This article, by Christopher South, was published in the ‘South’s Week’ column of the Cambridge Evening News on 31 May 1991.
TOM SHARPE tells me he thinks he has found a way round the dreadful technological maze in which so many modern writers get lost.
He has just spent £1,100 on an item of office equipment which he believes will allow him to go on writing his best-selling novels on his much-loved old-banger typewriters.
Tom, whose hilarious stories, many of them set in Cambridge, have sold in their millions, shares my affection for old-fashioned manual typewriters. “I read your column in the News the other day when you were going on about old bangers and I agreed with every word of it,” he tells me.
“I can’t write on these computer things. I’ve been through dozens of them. I’ve spent a fortune on computers but I just can’t get on with any of them. I simply can’t think when I’m at a computer keyboard. I need my old bangers. I have a collection of them and I love them all.
“But there’s one thing you didn’t say in your piece; you failed to admit that computers have some advantages when it comes to editing. My dear old bangers just can’t compare with a computer when I am editing something I have already written.”
And, of course, the great writer is right. You can fairly whizz the words round on a computer screen in ways that would require a major re-typing job an old manual model.
What is the solution? Tom believes it is a thing called a scanner. He now writes at his Stapleford home on one of his clattering old typewriters, hammering away at the keys like a blacksmith on an anvil. Then he takes his sheet of typescript and inserts it in the scanner which has the ability to read his clumsy typing and convert it into a crisp computer image on a screen.
“Then all I have to do is move the words about, chop bits out and so on.”
But Tom still has one regret. It seems impossible to buy a big, heavy, brand-new manual typewriter, which is what he really wants. Me too. I think the world is full of wordsmiths desperate for new “old” typewriters which the manufacturers arrogantly refuse to supply.