The demand sensor of the radiant heater in front of the Argus building was, as usual, out of order, so we didn't linger. Sara pressed her ID bracelet against the night lock and the door swung open with a squawk that lifted my hair.
Once when I asked her why she didn't get it fixed, she said it saved the price of a cowbell on a spring. I told her then that Vermont had no business in the 21st century, and she said the 21st century had no business in Vermont, the 19th had been more fun. Fun! She said if I didn't like Vermont I could go back to Nork, and she gave it the old fashioned pronunciation, Newark, I suppose just to irritate me. As I recall, I did go back to Nork, that time, but that was a long time ago.
This time, anyway, I pushed her gently down into her chair, the worn old oak swivel chair in front of the disreputable old rolltop desk, with that battered old electric typewriter of her father's and her grandfather's. For all I know, her five-great-grandfather Elias Witherill started the Argus with it in 1847, two centuries ago.
"You say the WPA is bad," I said. I tapped the typewriter. "There's your real villain. And there—" pointing at the ancient offset press she printed the Argus on and waving at the framed, yellowed copy of Vol. 1, No. 1 of the Argus, hanging on the wall—and "there!"
It began with the typewriter, I informed her. The printing press came first, but typewriters really did the job.
Maybe the actual beginning was the manuscript of the ancient monks: impersonal and uniform. But handwriting was hardly wide-spread in the Dark Ages, so let's take it from the typewriter.
Handwriting was an individual thing. Transcribed speech; and speech is an individual's articulated thought. Printing is based on handwriting, but it's stylized and made uniform for mass production.
That leaves a big gap between script and print—the difference between personal mental process and a merely mechanical process of duplication.
Look at it this way. In the days when handwriting was general, a man believed a personal message if it came from someone he trusted. And he'd know it came from that person because he recognized the handwriting, just as he'd recognize the person's voice, or his face. The writing was, in effect, an extension of the reader's own senses or experience, into a distant situation.