Authors Electric

Me typing wistfully at the   American Writers Museum I featured here last September Raise your hand if you've ever used a typewriter. Wiggle your fingers if you made a living with one. Thumbs up if you still own one. Our numbers diminish. It's safe to say that most people alive today never as much as pecked at a mechanical keyboard. Despite this, a die hard few collect and still write with them, and some even dream of a typewriter comeback, though it's debatable whether typewriters ever really left us in the way of quills to become antiques. This isn't about technology or trends, however. It's about first love, and bonding with a writing machine in a way that one never could with a computer, even with an hypothetical, pretty robot. I got my first typewriter at the callous and tender age of 15 - a voluptuous -deco, 1950s, manual Smith Corona "Silent" portable (meaning it weighed about as much as seven or eight Powerbooks.) I inherited it when ...

Yesterday, 28th January 2013, was the 200th birthday of Jane Austen's most famous novel 'Pride & Prejudice'. It was marked by a 'readathon' at the Jane Austin Centre in Bath, hooked up with a 12 hour broadcast with Jane Austen Societies in Australia and North America. A conference has also been organised at Cambridge.The conference will explore the original historical context of the novel, as well as the numerous screen adaptations and literary spin-offs the book has inspired. In the coming weeks the BBC will celebrate the anniversary of the book by recreating a Regency ball, like one featured in its pages, and there are several more events planned throughout the year, to celebrate the anniversary. Many new books about the writer have been published, with examinations of the history of the novel, and there is also a new high-end hardback edition available. First published by Thomas Egerton in 1813, Pride and Prejudice was Jane Austen's secon...