Christopher Keep - Literary Secretaries / Secretarial Culture (review) - Victorian Studies 49:1 Victorian Studies 49.1 (2006) 113-116 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Christopher Keep University of Western Ontario Literary Secretaries / Secretarial Culture , edited by Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell; pp. 168. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2005, £42.40, $79.95. "Our writing materials contribute their part to our thinking." This observation of Friedrich Nietzsche's, made following his experiments with the spherical keyboard of a Malling Hansen Writing Ball, suggests a concern for the social and epistemological consequences of the new communication technologies of the nineteenth century—including the typewriter, the spread of postal and telgraphic communications, and the gramophone—shared by many recent cultural and literary critics. But what of the men and women employed to operate these new technologies, the stenographers, typists, telegraphists, and personal assistants whose typically unacknowledged labor ensured the smooth transit of words from voice to page? To what extent have they, too, contributed their part to our thinking, and how has this part been represented in literature, film, and other media? These are the questions posed by the seven essays in Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell's splendid collection, Literary Secretaries / Secretarial Culture . Focusing principally on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,