Sunday, August 22, 2004

On typing

From a letter by Mark Twain to his brother upon the acquisition of a Remington typewriter (quoted in Faster by James Gleick, p. 117):

I am trying t to get the hang of this new f fangled writing machine ... The machine has several virtues I believe it will print faster than I can write. ... It piles an awful stack of words on one page.

(The typographical errors are copied from Faster, and presumably in turn were copied from the original letter.)