A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution (review)

When I was a senior in college in 1975 and had a last term paper to write, a technical-whiz roommate urged me to write it on a computer. I foolishly took his advice. I spent a week trooping to a dingy basement in a chemistry lab where there were terminals hooked up to a distant DEC PDP-10. I had to learn countless codes to format indents and paragraph breaks and even just to make corrections, and I had to wait forever when I wanted a printout of a draft. Typing and revising a fifteen-page paper took me every evening for a week, and when it was done it printed out in very large type with justified right margins made straight by the insertion of vast spaces between words. It looked like the world’s longest ransom note. I vowed never to try to write anything on a computer again.

I was reminded of that experience reading A Better Pencil, Dennis Baron’s brave attempt to tell the history of how writing and reading technologies have changed the ways we write and read. He tells a broad and kaleidoscopic story in a short space. What is brave about it is not only the range of what he has chosen to cover but also the fact that the technologies he covers have been changing so fast lately that the book was bound to be obsolete almost before it came out.

He discusses the laboriousness of writing on clay, an exercise to which he has subjected his students at the University of Illinois. He opens to us the lost world of penmanship. He tells us at length about Henry David Thoreau and the nineteenth-century American pencil industry (with an acknowledged big debt to Henry Petroski’s 1989 The Pencil). He describes in generous detail what it was like to work on WordStar, the word-processing software that lifted mankind out of that chem lab basement where I wrote my paper. He makes numerous striking observations along the way. “New writing technologies always start by slowing writers down,” he reassures us (p. 104), and “There have always been more consumers than creators of text, more readers than writers,” until today, when “on the Internet, everyone’s an author, every scrap of prose a publication” (p. 157).

He also makes points that hardly need to be made. “Instant messaging is attractive because it works in real time, like a phone call minus the long distance charges . . .” (p. 150); “In the end, as many bombers whose products detonate prematurely find out, not all wheels are worth reinventing, and not all DIY projects are worth doing yourself” (p. 29). That comes after an account of the career of Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Baron gets into a little trouble keeping up with the technologies of the last few years. How could he not? “Many readers will be familiar with the PDA, the personal digital assistant,” which “has become a popular device” (p. 68), he avers. In fact PDAs are pretty much forgotten now, in the era of the iPhone. “Today when people read books, they still read conventional printed books, not the relatively small number of electronic books that are available” (p. 231). That was probably true when he was writing this book, in 2008, and somewhat true when it was published, in 2009, but it’s not at all true now. What he gives us is ultimately a suspense story, not a whodunit but a “what’ll it be like.” His fast-paced, chatty, engaging history of reading and writing implicitly leads toward some sort of insight about the future. But if the present is slipping by as you write, how can you get a grip on the as-yet nonexistent future?

Indeed, the last sentence of the book concedes defeat in that regard, though it’s not his fault; that’s how history is. He writes, “Maybe the...