Script and Scribble Read online

  5 Or “penpersonship”—there are at least 200 very sincere Google references to this version, as in “It’s essential to have good penpersonship.”

  6 Where there are no salespeople at all, just bored and underpaid checkout clerks without health benefits.

  7 At our house, this was done with an old Heinz ketchup bottle fitted with the kind of sprinkler top that was readily available at any hardware store.

  THE STYLUS, THE BRUSH, AND THE CALAMUS

  The human need—or maybe the urge—to record the minutiae of daily life goes back to cave dwellers scratching on walls with sharp stones. That instinct, as the British calligrapher Donald Jackson puts it in The Story of Writing (1980), “is as deep-rooted as anything we know about our earliest ancestors.” They began by making pictures that recorded the results of the hunt. Eventually, drawing a picture of each slain bison became cumbersome and time-consuming, and a simpler method was developed: the use of a symbol to stand for a thing.

  In the fourth millennium BC, the Sumerians were drawing pictures on wet clay of the objects that made up their world—a tree, say, or a house. These were incised with a stylus, a pencil-like instrument not unlike the ones used with today’s PDAs, and because its tip was triangular, the marks were wedge-shaped (hence, cuneiform, from the Latin cuneus, meaning wedge).

  A stylus (image credits 1.1)

  These stylized images—pictograms—were used to record business transactions, historical events, and recipes, including one for beer, which the Sumerians apparently invented.1 Over time, their symbols lost detail and became increasingly abstracted, a response to the roughness of the stylus as a writing tool, and tendency of the clay to harden rapidly. The pictograms began to give way to phonograms, in which an image represented the sound of a syllable rather than an object—a radical transformation that reduced the two thousand images of the Sumerians to two hundred.

  At the same time, the Egyptians began chiseling their elegant hieroglyphs (“writing of the gods”) into stone or painting them on papyrus, using either a brush made of bristles, or a brush-pen made by chewing or hammering one end of a reed until it was soft. The Egyptians actually had an alphabet of twenty-four letters (all consonants), but because of the relative flexibility of the brush on papyrus, the urgency that led the stylus-and-clay Sumerians toward simplification was absent. The Egyptians hung on to their pictograms long past the point where they were needed. Hieroglyphics were a composite of pictograms and phonograms, the two types of images often supplementing each other in a phenomenally complex system: a student of writing had to memorize hundreds of separate signs.

  Over time, pictograms in general became less realistic and more abstract, until finally, sometime before the first millennium BC, the Phoenicians—the most successful traders and businessmen of their day—took a crucial leap further and devised the first system of writing dependent entirely on sounds rather than on images. A symbol now stood for a sound, not for a syllable. Their ingenious system of letters—a tidy twenty-six as opposed to hundreds—was worked out by merchants in the Phoenician city of Byblos—the city the Greeks had named after their word for papyrus because Egyptian papyrus was shipped from there. (Byblos, of course, is the source of bookish words like bibliography and bible.)

  The Phoenician system was based, quite sensibly, on Egyptian hieroglyphics: the genius of the Phoenicians was to transform the pictograms into a true alphabet. The Egyptian sign for ox head, for example, was:

  The Phoenician word for ox was aleph, and they named the letter by the initial sound of what the pictogram had represented (aleph = A) so that meaning was derived from a sound rather than from a picture. Similarly, the Egyptians used this expressive sign for water:

  The Phoenicians called it mem, their word for water, and it became M. (If we called our letter M not em but, say, Mom, and our letter A ax, we might be learning not our ABCs but our Ax-Banana-Cats. This process is called acrophony, from the Greek words for “uppermost” and “sound.”) Because they were still using a stylus, the letters began as angular forms, but eventually they also began to use brush and ink to generate more rounded letters. Gradually, a complete alphabet evolved and—with some modifications and additions over the slow flow of time—it’s the alphabet we use today.

  Between the Phoenicians with their inventories and bills of lading, and the monastic scribes toiling over illuminated manuscripts in their scriptoria, were the Romans. The Romans devised their own take on the Phoenician alphabet, using innovations borrowed from the Greeks and the Etruscans to create a bold, impressive all-caps script worthy of world conquerors. It became known as Roman Square Capital, and was particularly well suited to incising large letters with a chisel and mallet onto the stone facades of buildings.

  Roman Square Capital (image credits 1.4)

  The Romans employed more casual scripts as well, designed to be scribbled rather than chiseled, including an early cursive for writing quickly if not beautifully: when Julius Caesar, on horseback, dictated letters in the midst of a military campaign (as Plutarch tells us he did), the scribes very likely jotted down his words in their messy, shorthand proto-cursive and copied them over neatly in Square Capital when they got back to their tents.

  Much of this early writing (i.e., getting words onto a flat surface) was done using some version of the stylus on wax tabulae—shallow book-sized wooden or ivory boxes covered with a film of beeswax stained dark to make the writing more legible—an apparatus that calls to mind the once-ubiquitous Magic Slate.

  A woman with stylus and tabula, from Pompeii (image credits 1.5)

  Gradually, the instrument’s wedge-shaped end became more pointed, but the other remained flat for smoothing out the wax in order to use the surface again (or to “erase” an error). The stylus could be plain as a knitting needle or turned like a spindle, and was usually made of iron or bone (or iron-tipped bone), sometimes of more expensive bronze.

  Scholars estimate that perhaps 15 percent of Romans were literate, most of them from the patrician class. An educated citizen carried a stylus at all times, as someone today might keep a ballpoint in a shirt pocket. When Caesar was attacked in the Roman senate on the Ides of March in 44 BC, he defended himself (according to Suetonius) with his stylus—in vain, of course: the sword in this case was mightier than the pen.

  Soon after Caesar’s time, for books and official documents, the graceful Roman Rustic script came into use—a domestic variant of Roman Square Capital. Its narrower strokes and contracted forms took up less space and so was less time-consuming and expensive to produce.

  Roman Rustic (image credits 1.6)

  The Romans used stylus-and-wax for brief or ephemeral bits of writing, like bills, personal correspondence, jottings, schoolwork,2 but sometimes, surprisingly, they also used it to draw up legal documents like wills and contracts. The stuff was durable as long as you didn’t leave it in the sun.

  But for literary purposes, or anything they wished preserved ad infinitum, the ancients wrote with a brush made of hair, bristle, and various fibers, or with a calamus—a reed implement (calamus is the Latin word for reed) that was sharpened with a knife and split at the writing-end to facilitate the drawing up of the ink. This became the archetype of many subsequent pens, including the fountain pen with its split nib.

  Modern calamus, hand-cut from a reed

  Until around the fourth century, most writing was done on papyrus, which was made quite cheaply from reeds imported from Egypt. As a result, books were fairly inexpensive in Ancient Rome: you could pick up a copy of Martial’s Epigrams for six sesterces. (As a comparison, Cleopatra’s pearls were worth 40 million sesterces.)

  Then, as the Roman Empire started to decline and, with it, trade between Rome and its colonies, including Egypt, parchment began to take the place of papyrus. It was made from a readily available source—animal skins, usually sheep—and had clear advantages over papyrus: parchment was much smoother and sturdier, and could be folded into the shape of something mo
re like a book. The unwieldy scrolls we see in toga movies would have been papyrus.

  The Uncial scripts3 that grew out of Roman Square Capital were rounder, simpler, and more efficient—friendlier than the imposing Roman caps. Uncials were developed in the monasteries in answer to what the monks saw as an urgent need: just as Christianity was edging out paganism, the holier Uncial script began to replace its earlier Roman competitors, which, because they had been used for copying the works of pagan writers (Virgil, Horace, Cicero, Caesar himself), were considered sullied, and unsuitable for Church writings. (Even now, to me, Uncial has a hard-to-define but unmistakable “religious” look.)

  One of Uncial’s features was the introduction of small letters—not lower-case letters as we know them, but capitals written half their usual size, which saved paper and definitely sped things up. The variant known as Half-Uncial flirted with true minuscule letters: the top loop of the B was eliminated, for example, leaving the single-looped lower-case b we use today.

  Roman Half-Uncial (image credits 1.8)

  The script was brought to Ireland by Bishop Patricius—aka St. Patrick. The future bishop and saint was a Roman Briton, kidnapped as a teenager and transported to Ireland to be a slave, toiling for six years as a shepherd in what is now County Mayo. He finally escaped, made his way home, was educated in monasteries, became a missionary, was consecrated a bishop, and in the year 432 returned to Ireland—which during his captivity he had come to love—to convert the pagan warrior chieftains to Christianity. He also converted the Irish to Half-Uncial.

  Over time, the Irish monks made their own improvements and innovations as, doggedly copying manuscripts (the word comes from the Latin manu scriptis, or written by hand) in their scriptoria, they kept the flame of learning alive through the so-called Dark Ages—a time of upheaval in Europe during which, miraculously, handwriting flourished and spread. (The period is now referred to more benignly by historians as Late Antiquity or the Early Middle Ages.)

  The monastery scriptorium (image credits 1.9)

  Gradually, the scripts that began to dominate were the Irish spin-offs from Uncial, the so-called Insular Majuscule and Insular Minuscule—insular because they were developed on an island, majuscule because they consisted of all capital letters. (Insular Minuscule, which included lower-case letters, originated a little later, also in Ireland.) These highly pleasing scripts were taught by the Irish to the monks in Anglo-Saxon (i.e., English) monasteries, where the new forms caught on quickly. However, the old-fashioned Celtic churchmen, many of whom clung to the old Uncial scripts, were often at odds with the Anglo-Saxons, who were more enthusiastic embracers of what had become the official Christian establishment, based in Rome. The scripts the two factions favored coexisted peacefully enough, overlapping and influencing each other, but there were other problems: the Irish and Roman churches had differing calendars (so the date of Easter was always in dispute), they disagreed about whether penance should be performed in private or in public, and their monks favored opposing tonsure styles: the Anglo-Saxons shaved the tops of their heads, leaving the familiar neatly clipped monkish fringe, and ridiculed the Irish, who shaved the front half ear to ear and sported a long mane that hung down the back—a hairstyle possibly modeled on that of the Druids.

  Essentially, it was a power struggle between progressives and conservatives. The backward-looking Celts lost: at the Synod of Whitby in 664, the issue was decided in favor of the Roman tradition, which dominates the Catholic Church to this day, and along with their wild hairstyles, the Irish monks’ distinctive Uncial script was gradually replaced by its more compact Insular versions.

  Insular Minuscule, c. 700 (image credits 1.10)

  It was during the course of the evolution of these scripts that the calamus—the reed pen—began to be seen as an inadequate writing implement. It had been a step forward from the brush, but because, like papyrus, it too had to be made from an imported reed, the calamus eventually fell into disuse, and a new writing implement appeared, one that would change the course of handwriting history.

  THE QUILL

  The idea of using bird feathers to write with had been around for centuries—between about 250 BC and 68 AD, the Dead Sea Scrolls were written, at least in part, with quills. But it wasn’t until sometime in the late seventh or early eighth century that they became the major writing instrument in much of the world. The quill was versatile, flexible, and easier to manipulate than a brush. Its harder point—with a texture somewhat like the human fingernail—was better than the coarse tip of a calamus for writing on smooth parchment—but similar enough (hollow barrel, split nib) to be constructed easily by scribes. With the advent of the quill, handwriting became more varied and individual.

  Quills were used for the illuminated manuscripts produced by monks in Ireland, including the Lindisfarne Gospels and the sumptuous Book of Kells. Anonymous wrote Beowulf with a quill and Chaucer The Canterbury Tales. Shakespeare wrote his thirty-seven plays and 154 sonnets with a quill. (At the New York Public Library shop, you can buy a Shakespeare action figure with a quill pen in one hand and a book in the other.) Martin Luther used a quill for his 95 Theses, Cervantes for Don Quixote, Bach for The Well-Tempered Clavier, Charles Perrault for “Cinderella,” Mozart for The Magic Flute, Boswell for his Life of Johnson, Keats for the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Jane Austen for Pride and Prejudice, Dickens for Great Expectations, Pushkin for Eugene Onegin. (A Russian three-ruble commemorative coin issued in 1999 bears on its reverse a portrait of Pushkin holding a quill.) George Sand wrote her staggering output of books, plays, and essays4 in one room while Chopin composed his sublime nocturnes and mazurkas in another—both scratching away with their quill pens. The Magna Carta was written with a quill, and the Founding Fathers used one to put their John Hancocks on the Declaration of Independence. Presumably, your great-great-grandparents and mine signed their names (or perhaps just an X) with a quill pen.

  The Well-Tempered Clavier

  Quills were within the reach of everyone—often right out in the barnyard. You could pluck a quill from the wing feathers (penna in Latin means feather)5 of geese, turkeys, ravens (which could draw the finest lines), or (for the wealthy) swans. The best of them were plucked from living birds—pens for the right-handed from the left wing because of the way it curved, and vice versa.

  The trouble with quill pens was that they lasted only about a week—for a compulsive scribbler, a mere day or two. There’s a legend that the prolific Thomas Jefferson raised a special flock of geese at Monticello solely to satisfy his writing needs. I love this idea but, sadly, it does not seem to be true. The research librarian at the Jefferson library told me that geese were “one form of livestock that were typically purchased rather than raised” at the estate. On the other hand, there are no references in Jefferson’s financial records to buying quill pens, either—so presumably he bought a goose when he needed one, plucked, and wrote.

  You didn’t have to make your quills from scratch—they were sold in quantity by street vendors and in stationery shops—but many people did, even though they were a pain to prepare. Once you managed to pluck a wing feather from a large, angry bird (which—to anyone who’s ever met up with a hissing swan—sounds like the road to disaster), you had to cut away most of the feathery bits to make the quill comfortable to hold.

  Before (image credits 1.12)

  After: quills trimmed for writing

  Next, you had to harden it, a choice between burying it in hot sand (a modern quillster recommends a soup-can of sand in a 350 degree oven) or plunging it into a vat of acid (best to do both). You fashioned the tip to the proper shape (an art in itself), cut a slit in it, trimmed it into a nib, and scraped it flat. Then, as you wrote with the thing, you had to fiddle with it constantly to keep it sharp. (Hence, penknife, a tool also useful for erasing: a scribe could carefully scratch the ink off the parchment with no harm done. Illustrations of medieval scribes tend to show them with a quill in one hand and a knife in the
other.) No matter how careful you were, you could make a cutting error and damage the quill badly with the knife, and, once you did take pen in hand, drips and splatters of ink could ruin your manuscript. And you might very well be doing all this by candelight.6

  Presumably, people got the hang of it. The quill endured for twelve centuries, and it made possible an awe-inspiring array of scripts.

  Carolingian Minuscule

  The year 800, when Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor, is widely seen as the dawn of the medieval era, a triumph for the spread of Christianity, and the start of a huge advance for education—and, trailing along with it, penmanship. Charlemagne (Carolus Magnus, 742–814) was the son of Pepin the Short, though he himself was taller than average. He was a strong, rugged, rough-and-ready warrior without much book learning—a princely good-time-Charlie who loved to eat.

  Once he rose to power, he became a social reformer dedicated to improving the lives of his people, and interested, primarily, in education in all its aspects—including his own, which he had long neglected. With the scholar Alcuin of York (who had been summoned from England at the emperor’s behest), Charlemagne encouraged government scribes and monks to adopt a new style of handwriting—a written lingua franca that could be recognized throughout his enormous empire. The new script was the first to slope gently to the right; it used lower case as well as capitals; and it included some connections between letters (which the quill could handle, but which would have been awkward for the less flexible calamus). For all these reasons it flowed more easily than its predecessors.