William Marvel: The Pen is the Key

In books and articles for magazines and historical journals, I've had at least 8,000 pages in print over the last 40 years, and I can't begin to count how many words of mine this newspaper has published since 1990. Nonetheless, I still can't type worth a damn. Sister Dot, the plain-clothes nun who taught my college typing course, gave me a kindhearted D after I finally managed 21 words a minute with 16 mistakes, but then I seemed to be a favorite of Sister Dot's. She was very complimentary of my handwriting.

I wrote all my early books entirely by hand before typing them up for prospective publishers with carbon copies for myself. It took 61 days to produce a presentable manuscript of one book that I sent to a university press in 1993, typing it during a self-funded sabbatical from work; the handwritten version, with superscript insertions and taped-in revisions, is pictured here. Later, a cousin-in-law gave me his old Zenith console computer, dismissing my Luddite reservations with assurances that I would ultimately begin composing directly on the screen.