How J.B. Priestley typed

 I watched a two-and-a-half-minute film of J.B. Priestley hammering at a typewriter in 1944. He used two fingers but didn’t hunt and peck. He blazed away.

He also wrote in a room full of reference books. In the days before the Internet, writers were people who knew how to find things in books. They didn’t sit at a desk. They got up constantly to look things up.

Priestley wrote with a pipe in his mouth. A lot of the old writers I knew smoked.

The short film interested me not because it showed a lost world but because it showed a world I had seen. I went to work at the local newspaper when I was 14. It was a part-time job, taking calls from correspondents from across the region. I’d take down the facts and write three-paragraph items about high school games.

I worked the night shift on game nights: Fridays during football season — Tuesdays and Fridays when basketball started.

The calls started coming in before 8 p.m. We’d take calls until a little after midnight and then hit the last deadline.

Newspapers used hot type in those days. You could hear the clatter of typewriters in the newsroom and the racket of linotypes in the composing room. I didn’t know enough to worry about the fumes of molten metal. I wouldn’t have been able to smell the fumes anyway. When I first cracked the door of the newsroom, clouds of tobacco smoke billowed out.

I was younger than I was supposed to be. The sports editor couldn’t quite believe it when he discovered I was one of his employees. He always covered the big games on Friday nights, so months passed before he finally got his first look at the new guy.

He made sure I got a guild card.

The night shift was mainly sports guys. But sometimes the city hall reporters would come in from late meetings. The crime reporters and photographers were always around. The copy editors worked around the rim of a U-shaped table with the news editor in “the slot.”

It was a strange new world. The only thing that people noticed about me was that I used all 10 fingers to type. People came to watch, as if I were a circus elephant that had been trained to do a trick.

Most of the old guys typed like Priestley. And, like Priestly, they didn’t seem to be able to work without a smoke, but they did know how to look stuff up.

It was a short film. It seems like a lot of memories for such a short film.

• Sources: “Personalities: J.B. Priestley (1944) is available here:

https://youtu.be/_Xf-2zMSp6U?si=Nzz-Gqi8OS2MYFJJ

I saw the clip while reading Robert Messenger’s wonderful blog about typewriters:
https://oztypewriter.blogspot.com/2024/05/vale-paul-auster-1947-2024.html