Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451. 60th Anniversary Edition. Simon & Schuster, 2013. 

“In order to finish the novel— I had no office, I looked around for a good place to write this fantastic story that was coming to birth, and I thought, “Well, what’s a better place to write a novel about book burning in the future than a library?”   And I discovered , in that time, that wonderful downstairs basement room in the UCLA library with a typewriter that you fed a dime into every half hour. So I sat there and fed dimes into this typewriter for eight or nine days, twenty cents an hour, and finished the  short novel “The Fireman” on that typewriter in a room with ten or fifteen or twenty other students who didn’t know what I was up to.” [p.194]

COMMENT

     Bradbury seems to feel like he was getting away with something.  The CPI Inflation calculator says that in 1951 when he wrote The Fireman, $0.20 was worth $1.98 in 2018 dollars. That's dirt cheap rent for office space in an age.
      Are there modern-day Ray Bradburies writing the next great novel in library computer labs? Maybe. Good word-processing software is available open-source, but not everyone has a big screen and an ergonomic keyboard. The ubiquitous computer these days is a cell-phone which is not well adapted for typing. AS people are increasingly stuffed into crowded megacities the future demand for libraries as writing retreats might grow, too. In 1950, the average size of an American houses was 983 square feet.  The median size of a single family house built in 2017 was 2,426 square feet which should provide plenty of office space. Except that in many American cities average people can't afford to buy houses any more.
    Typewriters, by the way, seem to have experienced a bit of a comeback.[1] Some writers like the way they eliminate online distraction, slow down the thought process, and record a first draft without corrections.  A few libraries admit to still having typewriter rooms including Oberlin College Library A San Franciso Public Library  Facebook post implies that their typewriter is so popular people are queuing up to use it.

[1] California Typewriter [documentary], 2016. http://californiatypewritermovie.com/