TIME Goes to the Mattresses

Sun, Sep 12, 2004 at 6:29:23 pm PDT

TIME Magazine digs up a former NYC typewriter repairman, Bill Glennon, who says there were plenty of typewriters in the 1970s that could have produced an exact match to an MS Word document typed in 2004: The X Files Of Lt. Bush.

So far, forensic and typewriter experts consulted by TIME and other major media organizations have not reached a consensus on the authenticity of the memos. Some insist it would have been nearly impossible for a 1970s-era typewriter to produce the memos because of the letter spacing in the documents and the use of a raised and compact th symbol. But Bill Glennon, a technology consultant in New York City who worked for IBM repairing typewriters from 1973 to 1985, says those experts “are full of crap. They just don’t know.” Glennon says there were IBM machines capable of producing the spacing, and a customized key — the likes of which he says were not unusual — could have created the superscript th.

“Full of crap.” That must be covered in the 2004 edition of Strunk & White.