Odd Type Writers
Odd Type Writers

Author: Celia Blue Johnson

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2013-06-04

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1101623985

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Every great writer has a unique way of setting a story to paper. And, it turns out, many of these writers used methods that were just as inventive as the works they produced. Odd Type Writers explores the quirky writing habits of renowned authors, including Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, and Alexandre Dumas, among many others. * To meet his deadline for The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo placed himself under strict house arrest, locking up all of his clothes and wearing nothing but a large gray shawl until he finished the book. * Virginia Woolf used purple ink for love letters, diary entries, and to pen her acclaimed novel Mrs. Dalloway. Also, in her twenties, she preferred to write while standing up. * Friedrich Schiller kept a drawer full of rotten apples in his study. According to his wife, he couldn’t work without that pungent odor wafting into his nose. * Eudora Welty evaluated her work with scissors handy. If anything needed to be moved, she cut it right out of the page. Then she’d use pins to put the section in its new place. In Odd Type Writers, you’ll find out why James Joyce wrote in crayon, what Edgar Allan Poe’s cat was doing on his shoulder, why Vladimir Nabokov had to keep his feet wet, and the other peculiar tools and eccentric methods used to compose some of the greatest works of all time.

Odd Type Writers
Odd Type Writers

Author: Celia Blue Johnson

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2013-06-04

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0399159940

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Every great writer has a unique way of setting a story to paper. And, it turns out, many of these writers used methods that were just as inventive as the works they produced. Odd Type Writers explores the quirky writing habits of renowned authors, including Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, and Alexandre Dumas, among many others. * To meet his deadline for The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo placed himself under strict house arrest, locking up all of his clothes and wearing nothing but a large gray shawl until he finished the book. * Virginia Woolf used purple ink for love letters, diary entries, and to pen her acclaimed novel Mrs. Dalloway. Also, in her twenties, she preferred to write while standing up. * Friedrich Schiller kept a drawer full of rotten apples in his study. According to his wife, he couldn’t work without that pungent odor wafting into his nose. * Eudora Welty evaluated her work with scissors handy. If anything needed to be moved, she cut it right out of the page. Then she’d use pins to put the section in its new place. In Odd Type Writers, you’ll find out why James Joyce wrote in crayon, what Edgar Allan Poe’s cat was doing on his shoulder, why Vladimir Nabokov had to keep his feet wet, and the other peculiar tools and eccentric methods used to compose some of the greatest works of all time.

Typewriters
Typewriters

Author: Anthony Casillo

Publisher: Chronicle Books

Published: 2017-10-17

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 1452155747

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“Typewriter expert and collector Anthony Casillo presents a visual homage to the device that revolutionized correspondence” (The Florida Times-Union). From the creation of the QWERTY keyboard to the world’s first portable typing machine, this handsome collection is a visual homage to the golden age of the typewriter. From the world’s first commercially successful typewriter—the Sholes & Glidden Type Writer of 1874—to the iconic electric models of the 1960s, eighty vintage devices are profiled in elegant photographs and fascinating text that highlights the design modifications, intricate details, and peculiar quirks that make each typewriter unique. From functional advances like noiseless machines to luxurious details such as mahogany covers and inlaid mother-of-pearl, a century of design innovation and experimentation is charted in these pages. Packed with visuals and rich with history, Typewriters is the essential story of a writing invention that changed the world. Includes a foreword by Tom Hanks Praise for Typewriters “A Love Letter to Vintage Typewriters.” —Wall Street Journal “This is sure to delight typewriter lovers and those interested in machine or design history.” —Library Journal

Odd Partners
Odd Partners

Author: Mystery Writers Of America

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2019-04-23

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 1524799351

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Unlikely pairs join forces to crack a slew of intriguing cases in an anthology edited by New York Times bestselling author Anne Perry, featuring original stories by Jacqueline Winspear, Jeffery Deaver, Allison Brennan, Charles Todd, and many more, including Perry herself. Throughout the annals of fiction, there have been many celebrated detective teams: Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. Nick and Nora Charles. Hercule Poirot and Arthur Hastings. Thomas and Charlotte Pitt. That last pair is the creation of beloved mystery writer Anne Perry, who, as the editor of Odd Partners and in conjunction with Mystery Writers of America, has enlisted some of today’s best mystery writers to craft all-new stories about unlikely duos who join forces—sometimes unwillingly—to solve beguiling whodunits. From Perry’s own entry, in which an English sergeant and his German counterpart set out to find a missing soldier during World War I, to a psychological tale of an airplane passenger who wakes up unsure of who he is and must enlist his fellow passengers to help him remember, to a historical mystery about a misguided witch-hunt and the unlikely couple that brings it down, each story deals in the wonderful complexities of human interactions. And not just human interactions: Honey bees avenge the death of their beekeeper, a wandering cat brings home clues to a murder, and a gray wolf and a fly fisherman in the Minnesota woods try to protect their land from a brash billionaire. Featuring work by New York Times bestselling authors, Edgar Award winners, and up-and-coming members of the Mystery Writers of America, these tales of friends, enemies, and pairs who lie somewhere in the middle will satisfy every type of mystery reader. With each author’s signature brand of suspense, these stories give new meaning to the word “teamwork.” Featuring stories by: Ace Atkins • Allison Brennan • Shelley Costa • Jeffery Deaver • Robert Dugoni • William Frank • Georgia Jeffries • Lou Kemp • William Kent Krueger • Joe R. Lansdale • Lisa Morton • Claire Ortalda • Anne Perry • Adele Polomski • Stephen Ross • Mark Thielman • Charles Todd • Jacqueline Winspear • Amanda Witt

A Crack in the Sea
A Crack in the Sea

Author: H. M. Bouwman

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0399545190

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"Pip, a young boy who can speak to fish, and his sister Kinchen set off on a great adventure, joined by twins with magical powers, refugees fleeing post-war Vietnam, and some helpful sea monsters"--

Dancing with Mrs. Dalloway
Dancing with Mrs. Dalloway

Author: Celia Blue Johnson

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2011-10-04

Total Pages: 179

ISBN-13: 1101544589

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Every great book begins with an idea, whether it comes to a writer's mind with lightning speed or tugs at the imagination over time. Dancing with Mrs. Dalloway offers stories of the inspiration behind fifty classic works, from The Sound and the Fury, Jane Eyre, and Frankenstein to Anna Karenina, The Bell Jar, and Winnie-the-Pooh. Gabriel García Márquez was driving to Acapulco with his family when he slammed on the brakes, turned the car around, and insisted they abandon their trip so he could return home to write. He had good reason to cut the trip short-a childhood memory of touching ice had suddenly sparked the first line to a novel that would become his most famous work, One Hundred Years of Solitude. C. S. Lewis, on the other hand, spent decades pondering the scene that inspired The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. When Lewis was sixteen, he had a peculiar daydream: a faun carried a bundle of parcels and an umbrella through snow-covered woods. Lewis was almost forty when he decided to write a novel that grew around the vision. In Dancing with Mrs. Dalloway, you'll discover who Edgar Allan Poe's raven really belonged to, whether Jane Austen's heartthrob Mr. Darcy actually existed, who got into mischief with a young Mark Twain, and what the real Sherlock Holmes did for a living. These delightful stories reveal the often unknown reasons our literary heroes put quill to parchment, pen to paper, or finger to keyboard to write some of the world's best-loved books.

The Iron Whim
The Iron Whim

Author: Darren Sean Wershler-Henry

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 9780801445866

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The Iron Whim is an intelligent, irreverent, and humorous history of writing culture and technology. It covers the early history and evolution of the typewriter as well as the various attempts over the years to change the keyboard configuration, but it is primarily about the role played by this marvel in the writer's life. Darren Wershler-Henry populates his book with figures as disparate as Bram Stoker, Mark Twain, Franz Kafka, Norman Mailer, Alger Hiss, William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, Northrop Frye, David Cronenberg, and David Letterman; the soundtrack ranges from the industrial clatter of a newsroom full of Underwoods to the more muted tapping and hum of the Selectric. Wershler-Henry casts a bemused eye on the odd history of early writing machines, important and unusual typewritten texts, the creation of On the Road, and the exploits of a typewriting cockroach named Archy, numerous monkeys, poets, and even a couple of vampires. He gathers into his narrative typewriter-related rumors 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 a social system as well as the typewriter as a technological form, 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 communication and composition that has all but vanished.

Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish
Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish

Author: Tom McCarthy

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2017-05-09

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1681370875

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Essays on literature, pop culture, and more from the cult novelist and critic Tom McCarthy Fifteen brilliant essays written over as many years provide a map of the sensibility and critical intelligence of Tom McCarthy, one of the most original and challenging novelists at work today. Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish explores a wide range of subjects, from the weather considered as a form of media, to the paintings of Gerhard Richter and the movies of David Lynch, to Patty Hearst as revolutionary sex goddess, to the still-radical implications of established masterpieces such as Ulysses (how do you write after it?), Tristram Shandy, and the unsung junky genius Alexander Trocchi’s darkly beautiful Cain’s Book. The longer “Recessional” examines the place of time in writing—how writing makes a new time of its own, a time apart from institutional time—while the startling “Nothing Will Have Taken Place” moves from Mallarmé and Don DeLillo to the ball mastery of Zidane to look at how art, whether that of a poet, novelist, or athlete, destroys given codes of meaning and behavior, returning them to play. Certain points of reference recur with dreamlike insistence—among them the artist Ed Ruscha’s Royal Road Test, a photographic documentation of the roadside debris of a Royal typewriter hurled from the window of a traveling car; the great blooms of jellyfish that are filling the oceans and gumming up the machinery of commerce and military domination—and the question throughout is: How can art explode the restraining conventions of so-called realism, whether aesthetic or political, to engage in the active reinvention of the world?

Odd Jobs
Odd Jobs

Author: John Updike

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2012-12-04

Total Pages: 1025

ISBN-13: 0679645853

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To complement his work as a fiction writer, John Updike accepted any number of odd jobs—book reviews and introductions, speeches and tributes, a “few paragraphs” on baseball or beauty or Borges—and saw each as “an opportunity to learn something, or to extract from within some unsuspected wisdom.” In this, his largest collection of assorted prose, he brings generosity and insight to the works and lives of William Dean Howells, George Bernard Shaw, Philip Roth, Muriel Spark, and dozens more. Novels from outposts of postmodernism like Turkey, Albania, Israel, and Nigeria are reviewed, as are biographies of Cleopatra and Dorothy Parker. The more than a hundred considerations of books are flanked, on one side, by short stories, a playlet, and personal essays, and, on the other, by essays on his own oeuvre. Updike’s odd jobs would be any other writer’s chief work.