Other editions of book The Enchanted Type-Writer

The Enchanted Type-Writer is a collection of short stories by John Kendrick Bangs, published in 1899l. Bangs attributes many of the stories to the late (and invisible) James Boswell, who has become an editor for a newspaper in Hades, and who communicates with the author by means of an old typewriter. The stories are part of the author's Associated Shades series, sometimes called the Hades series for its primary setting. Their genre has become known as Bangsian fantasy.

John Kendrick Bangs (1862-1922) is without doubt one of the most prolific writers of fantastic novels and stories set in Hades. The three works which comprise his "Hades" series, A Houseboat on the Styx (1895), Pursuit of the Houseboat (1897), and the collection now in your hands, The Enchanted Type-Writer (1899) are acknowledged classics of modern fantasy, precursors to works by Thorne Smith (Topper), Philip Jose Farmer (The Fabulous Riverboat), and many others. Rest assured that The Enchanted Type-Writer stands alone; you do not have to have read the first two novels to enjoy it fully. At the turn of the 20th century, when copyright laws were, shall we say, less rigidly enforced than they probably should have been, Bangs felt free to "borrow" other writers' characters, including two of the most famous?

It is a strange fact, for which I do not expect ever satisfactorily to account, and which will receive little credence even among those who know that I am not given to romancing—it is a strange fact, I say, that the substance of the following pages has evolved itself during a period of six months, more or less, between the hours of midnight and four o'clock in the morning, proceeding directly from a type-writing machine standing in the corner of my library, manipulated by unseen hands. The machine is not of recent make. It is, in fact, a relic of the early seventies, which I discovered one morning when, suffering from a slight attack of the grip, I had remained at home and devoted my time to pottering about in the attic, unearthing old books, bringing to the light long-forgotten correspondences, my boyhood collections of “stuff,” and other memory-inducing things. Whence the machine came originally I do not recall. My impression is that it belonged to a stenographer once in the employ of my father, who used frequently to come to our house to take down dictations. However this may be, the machine had lain hidden by dust and the flotsam and jetsam of the house for twenty years, when, as I have said, I came upon it unexpectedly. Old man as I am—I shall soon be thirty—the fascination of a machine has lost none of its potency. I am as pleased to-day watching the wheels of my watch “go round” as ever I was, and to “monkey” with a type-writing apparatus has always brought great joy into my heart—though for composing give me the pen. Perhaps I should apologize for the use here of the verb monkey, which savors of what a friend of mine calls the “English slanguage,” to differentiate it from what he also calls the “Andrew Language.” But I shall not do so, because, to whatever branch of our tongue the word may belong, it is exactly descriptive, and descriptive as no other word can be, of what a boy does with things that click and “go,” and is therefore not at all out of place in a tale which I trust will be regarded as a polite one.

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The Enchanted Type-Writer is a collection of short stories by John Kendrick Bangs, published in 1899 with illustrations by Peter Newell. Bangs attributes many of the stories to the late (and invisible) James Boswell, who has become an editor for a newspaper in Hades, and who communicates with the author by means of an old typewriter. The stories are part of the author's Associated Shades series, sometimes called the Hades series for its primary setting. Their genre has become known as Bangsian fantasy. There are ten stories in the collection, and ten plates from illustrations by Newell. They were first published serially in Harper's Weekly beginning August 5, 1899, including the Newell illustrations. John Kendrick Bangs (May 27, 1862 – January 21, 1922) was an American author, humorist, editor and satirist. Biography: He was born in Yonkers, New York. His father Francis Nehemiah Bangs was a lawyer in New York City, as was his brother, Francis S. Bangs.