Remember Carbon Paper?
No? Prepare to be shocked
Yes? Welcome back to the
Pre-Millennium Carbon Age
Part One
So you’ve got a story idea…
Back in
those heady days of yore when you had an idea for a story, you didn’t fire up
your laptop (‘What’s that?’ you would have cried and no one would have
answered.) Instead, you grabbed your Silvine Exercise Book. There was something
so wonderfully tactile about the glossy textured surface and, on the back
cover, you could learn ‘avoirdupois weights’, ‘hay and straw weights’, ‘long
and lineal measures’ including how many poles were in a furlong (40), the
number of yards in a fathom (2). We all knew how many noggins made up a pint
(4) because our exercise books told us, and as for rods, poles and perches...
With
pencils sharpened, you stared at the first pristine page. If you were already
inspired enough, you might actually write something - maybe the working title, or
possibly a first sentence. Braver souls headed straight for the ballpoint pen;
the rest of us lined up our erasers.
Meanwhile, the machine that would eventually be harnessed into service to produce a
printed version sat idly in the corner of the kitchen/living room/bedroom. Most
likely it was a portable, neatly zipped into its leatherette carrying case. You
wouldn’t dream of typing your first draft or even your second. No, that was for
later, when you had finished all the crossings out and amendments and after you
had deciphered that note you made on page 32 relating to something on page 94
that was now completely obliterated or amended so many times as to be
completely illegible.
You see
your friendly typewriter couldn’t correct any mistakes you might make, or any
decisions to alter a word or phrase once you had typed it. If you wanted to
make a correction, you had to do it yourself. To effect such a change, you
needed to call on the services of a hard typewriter rubber (that usually rubbed
a hole in the paper while removing the offending error) or, if you were a
little more sophisticated, you might use a white liquid resembling a cross
between a bottle of nail varnish and Dulux Brilliant White Gloss Paint – called
variously ‘Liquid Paper’ or ‘Tipp-Ex’ depending on your manufacturer of choice.
This had been invented by the mother of a musician and sometime member of The Monkees (anyone under the age of 40 is advised to consult an older relative or friend). His name was Michael (Mike) Nesmith. I forget hers but I believe she was a Mrs. Nesmith, at least once upon a time. Tipp-Ex also made a paper-correction slip thingy but it’s far too complicated to explain here (that older friend/relative is going to become increasingly handy from now on).
 |
| (Mike Nesmith is on the left) |
The
subject of errors and revisions leads me to the next hurdle we writers from the
carbon (paper) age had to overcome. Copies. Nowadays, along with everything
else a typewriter couldn’t do, your computer, in cahoots with a printer, will
happily print off as many copies as you want – all identical and of the same
quality. Not back then they didn’t.
And this
is where carbon paper came in.
It was
sold in boxes, in various sorts, textures and colours. Usually you had a
choice of black or, a sort of, royal blue. If you wanted more colour definition
you needed to use different colours of paper rather than print. Even the most
amateur writer knew that to type only one copy of the precious manuscript was
to court danger of the most precipitous kind. What if you lost it? What if you
sent it to a publisher and THEY lost it? Or the postal service lost it (I’m
coming to them later, in part two). What if your house burned down? What
if…what if… The prospect was too horrendous to contemplate so, the investment
in carbon paper was well worth it, plus publishers were usually satisfied with
receiving a first or second-generation copy, as long as it was neat,
error-free, pristine, and…legible. As well as double-spaced, with correct
margins and numbered pages (you had to type those on as you went along).
In order
to create your usual mix of one top copy plus up to five carbon copies, you
carefully layered your sheets of typing paper with a layer of carbon paper between each one –
taking great care to load the carbon paper the right way up or else the damn
thing would print on the reverse of the previous sheet and you would have to
(sound ominous music here) START ALL OVER AGAIN.
A word of
caution here. Imagine you are bashing away at your typewriter - not the gentle
tip tap most of you do right now. Typewriters were robust and required robust
operation – some more than others; the keys needed to be moved. They had to
be hit with meaning and a certain sense of real purpose or they had a tendency
to sit tight and refuse to budge or else all gang up on you, move together and
end in a tangle which – you guessed it – you would have to sort out.
Manually manipulating the little buggers back where they belonged. This
usually resulted in scraped fingers (yours) and bad language (yours again).
Then, as
now, editors didn’t like to receive work that showed a lack of care – spelling
and grammatical errors and typos for example. Back then, you would need to add
corrections to the list of their pet hates They would – if you were lucky –
allow you probably one or maybe two very minor corrections now and again on a
full novel-length manuscript but some were far stricter than that and would
reject anything that, at least on the first ten pages, contained more than one
obvious error. Don’t forget that any mistake you made was echoed through
every carbon copy and was far harder to disguise on your copies. And also,
Liquid Paper needed time to dry. A frequent complaint from agents and
publishers concerned the difficulty of trying to prise apart sheets of type
fused together with an over-exuberant application of correction fluid.
Like
everything else, carbon paper had a limited life span although you could reuse
it a number of times, only discarding it when the copies started growing
fainter.
The same
applied to the ribbon.
On my first
typewriter, I had an all-black ribbon. You unwrapped it, sat it down on its
spindle, threaded it through and attached it to an empty reel and spindle on
the other side of your machine. Hitting a typewriter key would cause the
selected hammer to strike the ribbon and its attendant letter to appear on the
printed page. When your ribbon was nice and new, the type would be a bold, assertive
black. Once the ribbon had run its course to the end, it would automatically reverse
itself and you could merrily carry on typing until you saw the type beginning
to move from black through dark charcoal to grey. Time to replace the ribbon.
Some fancier typewriters used black and red ribbons enabling you to select
which colour you wanted to type in. That always seemed a bit of a waste to me
as it meant half the ribbon was barely used.
As you can
imagine, changing a ribbon was messy, time consuming and inclined to result in
sore, inky fingers and bad language(that would be yours again). As with all
inanimate objects, a typewriter experiencing a ribbon change seemed to want to
provide you with as much grief as it was capable of. And, take it from me,
typewriters were born sadists.
Later
models dispensed with all that nonsense and delivered you a cassette which
you inserted. Slam, dunk, done. It didn’t reverse itself and stopped when it
was empty. That was fine as long as you had a replacement all ready and
waiting. Infuriating if you didn’t and it was Sunday afternoon.
Of course,
I have been talking here about manual typewriters. There were expensive electric ones.
The only real difference for many years was that they were usually a little
quieter and required less heavy bashing of the keys, and they automatically performed
something known as ‘automatic carriage return’ (you haven’t sent that older
relative/friend home yet, have you?). In other words, once you had set your
margins, the typewriter would ring a little bell when it knew you were coming
to the end of a sentence and, at one finger touch from you., would send the
carriage flying back to the beginning of the next line. On manual typewriters
you could also set your margins and a bell would ping but then you had to
return the carriage yourself (your friend/relative will explain).
Your
typewriter wouldn’t ping when it came to the bottom of the page though. Oh no,
you would have to take precautions against running out of paper (in my case, I
would draw the faintest pencil line a couple of inches up from the bottom) or
run the risk of all your efforts being in vain as you watched your paper slip
to one side, along with your line of print. And guess what that meant? You’ve
got it. START ALL OVER AGAIN.
Oh – and
another point. If you were lost for just the right word to use, there was no
point in asking your typewriter, you had to reach up to your bookshelf, heave down your copy of Roget’s Thesaurus and look it up. Yes, really.
Ask…well, you know who by now don’t you?
So, are
you still mad at your laptop? Do you still think producing your manuscript is
tough? Wait till you learn what happened when you wanted to send it off.
Still to
come, in Part Two:
I get my
first Word Processor
The first
spellcheckers – introducing the wonderful world of Anchovy and Claptrap
The
perils, pitfalls, and expense of querying agents and publishers before emails
made it all so easy (or not)
Don’t miss
Part Two
It will
leave you aghast and wondering why anyone even tried to get published.
Images:
Shutterstock
public domain
