Francis Bacon teaches typing

[From Midnight Mary (dir. William A. Wellman, 1933). Click either image for a larger view.]

Mary Martin (Loretta Young) tries to get on the straight and narrow by going to secretarial school. These two brief glimpses of typing show her progress. By September she’s typing a passage from Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning (1605):

And to speak truly, “Antiquitas seculi, juventus mundi.” These times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not those which we account ancient ordine retrogrado, by a computation backward from ourselves.

[Post title with apologies to the imaginary Mavis Bacon. “Antiquitas seculi, juventus mundi”: the age of antiquity is the youth of the world. “Ordine retrogado”: in retrograde order.]