In his wide-ranging study, The Typewriter Century: A Cultural History of Writing Practices, Martyn Lyons presents “the many ways in which different writers reacted to the typewriter and incorporated it into their work routines” (4). His focus is on the century from the 1880s to the 1980s, which he designates “the typewriter century” (13). He engages with a wide range of writers and examines various aspects of the history and the significance of the typewriter as a technology that, he argues, had a fundamental impact on the practices of literary writing within that period.

Lyons begins The Typewriter Century with a chapter outlining possible approaches to understanding the relationship between technological change and practices of writing. Here Lyons briefly presents the theoretical contributions of Friedrich Kittler to consideration of these approaches but concludes that Kittler's “technological determinism” (10) and the narrowness of his understanding of the possible relations between the typewriter and the writing subject that “left little scope for human agency” (11) limit the usefulness of his approach. Rejecting what he sees as Kittler's monolithic view, Lyons opts instead to focus on the diversity of experiences of the typewriter associated with a wide range of literary and popular writers. His case studies include “late nineteenth-century novelists, modernist poets, realist novelists of the interwar period, pulp fiction writers of the mid-twentieth century, the Beat Generation, and a few late twentieth-century writers and poets” (15).

In Lyons's second chapter, he presents a history of the technical development of the typewriter, stressing that it developed relatively gradually and was the result, not of one inventor, but rather of teams who interacted significantly with users of this emerging technology over decades. He then goes on to consider the emergence of “the typewriter girl” (49–66) (particularly within the setting of the modern office) and her use as a figure for modernity. In a subsequent chapter Lyons analyzes the ways in which the typewriter might be understood as underpinning and even enabling innovations in literary form in the early years of the twentieth century. These two chapters cover some relatively familiar ground but offer clear and helpful summaries of current approaches to these topics.

Chapter 5 addresses what Lyons describes as the “distancing effect” (86–104) of the typewriter, which he analyzes in relation to the role that the hand, the eye, and the voice all play in specific practices of writing. The writer at the center of this intriguing discussion is Henry James, who famously relied on the mediating role of the typewriter as part of his creative practice. Lyons considers how James used the process of dictation to enable his writing to be captured by a typist but notes that James then recognized that this made his texts “too diffuse” (97) and subsequently revised his work orally, while also finding that “to achieve brevity, he needed to write silently by hand” (98). Lyons thus captures very persuasively the impacts of different practices of writing on James's literary output. After examination of the use of recording devices, transcription machines, and typewriters, Lyons concludes by suggesting that “[t]he authors considered in this chapter registered the cold detachment of the typed text; they knew the anxiety of print” (104).

After analyzing writers, including Jack Kerouac and Enid Blyton, for whom the use of a typewriter seemed to offer “fluency and a more intuitive style of composition” (23), Lyons turns to a consideration of the extent to which practices associated with manuscript culture persisted within the typewriter century. His main authors here include Agatha Christie and John le Carré, and he concludes that his “examination of the relationship between handwriting and typed text has shown that they were intimately connected throughout every stage of composition in the typewriter century” (135). This is a useful corrective to any narrative of linear progress that might be deployed in understanding the relations between technologies and the processes of literary writing.

Lyons concludes this volume with case studies designed to illuminate how the factors considered in earlier sections of the book produced or enabled specific practices of writing for a range of popular writers: Georges Simenon, Erle Stanley Gardner, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Enid Blyton, and Richmal Crompton. His consideration within these case studies of how gender shaped a writer's relationship to the typewriter in the period includes interesting analyses both of the impact of domestic spaces on the woman writer and the disadvantages she faced in being recognized as a professional writer at all.

This is a useful study of the complex impacts of the typewriter on the practices of different writers in the twentieth century. It contextualizes existing research approaches to this set of questions effectively and offers original insights into the history of the typewriter as a technology and its interactions with the social position of writers and the market for published literary works. The breadth of its literary case studies is in many ways a strength of the book, but it does also mean that Lyons is able to give only a summary account of some of the many and complex texts he addresses across the volume.