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LET’S HAVE
SOME FUN WITH LITERARY By TIMOTHY B. BENFORD I’m taking a bit of a break from the usual material this column covers and instead delving into little-known literary facts, oddities, vignettes, and information anecdotes I’ve tucked away in my memory bank over the years. Simply put: literary trivia. I’ve written twelve books. The first few were done on a Royal manual typewriter starting in 1982 with messy carbon paper for a second copy. Thereafter I used an IBM Selectric; a Commodore 64 computer; and finally an increasingly upgraded succession of PCs. I still have the original old manual Royal. I’ve kept it for its sentimental value. My wife says I kept it because I’m a pack-rat who can’t throw anything out. Whatever. Let me tell you about manual typewriters. Christopher Latham Sholes received a U.S. patent in 1868 for the first practical commercial typewriter. It was manufactured by Remington and only had capital letters. Sholes is also credited with creating the word itself. However, as far back as 1714 cumbersome, slow, and difficult to use machines had been invented for use by blind people. Both Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud were among the famous early users of Sholes typewriter. Twain used the new-fangled thing in 1875 to write The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and it is considered to be the first-ever typewritten book manuscript. Interestingly, Twain avoided broadcasting the fact because he feared other authors would jump on the bandwagon, and he didn’t want the competition. Henry Miller is often mentioned as the fastest author on a typewriter. I can’t give you his specific speed, or output, but I’ve heard that fact numerous times. If you live in China writing a book using a typewriter can be very difficult. There is one version of their typewriter that has 5,850 characters! I’ve read that even Chinese ‘speed merchants’ can only churn out a dozen or so words a minute. Charlie Chaplin believed that having sex before sitting down to write reduced his literary production by about a page of output. I’ve read that the first woman known to have made a living as an author was Aphra Behn (1640-1689) who wrote contemporary plays, fiction and poetry. There is also strong evidence that this lady was a spy for England’s Charles II. She is entombed in Westminster Abbey’s East Cloister. Talk about highly-paid authors, consider this: James Jones, best known for his novel From Here to Eternity, was paid $15,000 by Producer Darryl F. Zanuck for correcting a single line of dialog during production of the World War II epic The Longest Day. For reasons that remain unclear, the line that offended Zanuck originally read “I can’t eat that bloody old box of tunny fish. While sitting on a beach Jones and his wife Gloria read it over and over again. They deleted two words and changed four, and the result was: “I can’t stand this damned old tuna fish!” Their efforts averaged out to $2,500 a word. You think that’s a lot? Consider this: In 1960, according to The Guinness Book of World Records, Ernest Hemingway received $15 a word for a 2,000-word Sports Illustrated article on bullfighting. That’s a whopping $30,000 for writing about a topic Hemingway thoroughly knew and could write without doing a bit of research. The magazine’s usual rate at the time for an article of that length was $1,000 Authors can make some extra money on the lecture circuit. Best-selling and popular authors obviously do very well indeed with fees in five figures and sometimes higher. The largest honorarium yours truly ever received for a 30-minute speaking engagement was $700. But even my comparatively modest take blows the fee received by Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 1889s. He is believed to be the first writer to receive an honorarium for talking about his writing and it was a paltry $5. The arrangement, according to Emerson, also included oats for his horse. However, at the conclusion he became involved in a loud discussion with the organizers of the event about whether or not feeding his horse was part of the bargain. Though some of today’s popular and best-selling authors have, or shortly may, replace some of the scribes on the list of ‘The Ten Most Popular Writers of All Time,’ here are the writers that literary pundits believed were the most read, as of a quarter century ago: Shakespeare; Dante; Goethe; Pushkin; Burns; Shiller; Tolstoy; and Whitman… and not a Harry Potter book among them. TIMOTHY B. BENFORD is a best selling author and award-winning novelist. More than 90 of his magazine and newspaper features can be found at: http://www.associatedcontent.com/user/63511/timothy_b_benford.html |
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