Dime Novel

By Gordon Hopkins How much would you pay for a masterpiece?Now that word, masterpiece, gets thrown around a lot, kind of like genius and brilliant and outrageous. Most people or works of art labeled with one of those terms is usually better described by another word we hear a lot: overrated.However, I don't think there are many that would begrudge the title, masterpiece, to Ray Bradbury's seminal novel, “Fahrenheit 451.”If not the greatest writing Bradbury ever wrote, is it inarguably the most socially significant. Indeed, if anything, Bradbury's tale of a willfully uninformed society is more relevant today then when it was first published in 1953.Like all truly important works of art, it was the product of blood and sweat and tears.It also cost $9.80. Bradbury wrote the first draft of “Fahrenheit 451” in the basement of the UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) library, on a coin operated typewriter.Now, I had no idea there even was such a thing as a coin operated typewriter. Sources differ on whether is was a Remington or an Underwood. Obviously, you don't care. Only someone as pedantic as myself would care.I remember being offended by the concept of pay toilets. Making people pay to write just seems like adding insult to injury.It cost a ten cents for 30 minutes of typing time. So get out your calculators, students. How long did it take him to write his book? Be prepared to show your work.Of course, as noted above, this was only the first draft, not the final version. What Bradbury tapped out on those machines while feeding them dimes to keep the work going, was a novella-length work called “The Firemen.” The story was later fleshed out to the book as we now know it.In a 2002 interview, Bradbury said, ““It was a passionate and exciting time for me. Imagine what it was like to be writing a book about book burning and doing it in a library where the passions of all those authors, living and dead, surrounded me.”What the library could not provide was a title for the book. “Fahrenheit 451,” of course, refers to the temperature at which paper burns. He could not find the answer anywhere in the library to the question, “At what temperatures does paper ignite?” UCLA's chemistry department proved equally unhelpful. In the end, Bradbury found the answer, and the title to his book, by calling the Los Angeles Fire Department.

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