanted to talk about typewriters.)

This is a vin­tage 1929 Royal Portable type­writer. Over the last week, I’ve pur­chased six vin­tage, man­ual type­writ­ers. “Why the freck would you do that?” you might ask.

Well, I’m a writer, and these are writ­ing devices. Very cool, vin­tage writ­ing devices.

Also, I’m strange. And obsessive.

I’ve many other rea­sons. In fact, I will soon detail those rea­sons on this very site. I am going to write a story (novel?) using one or more man­ual type­writ­ers. I plan on explain­ing why and doing a series of arti­cles detail­ing the expe­ri­ence. (I’ve never used a man­ual type­writer before. Only an elec­tric for typ­ing class in high school. I got my first com­puter in 1984 at the age of 8.)