I heard a lecture the other day about ay Bradbury, including that he wrote* Fahrenheit 451* in 10 days in a rent-a-typewriter room in his public library. It was a dime per half hour, and ultimately cost him maybe $15.
I’d never heard of this before – have you? Are you aware of other such things – cheap rentals of “high tech” gear for the 40s or 50s to people who couldn’t afford to buy them?
Never used one, but yes, I remember seeing them in libraries “back in the day”.
ETA: I think courthouses may have had them too. Courts were (and I suppose still are) notoriously finicky about the precise format of documents that they will accept. Documents were REQUIRED to be typewritten, using the standard typewriter font, in Pica-sized text. (Typewriters were available in two standard type sizes, Pica (10 chars per inch) and Elite (12 per inch).) Typewriters were also made with other fonts besides the standard Courier fixed-width font, and there were even beginning to be typewriters with variable width fonts. None of that was acceptable in courts.
I think it was common to see people in some side room at the courthouse typing up their docs.
Yeah, pay phones were common too.
Wow, $15 in 1953 was quite a bit to invest in a novel. I wonder if they were paying him by the word at the time.
And pay toilets.
Yes, but you couldn’t buy one back in those days. Even with a home phone, ATT was renting it to you, not selling it.
Don’t think so. I think he wrote it on spec and then sold the finished or nearly finished novel.
A bit later, but in 1980 I rented an IBM Selectric correcting typewriter to type my doctoral thesis. Being able to correct typos without using white-out was worth it.
When I first attended college, word processors existed, but they weren’t numerous, and the library still had typewriters you could rent by the hour, complete with little locks and coin boxes for to insert coin and get to work…
Later, when there were word processors, you could type all you want and print out for free.
Nitpick: I believe he wrote it at UCLA. There is a plaque in the room.
I rented an old-fashioned manual upright in the middle 1980s to type up a very bad novel I wrote. I’d find it annoying to feed the meter every 30 minutes but renting by the day (or week) was convenient and affordable.
As late as about 2000 I frequented a library that had a small room with several typewriters in it that you could use. You had to sign up, but I don’t know if you had to pay. At that time I had a few typewriters at home that I hadn’t used in several years. I never saw anybody use them. They had another room next to it, presumably sound-proofed, with a piano in it that you could sign up to use.
Here it is…
Novels weren’t paid by the word at the time (I don’t think they ever were, except when they were serialized). He could probably get at least a $1000 advance*, so it’s only a small percentage.
*Ballentine first published it. They were a major publisher at the time and probably paid more than that.
I think the bigger question is why Ray Bradbury was renting a typewriter in 1953. His first sale was in 1938 and by 1953 he was a well established author. He could easily have bought a typewriter and written the book at home.
Right. I forgot to mention that too.
Today, isn’t it standard that your telecom company (phone or internet or cable or whatever) just rents to you the set-top converter box or the modem/gateway? And that little box of electronic that sits in front of your dish antenna? The companies will ultimately want you to ship all those things back to them.
Pay toilets never really caught on. Well, not for very long anyway. They became common at some kinds of public facilities (bus and train stations, and airports in particular) and some private places like restaurants, but there was quite a backlash against them. IIRC there was a California ballot initiative to ban them.
Here’s a more-or-less randomly chosen site I found via google, with some remarks about them.
Many Public Toilets Used To Be Pay As You Use.
Not-so-high-tech things we still rent by the hour, or minute: Metered parking space on public streets or parking lots. The meters themselves are getting pretty high-tech these days, though.
Vending machines of all sorts. Computer time at the FedEx stores (formerly Kinko’s). Washers and dryers at the laundromat or in your apartment building’s laundry room.
About $134 in today’s dollars.
It’s not very long by today’s standards, at 179 pages (1997 paperback edition), but it’s pretty typical for a novel at the time.
There used to be coin-operated TVs in public places. 25¢ typically bought you a half hour of viewing.
Speaking of parking meters…what happened to the days when you could actually pay at the one you parked at? In Ann Arbor, you parked at a meter, then had to memorize your meter number, and hunt down a parking payment box, and enter your meter number. I always hated having to go out of my way to pay.