Scope and Contents

This book provides the history of the typewriter and a description of the world-wide models. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents Kirkus Review: is the sturdy old typewriter, and this biography of a machine might just catch on. It's fun reading and conveys the vim and zest it imparts to our bustling economy and its inevitable facet, office life. It starts with a sparkling tribute to the girl secretary, as she led the invasion of the sacred portals, via the machine. Bliven has a facility in enlivening what might have been dull reportage of an invention that revolutionized communication at local level. Henry Mill of England worked on the idea in 1714; William Austin Burt of Michigan was the first American to pick it up, thought it just a byproduct but patented it in 1829. After an interim of fifty two dabblers in the invention came Sholes of Milwaukee, who put it on its keys. From then on- the histories and struggles of such household names as Remington, Underwood and Smith; of Mark Twain who thought the typewriter ""too curiosity breeding""; of the novel The Typewriter Girl whose doughty heroine proved she...