Excerpt from Alphabetical by Michael Rosen, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Even better, in the student magazine office was a big Olivetti. Like a real professional one. As big as my mother's old Remington but as stylish as my brother's. Over the summer, the news was that the office was closing, and we were moving to a new office that someone had kitted out. There was a rumour that Robert Maxwell was involved. The Olivetti went into the back of a car and found its way home. It sat on the desk I got for my twenty- first birthday, and I sat upstairs in my parents' house in the holidays back from college, typing the poems that would end up in my first book for children, Mind Your Own Business. I used triple-carbonated paper, three copies in one go. Even my mother was impressed. She had never liked the mess of the old carbon paper you had to slot in by hand between the sheets.

And wasn't the typeface rather snazzy too? Didn't my mother's seem rather quaint? Even as she was sending off her scripts to BBC Schools Radio, didn't it make her writing seem old too? I was Olivetti qwerty man.

Someone mentioned electric typewriters. What's the point of that? It doesn't make you type any faster. Someone mentioned that you didn't have to go back over a mistake and whack it with an 'x'. You now pressed a delete button and the letter disappeared. What! You could make a letter disappear? There's a ribbon, and it lifts the letter off the page. The letters aren't ink. They're more like Letraset. They're like . . . stuck on to the page. So the little ribbon unsticks them. I was up for it. By making qwerty less permanent, it was making qwerty look perfect on the page. Scripts, articles, poems would have no more mistakes. I had to upgrade myself. This four-finger, staring-at- the-keyboard thing had to end. I had to learn how to touch-type.

So I enrolled for a two-week typing course at a typing college in an upstairs room in Camden Town. All day, I sat with young women who had just left school, sixteen-, seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. All day we did the exercises, 'frf', 'juj', 'kik', 'ded'. Hours and hours forcing my mind, fingers, keys and letters to work along in synch. I loved it. And in the evenings, after school, I came home and forced myself to type what I had to type using what I had learned. Qwerty started to disappear from being something I stared at. Now it was something that my fingers knew. Because I did so much typing in the evening, I found the daytime class easier and easier. I became annoying. At least two people in the class stopped talking to me. I didn't mean to sound like a qwerty show-off though it must have looked that way. I'm sorry.

The electric typewriter was supposed to be portable. Like a suitcase is portable. And, like a fat black plastic suitcase, it stayed put. The letters it made were strangely thin and weaselly. People said I had to get a golf-ball. Everyone was talking about golf-balls. I was going to get a golf-ball, when someone else said that it was going to be computers. What you're going to be able to do now, they said, is type something and store it in the machine. Then you can call it up again, change it as many times as you like and only when you're happy with it do you have to print it. You get this printer where you put in these sheets that are all joined up, press a button and it prints it all out in a great long sheet, which you tear into pages.

No thanks, I said, I'll stick with the electric. I'm loving erasing my misdemeanours with the delete button. I can even put up with thin, weaselly qwerty. My fingers know everything now. I rule qwerty like the King of Ruritania rules the peasants. Every letter does just as I tell it to. Well, mostly. 'Z' and 'X' give me bother. That quick change from the little finger to the third finger of the left hand. Don't ask me to do it quickly. And another thing, I didn't do a third week, when I would have learned how to touch-type the numbers. I have to look. But apart from all that, I'm Mr Qwick Qwerty Guy now. My elec- tric typewriter sounded like jazz: te tutter, ta ta ta tutter, tutter te ta ta ta. The bebop of qwertyuiop.

Excerpted from Alphabetical by Michael Rosen. Copyright © 2015 by Michael Rosen. Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.