The cut-and-paste feature in word-processing programs makes it easy to rearrange text. But in the past, some writers literally cut and pinned their copy. At the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries, you can see the pins Jane Austenused to fasten together parts of pages from her unfinished novel, The Watsons. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Pinning Manuscripts Together”
Grant, you and I are so spoiled by word processors. You can just cut and paste, but you’re not.
Literally cutting and pasting, right?
Not anymore.
But exactly.
And that’s where I was going.
Not anymore.
I don’t know if you used to do this, but there were times when I was in college when I would cut out something, like literally cut out something from a paper and paste something in.
But that wasn’t always the case. What did people do before that?
Before cutting and pasting?
People used straight pins to patch in a new bit of copy in a manuscript.
Oh, I’ve seen that. I think I have seen that.
Yes.
Well, in the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford, there are pins that Jane Austen used in her unfinished novel, The Watsons, where she just made these little patches of text and pinned them to her manuscript.
Oh, that’s very cool. I think I have seen images of something like that, if not actually that.
Isn’t that cool? That’s very cool. Yeah. And the librarians have to take those pins out just to help preserve the manuscript, but you can actually go there and see the pins or you can see pictures of them online.
Jane Austen’s pens, P-I-N. That’s right. They’re mightier than the Post-it.
You’re reminding me of how Hunter S. Thompson often delivered his articles when he wrote for Rolling Stone.
How is that?
He would fax them in, and then the editors on the other end would take his faxes and cut them up and literally lay them out on the floor and rearrange on the floor his writing, and then they would re-key it into their composition system, the compositing system.
Is that right?
Yeah.
So that’s a true kind of cutting pasting as well.
Literally, huh?
