Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury had small children and no quiet place to work. What he found instead was the basement of the Powell Library at the University of California, Los Angeles, where there was a room containing typewriters available for hire.

The rate was ten cents for half an hour.

You put a dime in, and the machine ran. When the time was up it stopped, mid-sentence if necessary, and waited for another one.

Bradbury wrote in bursts, dropping dimes in to keep the carriage moving, running upstairs into the stacks when he needed something and running back down before the meter expired.

In nine days he produced a 25,000-word story called "The Fireman". The total cost of writing it, in dimes, was $9.80.

"The Fireman" was later expanded into the novel published in 1953 as Fahrenheit 451 — a book about a future in which firemen are employed to burn books, written at speed in the basement of a library, surrounded by the exact thing it was mourning.

It is easy to imagine the novel as a grand statement composed in a study. It was not. It was written against a clock, for pocket change, by a man who could not afford an office, in a building full of the books he was writing about losing.

Filmed in 1966 by François Truffaut — his only English-language film and his first in colour — starring Julie Christie and Oskar Werner.

Bradbury broadly liked it, though he complained that Truffaut "was a coward about doing certain things" and had left out the Mechanical Hound.