| The machine is at Bliss's, grimly pursuing
its appointed mission, slowly & implacably rotting away at another man's
chances for salvation. I have sent Bliss word not to donate it to a charity (though it is a pity to fool away a chance to do a charity an ill turn), but to let me know when he has got his dose, because I've got another candidate for damnation. You just wait a couple of weeks & if you don't see the TypeWriter coming tilting along toward Cambridge with the raging hell of an unsatisfied appetite in its eye, I lose my guess. - Letter to William Dean Howells, 25 June 1875 |
One
of Mark Twain's typewriters, a Hammond model circa 1880, |
Please do not even divulge the fact that I own a machine. I have entirely stopped
using the Type-Writer, for the reason that I never could write a letter with
it to anybody without receiving a request by return mail that I would not only
describe the machine but state what progress I had made in the use of it, etc.,
etc. I don't like to write letters, and so I don't want people to know that
I own this curiosity-breeding little joker.
- Letter, 19 March 1875
...I will now claim--until dispossessed--that I was the first person in the
world to apply the typewriter to literature...The early machine was full of
caprices, full of defects--devilish ones. It had as many immoralities as the
machine of today has virtues. After a year or two I found that it was degrading
my character, so I thought I would give it to Howells...He took it home to Boston,
and my morals began to improve, but his have never recovered.
- "The First Writing Machines"
Remington Rand
typewriter ad featuring Mark Twain and his daughter,
COLLIER'S MAGAZINE, February 24, 1945
...[children] what are they in the world for I don't know, for they are of
no practical value as far as I can see. If I could beget a typewriter--but no,
our fertile days are over.
- Letter to William Dean Howells, 12 May 1899
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