English A themes, term papers, Ph.D. theses, and literary manuscripts keep Harvard Square a beehive of professional typists. Students and professors pass scribbled first drafts and mandatory deadlines to five typing agencies, the largess of the dozen odd agencies in Cambridge.

The Harvard Service Bureau, leviathan among its competitors, employs 12 typists and boasts the Square's one photo-offset machine. This device, which produces an even right margin, attracts a heterogeneous clientele--reports from the Dean's Office to programs for the Union Dance Committee. The Service Bureau professes stenographic friendship for students and faculty alike, but some people have stretched its good will, believing Service to include baby sitting and information on transcontinental trips.

A block from the University office is the versatile one-lady concern, Lorna Lowry. A reading knowledge of French, Spanish, and Latin qualify her as dean of Square linguists, as does her colorful and spirited English; Miss Lowry never lets a typing error pass without fitting condemnation. Her talents run into areas more creative than deciphering first drafts, whatever their language. She has written articles for "The Atlantic Monthly" and "Good Housekeeping," and this year her "Beer for Bill Haggerty" will appear in the "New Yorker."

Oldest of the Square's typing bureaus is The Misses Littlefield Twin winters, a year out of Cambridge High and Latin, opened the agency in 1899; their noice, Miss Dorothy Littlefield, has managed the office since 1945. The Littlefield bureau is proud of its alumni, men who it feels have gone through Littlefield's as well as Harvard, and who often visit the Brattle Street office when back in Cambridge. An office library of Littlefield typed manuscripts includes Rollo Walter Brown's "Harvard Yard in the Golden Age," and a study of Milton's influence on English poetry which was 11 years on a Littlefield carriage. Littlefield's were never political partisans, they have maintained strict surface neutrality; they have maintained strict surface neutrality; they typed sons of Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt through College.

Across the Square from the Misses Littlefield is the Alice Darling Secretarial Service, the one-man managed agency on the Square. The bureau is now owned by John S. Marston who bought it in 1948 when Miss Darling abandoned typing for law practice. For Miss Darling's as for the other bureaus, the thesis rush began in March and is now subsiding.

Miss Theresa L. Baldwin has typed at 18 Brattle Street for the last ten years. The work has been absorbing, she reports, because it involves an interesting personality, the Harvard male. From English A to job applications, Miss Baldwin mixes typing with a maternal affection.

All the typists share a common plague--scotch-taped, stapled, and unreadable manuscripts. But student patronage would seem to prove that they can read the unreadable and beat the deadlines.