/lit/ - Literature

I know the general is about to die but I wanted to share my autism with you all. Recently I got an Olivetti Lettera mechanical typewriter. I was curious, and wanted to see on average, if I were to type out a novel, how many pages it would be (pic related is not the page I used, but serves as a good visual representation of what a single typewritten page would look like).

First. I typed out a pretty basic passage, with a good mix of shorter and slightly longer but still average words, with 1-inch margins on a standard 8x11 inch piece of printer paper; With 1.5 spacing, I got about 35 lines, with a range of 9–14 words per line, for a total of about 400 words per page. I found the word-counts of a couple novels and calculated how many typewritten pages they would require:

>Invisible Man: 176,559 words (578 pages in the Vintage International paperback edition), would require about 441 typewritten pages
>Blood Meridian: 116,322 words (334 pages in the black cover Vintage International paperback edition), would require about 291 typewritten pages
>Lolita: 110,951 words (314 pages in the Vintage International paperback edition), would require about 277 typewritten pages
>A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: 84,840 words (288 pages in the Vintage International paperback edition), would require about 212 typewritten pages

If you wrote a page a day, in 28 days you would have written 28 pages (11,200 words); in about 3 months you would have written 84 pages (33,600 words). If you wrote a mere two pages a day, you would have 56 pages (22,400 words) in 28 days, and 168 pages (about 67,200 words) in 3 months! At two pages a day, in half a year, you would have written a respectable 336 pages (134,400 words), a book a bit longer than Blood Meridian, a good healthy sized novel. Of course, who knows how much of that will be lost in a second draft, but its nice to put things in perspective

I know the general is about to die but I wanted to share my autism with you all. Recently I got an Olivetti Lettera mechanical typewriter. I was curious, and wanted to see on average, if I were to type out a novel, how many pages it would be (pic related is not the page I used, but serves as a good visual representation of what a single typewritten page would look like).

First. I typed out a pretty basic passage, with a good mix of shorter and slightly longer but still average words, with 1-inch margins on a standard 8x11 inch piece of printer paper; With 1.5 spacing, I got about 35 lines, with a range of 9–14 words per line, for a total of about 400 words per page. I found the word-counts of a couple novels and calculated how many typewritten pages they would require:

>Invisible Man: 176,559 words (578 pages in the Vintage International paperback edition), would require about 441 typewritten pages
>Blood Meridian: 116,322 words (334 pages in the black cover Vintage International paperback edition), would require about 291 typewritten pages
>Lolita: 110,951 words (314 pages in the Vintage International paperback edition), would require about 277 typewritten pages
>A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: 84,840 words (288 pages in the Vintage International paperback edition), would require about 212 typewritten pages

If you wrote a page a day, in 28 days you would have written 28 pages (11,200 words); in about 3 months you would have written 84 pages (33,600 words). If you wrote a mere two pages a day, you would have 56 pages (22,400 words) in 28 days, and 168 pages (about 67,200 words) in 3 months! At two pages a day, in half a year, you would have written a respectable 336 pages (134,400 words), a book a bit longer than Blood Meridian, a good healthy sized novel. Of course, who knows how much of that will be lost in a second draft, but its nice to put things in perspective