QUILL TO TYPEWRITER

Hawera Star, Volume LIV, 4 May 1935, Page 11

QUILL TO TYPEWRITER

Writing Made Easy for the Unskilled

A* old journalistic friend of ruin w ho lived and worked until 1 was eighty years of age, could neve be persuaded to use a fountain per Perhaps the pause allowed him in th act of dipping gave him time to gatl er his thoughts. He was a most pain; taking and accurate antiquarian ant perhaps, living in the past mainly, thi was his protest against the moder spirit. Anyhow, this trifling foible <li not make me respect him the less. IV are all of us the better for a kic at something. Years ago, when I was a small bo.T writes “T.T.” in the “Mancheste Guardian,” it was one of my duties t take printed sheets to be stamped b the Inland Revenue people in Mar Chester. I had to fill up a form, anc believe me, the only pens availabl were quill pens. An unskilled! per man might do just as well with a spli skewer as with a quill pen, especiall when somebody in despair has prev ously tried his hand at cutting th nib and one leg swings iround th other like a skater doing the outsid edge. I do not know whether the rc volt which must have happened wa submitted to arbitration, but later, remember, the. quill pens were cu level at the bottom and steel nibs wer stuck in. Thus we reached out amir ably to the Middle Ages. My fountain pen has served mo we for years, but it is one of those anc ent contraptions you fill with a glas syringe. I hate to throw it away, an so I point out to my friends who com along with those Americanised sell filling rolling pins that I do not wan

!C,| a pen which will empty a bucket or lc I make me round-shouldered. The cun--I(l.!ning of this reply lies behind the fact that virtually my fountain pen is on the retired Jist. Never having* comI pletely mastered the art of penmanship, I gave it up as soon as I could ’] afford a typewriter. Now I only write •’ when it is too much trouble to imcover the machine. • c l Here I bump into the diieha.rds again. r e I am told that typewriting lacks per.j. sonality, and that posterity will never treasure a typescript as it would a „ manuscript. Being convinced at prep sent that unless things alter consid.Q erably posterity will be nomadic and ' tent-dwelling, it seems to me that even the writer of a document as import-. ] ant as the Codex Sinaitieus need not |g worry about his method. I am told also that it. cannot be as it easy to think whilst using the typo[y writer as with the pen. At first (I frankly admit) it was impossible to think * without spelling Mussolini ie something like Mu/s —l£nl. I had first | e to write the thing out in pencil and 3. trust to luck as to whether I could ts read it. Now I challenge anyone to 1 deny that the typewriter is not the it easiest of all writing instruments for • e [ thinking upon and expressing c _ thoughts. You can almost see the things you are wanting about as you ]] play upon the keys. Except, of course, i- when King Stodge blankets your m fuddled brain with his grey coat, d Then, as the American announcers put ie it, you “ain't-seen nothin’,’’ and feel f- as though you never will, it “Most English of the English” —* 333