![]() ![]() One day she’d wandered into Wilson’s office and discovered his typewriter. “She was always seeing A’s in the gables of houses and H’s in football goalposts,” he recalled. He’d already written of his daughter Barbara in Harper’s, describing a girl who by the age of three was consumed with letters and words. In 1923, typewriters were hardly a child’s plaything, but to those following the family of critic and editor Wilson Follett, it was a grand educational experiment. Through the door could be heard furious clacking and carriage returns: the sound, in fact, of an eight-year-old girl writing her first novel. If the door is shut tight and a person is in the room the shut door means that the person in the room wishes to be left alone. ![]() The door may be shut if nobody is in the room but if a person wants to come in, knocks and hears no answer that means there is no one in the room and he must not go in. The person in this room if he agrees that one shall come in will say “come in,” or something like that and if he does not agree to it he will say “Not yet, please,” or something like that. Nobody may come into this room if the door is shut tight (if it is shut not quite latched it is all right) without knocking. In a New Hampshire apartment during the winter of 1923, this typewritten notice was fastened squarely against a closed door: ![]() Audio brought to you by Curio, a Lapham’s Quarterly partner ![]()
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