Review
"Darren Wershler-Henry¹s
The Iron Whim is a pure delight. This “fragmented history of typewriting” provides fascinating glimpses into the history, culture, and poetics of the typewriter, that instrument that controlled our writing for so many decades and for which nostalgia is currently at a high point. Himself a poet and critic, Wershler-Henry recounts, with great panache, how the typewriter works of such writers as Henry James and Charles Olson were actually produced. The role of the amanuensis, the dictation process, the production and reception of typed text: all these topics, clearly and vividly detailed, insure the wide reception
The Iron Whim is sure to get. I cannot imagine a reader who would not find this book intriguing and compelling."
—Marjorie Perloff, author of
Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strageness of the Ordinary and
The Futurist Movement"I have been waiting years for just such a book on the cultural imagination of the typewriter, and Darren Wershler-Henry makes the wait well worthwhile.
The Iron Whim combines historical rigor, theoretical sophistication, and an amazing breadth of literary knowledge from the canonical to the avant-garde -- not to mention a palpable sense of mischievous fun. Wershler-Henry, one of today's most provocative scholars and poets, undertakes this medial archaeology with unerring precision: revealing the most surprising arcana to be central to our cultural history and making the most familiar facts of the modern writing machine seem suddenly new and strange and extravagantly unlikely. This book is necessary, intelligent, and fun."
—Craig Dworkin, Associate Professor at the University of Utah, and author of
Reading the Illegible"Who connects the typewriter with vampires, ghosts, sex, drugs, and money? Poet, theorist, and culture critic Wershler-Henry, has produced a surprising book that is nothing short of a cultural history of the complex writing machine. Richly researched, the text is composed with élan and wit. A must-read for students of contemporary literature, media studies, and anyone interested in the interconnections of modern life and technology.
This book will find its place next to Henry Petroski’s book
The Pencil as a marvel of transformative prose by which a mundane and under-appreciated invention rises from humble beginnings to a starring role in the history of culture."
—Johanna Drucker, Robertson Professor of Media Studies, University of Virginia
Product Description
The fascinating history of a writing culture and technology.
The Iron Whim is an intelligent, irreverent, and humorous history that traces the haphazard trajectory of the typewriter’s development and its various evolutionary dead ends.
Darren Wershler-Henry casts amusing light on the tricks of the first typewriter salesmen, important and unusual typewritten texts, the creation of On the Road, and the exploits of a typewriting cockroach named Archy, numerous monkeys, and even a couple of vampires. He turns his keen eye on typewriter-related rumours (does Thomas Mann’s daughter really live on Canada’s east coast with two golden retrievers who type on a machine built specifically for their use?) and anecdotes (Henry James became so accustomed to dictating his novels to a typist that he required the sound of a randomly operated typewriter even to begin to compose). And by broadening his focus to look at typewriting as well as the typewriter, he examines the fascinating way that the tool has actually shaped the creative process.
With engaging subject matter that ranges over two hundred years of literature and culture in English,
The Iron Whim builds on recent interest in books about familiar objects and taps into our nostalgia for a method of communicating that has all but vanished.
