Rooms of Their Own by Johnson Alex;Oses James;

Author:Johnson, Alex;Oses, James;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quarto Publishing Group UK
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

In his early years, when he found it hard to make money from his writing, he rented a typewriter and pawned his coat, suit and bicycle rather than lose them altogether.

The study was a more conventional writing room in which he worked on his 1902 Bar-Lock No. 10 typewriter. This was unusual in several ways – it did not have the standard QWERTY key arrangement, there was no key for exclamation marks and there were separate keyboards for upper- and lower-case letters. In his early years, when he found it hard to make money from his writing, he rented a typewriter and pawned his coat, suit and bicycle rather than lose them altogether.

The room had plenty of natural light from large windows and was lined with bookcases. London was a big reader. ‘I regard books in my library in much the same way that a sea captain regards the charts in his chart-room,’ he wrote. ‘The student and thinker must have a well-equipped library, and must know his way around that library.’ He planned a large personal library to store his collection of 15,000 books at the twenty-six-room dream home named Wolf House that he had built for himself on his ranch. Above it were plans for a 40 by 19ft (12 by 5.8m) writing room. Unfortunately an accidental fire burned the building to the ground just as it was nearing completion in 1913.

He also sometimes wrote outdoors, sitting on a simple chair and balancing his papers on a large board. Indeed, London was a great outdoorsman, spending far more time working on his ranch than on his writing as he grew older, and admitting that he wrote entirely to make money. ‘Every time I sit down to write, it is with great disgust,’ he said. ‘I’d sooner be out in the open, wandering around most any old place.’ He was particularly fond of the large 400-year-old oak tree known as Jack’s Oak to the side of the cottage, which he could see from his study’s windows. It inspired his play The Acorn-Planter.

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