You have no items in your cart. Want to get some nice things?
Go shoppingWriters are a peculiar lot, often possessed of vague superstitions and idiosyncratic behaviours that they hope will somehow pin down the ever elusive Muse (that bitch). Nabokov wrote on index cards whilst standing up, Gertrude Stein whilst sitting in her Ford. Jack Kerouac swore by his Spontaneous Prose method, the rules of which included such gems as “Try never to get drunk outside your own house” and “You’re a Genius all the time” (fair enough, although that doesn’t exactly seem prescriptive). Descriptions of Dickens’ behaviour, meanwhile, smack of obsessive-compulsiveness, but should one expect otherwise from such a prolific writer?
We were thinking of the oddities associated with the writing life after learning today that George Bernard Shaw’s typewriter is up for sale. Do you see where we’re going with this? George Bernard Shaw’s typewriter. Think of the superstitious possibilities. For a mere $8,417.44 (about £4500), this Remington Noiseless Portable Typewriter, on which the author of Pygmalion must surely have prepared many a manuscript for publication, can be yours. Or ours. Please, would you buy it for us? Think of the inspiration it would bring us! Not a day would pass without at least seventeen new blog posts… if only we could figure out a way to blog from a typewriter.
I’ll invoke Joyce here—always invoke Joycean stream-of-consciousness whenever you can’t be bothered to explain your non sequiturs—and leave you with a clip which both indirectly descends from one of Shaw’s typewriters (if not this exact model) and which satisfies my didactic streak:
Why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?
By Julie Palmer-Hoffman
