Some Types of Pleasure.

Quirky Qwerty: The Story of the Keyboard Your Fingertips, by Torbjorn Lundmark; University of NSW Press, 2001, $24.95.

WE ARE ANXIOUS about text. Those of us who love it, and who believe in it, sense that there is a growing body of people who can't read or don't read, and we are a bit frightened of such people. A civilised society can afford a few of them, but once they start running the place, well ... we wonder what will happen.

At the same time, we have all become our own typists, editors and publishers. What is the percentage of workers whose workplace is a computer, a screen and a keyboard? Modern societies have almost entire workforces composed of textual processors, people for whom there is no relationship between reading and pleasure.

A symptom of this anxiety is the collection of recent books for more-or-less popular audiences which concern the things of which written texts are composed at the most fundamental level: the alphabet (Alpha Beta, by John Man and Mysteries of the Alphabet, by M.-A. Ouaknin) and numerals, punctuation (Pause and Effect, by M.B. Parkes), paratexts (Invisible Forms, by Kevin Jackson) and the list goes on.

As its cutesy title suggests, this book is not a scholarly work, but a chatty exploration of the origins and uses of keyboards and the symbols on them, both alphabetical and non-alphabetical, including the numerals and punctuation marks. It is certainly a wide-ranging set of notions, involving some account of the invention of various specific technologies, such as printing, the typewriter and the "qwerty" keyboard, as well as the more ancient and complex subject of the evolution of writing and writing systems.

On the way we learn that an Englishman, Henry Mill, patented some sort of typewriting machine in 1714. But as Lundmark says nothing more about it, we can only conclude that it was never built and no design exists, and that there was no continuity between it and later developments. The real inventor of the modern typewriter, 150 years later in New York, was Christopher Scholes. The device was built, sold and improved by Scholes from 1864 until he died in 1890. Scholes capitalised on various features of earlier but unsuccessful inventions, but he is responsible for the qwerty keyboard.

The short version of the reason for the seemingly haphazard arrangement of the letters on the keyboard is that common English-language letter-pairs were split up in order to avoid the mechanical keys becoming jammed when combinations like "ab", "ef", "gh", "op", or "st" were typed quickly. There is of course no reason for such precautions on modern electronic machines, but the qwerty arrangement has now penetrated the psyches not just of typists, but of almost every literate person, and is more secure than ever before.