I mentioned last week that I was putting together a book on Utopian Publishing in the same format as BEYOND THE VOID, although it will be a slimmer volume. I do want to include a couple of additional pieces beyond the history of the company, one of which will be an essay on Norman Firth.
I've written about Firth previously (in C.A.D.S. and in my book The Mushroom Jungle) but this will hopefully—no, definitely!—be a far more comprehensive look at his short career. In five years (Firth was dead at the age of 29) he wrote something like four million words, publishing a lot of 10,000 and 20,000 novelettes masquerading as "novels" in the post-war period of 1945-50, although he also wrote quite a few full-length novels, too, as well as regular monthly 30,000-word magazines. He reputedly could write 6,000 words at a sitting.
I once typed up a book in three days—16,000 words, 3,000 words, 18,000 words—in order to complete my first book (Vultures of the Void) before my 21st birthday. This was a second draft, so most of the hard work had already been done. The dip in the middle was because I had a Brother golf-ball typewriter that used cassettes with tape that the golf-ball punched out onto the page rather than inky ribbons and I had to go into town to buy a new one. You can see one in action on this YouTube video, although I remember mine being slightly different as he doesn't mention the correcting feature. I think this is the model I had, which had a little strip of white tape that, if you mistyped something, you could type back over it and the white tape would lift the misspelled words off the paper. This is what sold the machine to me. No more Tippex! (I pinched the header picture from the eBay sales listing linked above.)
I have a feeling I bought that typewriter in 1981 and it cost £200. The golf balls were expensive, too, and I only had a couple, one of them probably an Ariel 10pt and the other a Pica Italic 10pt. Whenever I had to type the name of a book or film, I had to open up the typewriter, change the golf ball, type the title, and then change it back. Now imagine doing that all the way through typing a book. No wonder I was up from dawn until the wee hours of the morning finishing that book.
Buying those cassettes containing the tape proved quite expensive, and, of course, the lift-off mechanism only worked if you immediately spotted a mistake, as lining up the paper precisely after you'd removed it was impossible. Tippex never had the slightest glitch in their thriving business.
It was the Brother that caused me to slip a disk in my back: the typewriter used to sit on a low table in the living room at home and I had just taken a phone call from Heather (my then girlfriend); I was meant to be catching a bus to meet up with her and other friends in town, so I rushed back into the living room, leant over to lift the table so that it was out of the way, and collapsed backwards from the most unbearable pain I've ever experienced.
I was off work for two months and have had intermittent back pain problems ever since.
Talking of which... I'm currently suffering from damaged tendons in my upper right arm, probably caused by heavy lifting some months ago that have not been allowed to heal due to repetitive strain injury. I went to see a physio and have been given some exercises to do, one of which is impossible due to the agony it causes, and we shall see how I feel in a month. For the most part I feel fine—typing, for instance, isn't a problem—but twisting and lifting my arm, such as when I try to open and shut the curtains next to my desk, quickly reminds me, thanks to the intense shooting pain and sudden outburst of swearing, that everything is not alright.
Let's see if the exercises help.
We're in the last stages of getting THE PHANTOM PATROL into your hands. Progress has been made and we'll have more news next week. But it should definitely be out in September. I'd punch the air and scream "VICTORY!" but I'm worried I'll end up cursing rather that rejoicing.
Today''s Comic Cuts is brought to you by the numbers 37,000 and 200 and the words 'rotator' and 'cuff'.
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