The Lives of Typewriters and Large Data-sets: The Will Self Archive

Abstract

• Chris Beckett, Manuscripts Cataloguer at the British Library is currently working on the Will Self archive. The archive, which was acquired by the Library in 2016, consists of 24 large boxes of papers along with artwork, audio-visual material and the author’s computer hard drive. The first tranche is now discoverable through our Archives and Manuscripts catalogue at Add MS 89203. On 24 June 2007, Will Self typed a letter to J G Ballard. It included, in passing, remarks on a German film he had just seen, set in East Berlin in 1984, some five years before the Fall of the Wall: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (2006). ‘The film would be worth seeing for the furniture alone,’ Self suggested, ‘but best of all is that the entire plot hinges on a typewriter, specifically a Groma Kolibri. A portable of beautiful compact sleekness, which our hero is able to hide from the Stasi.’ The ‘hero’ in question is a writer under state suspicion. He keeps his sleek portable hidden under the floorboards. Powerful tools of communication, all typewriters in East Germany were registered and numbered. The writer is unaware that his apartment is bugged. As the Stasi agent listens, and begins to log what he hears, he learns more about the writer’s life in the round. Invisible and increasingly engaged with the life of another, agent HGW XX/7 – for he too has a number – begins a dangerous moral journey from surveillance to active protection.