The latest book by CanLit mainstay Darren Wershler-Henry, The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typing, is reviewed in the latest New Yorker. (The book was published by McClelland & Stewart here in Canada but by Cornell University Press in the States.) Writer Joan Acocella notes that Wershler-Henry doesn’t really back up a couple of his core assertions, but she doesn’t seem to mind: “They make him think of good stories to tell about the typewriter.” Accordingly, she fills much of her space summarizing anecdotes that appear in the book. Like this choice one:

[Wershler-Henry] also tells us about monkeys, as in the hypothetical question “If you put a bunch of monkeys in front of typewriters, how long would it take them to compose the works of Shakespeare?” This question originated as part of the theory of probability, and it has been tested. According to Wershler-Henry, the world record for Shakespeare-reinvention belongs to the virtual monkeys supervised by Dan Oliver, of Scottsdale, Arizona. On August 4, 2004, after the group had worked for 42,162,500,000 billion billion monkey years, one of Oliver’s monkeys typed, “VALENTINE. Cease toIdor:eFLP0FRjWK78aXzVOwm)-‘;8.t . . .,” the first nineteen characters of which can be found in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona.” Runner-up teams have produced eighteen characters from “Timon of Athens,” seventeen from “Troilus and Cressida,” and sixteen from “Richard II.” Did these monkeys get federal funding?

Read the Q&Q review of The Iron Whim here.