Script and Scribble Read online

  Carolingian Minuscule (image credits 1.14)

  Unlike most of those, it also allowed for separations between words—something not considered attractive by writers of, for example, Roman Rustic—and it standardized punctuation, which had been inconsistent, haphazard, or completely nonexistent. Now the comma, quote marks, and question mark began to be used as we know them. The script came to be called Carolingian Minuscule, after the emperor—a nicely ironic historical note, since Charlemagne wrote a very poor hand despite all his efforts, though, unlike most rulers of his time, he was at least literate.

  Gothic

  The grace and readability of Carolingian Minuscule were severely compromised by the various Gothic scripts that succeeded it. What looks pointy, aggressive, and often impenetrable to our eyes must have been attractive and readable in the Middle Ages, because Gothic in its several incarnations was intensely popular. Whatever their faults, the Gothic scripts were neat and space-saving, and were the preferred bookhand—i.e., the script used for copying texts—in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, and even served as the basis of the first typefaces in printed books. Gothic came to be known as blackletter because a page of it was essentially a black sea of ink.

  There were endless varieties of the script, some more pleasing than others—a lighter, less jagged and compressed version was known as bastarda, a generic term usually used for scripts that combined Gothic with a touch of cursive, and there are some beautiful offshoots in use today. But while many Gothics are lovely (albeit illegible), others—especially the later, exaggerated ones—share an unpleasantly crabbed, dense quality.7 A monkish medieval joke is worth reproducing here, an exaggeration of Gothic’s stodgy vertical illegibility:

  Gothic script (image credits 1.15)

  It reads “Mimi numinum nivium minimi munium nimium vini muniminum imminui vivi minimum volunt,” or “The very short mimes of the gods of snow do not at all wish that during their lifetime the very great burden of [distributing] the wine of the walls be lightened.”8

  Gothic scripts, perversely, emphasized the look of the entire word over the individual letter—the whole wrought-iron fence rather than the narrow gate that’s an n or a v. Gothic was more about appearance than about legibility. And, in fact, the overall effect of a word or a sentence was quite grand—even if you held the page upside-down. (Try it with the example on the previous page.) In some variants, the letters were so closely woven they were called textura—textured. There are many textura styles, including quadrata—a favorite for newspaper titles, including the New York Times—whose letters have very precise diamond-shaped “feet”; rotunda, whose letters are more delicate, and rounded at the bottom; and semiquadrata, with some rounded and some pointy feet.

  Gothic looks like it was hell to write, but it persisted in Germany, where it was known as Fraktur, from the Latin fractus (for “fractured”): in some variations, the letter forms were not joined but broken up. In 1941 Hitler outlawed the script (calling it, with admirable illogic, “Jewish”), because people in Nazi-occupied territories couldn’t read the propaganda disseminated by the Fraktur-writing Germans. However, it was never really eradicated, and the brutal, aggressive blackletter script is still associated with the Nazis.

  But in general, as Gothic became ever more elaborate, and burdened with endless regional reworkings, people turned once more to less intricate, more legible styles.

  This syndrome characterizes much of the history of handwriting, which has been driven at least partly by the tension between aesthetics and utility. Writing designed primarily for business—writing that, in effect, had a built-in deadline—has traditionally been about speed and legibility. Writing used for literary or religious purposes could be more leisurely and hence more decorative, driven by the simple desire for beauty—or showmanship. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” has no relevance here: a plain and practical script was no sooner introduced than it would be dolled up by scribes, who worked variations on a theme. After a while the original began to seem uninteresting or just plain ugly, and the fittest variation that survived became standard. In turn, that would become too ordinary, and users with an artistic eye made further changes until a new script was born. Some were a reaction against too much flash, some against too much austerity. There were revivals in handwriting history—romantic throwbacks to a supposedly better age—just as there were in the history of art and architecture. But the process meant that handwriting over the centuries went through a vast number of transformations.

  Italic Writing

  The Italic (a term that honors its Italian origins) or “secretary hand” (i.e., used by clerks) emerged toward the end of the fifteenth century:

  It became popular not only with clerks but with educated writers of the time because it was more in tune with the humanist ideals of the Renaissance, part of the turning away from the barbaric extremes of Gothic sensibility. The slanty italic we use for emphasis on a printed page comes from Italic script.

  Italic first appeared in Venice c. 1500, the inspiration of either a printer named Aldus Manutius or his type-cutter, Francesco Griffo (or possibly a collaboration by both). It was, in Manutius’s words, “an entirely new design.” The pocket edition of Virgil in which Manutius introduced it was a sensational bestseller, and Italic quickly spread all over Europe. It was probably the hand used by Shakespeare.9

  As the handwriting historian A. S. Osley speculated in his article “Origins of Italic Type,” Italic’s popularity may have been aided by the fact that, in the early days of printed books, the stiff and upright Roman type that, by then, was usually the choice of printers “was monotonous to eyes attuned to the irregularities of manuscript.” Italic, which used some ligatures (i.e., connected letters) and had a natural rightward slant even in its printed form, was meant to imitate the rapid, improvised cursive scrawl of the average hand-writer.

  Italic was, of course, far more pleasing and elegant than any vernacular writing style. As it evolved, it combined some of the better features of the Italian version of Gothic script—European nostalgia for Gothic was inexplicable but undeniable—with a touch of the graceful and clearly defined Carolingian letterforms that represented the characteristically Renaissance nostalgia for the glories of the ancient world.

  Between 1440 and 1500, about 40,000 books were produced on European presses. As the printing press began to take over the making of books—or of anything that needed to exist in multiple copies—the need for professional scribes diminished. A case in point is Antonio Sinibaldi (1443–1528), one of the most famous scribes of the early Italian Renaissance. His masterpiece—and the high point of his career—was a commission to letter the text of a particularly magnificent Book of Hours for Lorenzo de Medici.10 But by 1480 Sinibaldi was complaining in a note on his tax return that he was so broke he could hardly afford to keep himself clothed.

  In reaction to the job crisis, many practical-minded scribes became writing masters, teaching fine penmanship skills to the educated classes—a new profession that provided the best of them with an excellent living. The writing masters also found a way to capitalize on the printing press: they began producing their own printed how-to books, prepared using wood blocks cut from their original designs.

  The books—delightful objects in themselves—sold well, and elegant handwriting quickly became the rage, especially among the burgeoning clerical class. As Osley puts it in his book Scribes and Sources, “During the sixteenth century bureaucracy really began to flourish in Europe. The new offices had to be manned [and] young men of good family could find satisfying careers in this line of business.” All these eager young strivers—the yuppies of their day—needed to be taught a legible and pleasing hand.

  As both teachers and designers of scripts, the Italian masters were highly influential. The greatest were Giambattista Palatino, who is considered by many to be the greatest calligrapher who ever lived, and Ludovico Vicentino Arrighi, who created the first printed handwriting manual in 1522, the
startlingly beautiful La Operina:

  Before Arrighi’s death in 1527 (he perished in the sack of Rome by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V), he wrote, designed, and printed a detailed treatise on quills, with tips on selecting and cutting them, choosing inkwells (the best ones were of lead because it keeps the ink fresh), ink (it’s best to mix your own, in small batches), and a penknife (make sure it’s of well-tempered steel, with a sturdy, comfortable handle), not to mention various tools—thimbles, lamps, rulers, tweezers, shears, etc.—that were indispensable for the serious penman.

  More than three centuries later, Arrighi’s work would serve as a model for William Morris during the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts calligraphy revival.11 Oscar Wilde reported that, at an exhibition in London, “a photographic projection of a page of Arrighi was greeted with a spontaneous round of applause.”

  Italic in the more formal version known as cancellaresca (chancery hand) was used in the courts of the Vatican. (Arrighi worked in the Apostolic Chancery copying papal briefs until he was fired for his attempts to battle the graft and corruption that flourished there.) Chancery hand lacked Italic’s characteristic rightward slope, and—like other scripts meant for legal use—was sometimes deliberately illegible to keep the wrong people from reading (or forging) confidential texts:

  Chancery hand (image credits 1.18)

  However, though they retained some of chancery’s stateliness, the more readable, right-slanting Italic forms prevailed, and the script became renowned for its clarity, answering a demand for a refined, useful, and historically valid script not only for bureaucrats but among the educated classes in general.

  With the rise of Italic, there was a slowing of the persistent changes that had characterized script styles for a thousand years. One of Italic’s virtues was its relative speediness, but because technology in the form of the printing press had taken over mass production of manuscripts, scribes no longer had to tailor the prevailing script to massive writing projects. Fast copying became less important. As a result, professional penmen were now teachers and craftsmen more than they were innovators: their task was to refine, sustain, and disseminate their skills.

  Copperplate

  It goes without saying that, useful and popular though it was, Italic script did not answer the needs of every writer, but the post-Renaissance changes were about neither art nor speed: they were about morality. For Puritans and other reformers in England and America, the scripts favored in Europe were too elaborate, too baroque—perhaps too seductively gorgeous—and the plain and easy script known as copperplate (or roundhand) was devised as an alternative. By the eighteenth century, roundhand—so called because it was structured on the shape of the letter O—was in wide use.12

  English roundhand, 1736 (image credits 1.19)

  Roundhand was versatile: it was used for printing as well as handwriting, and though its standard forms were designed for business, it allowed for a daintier style suitable for ladies. Furthermore, if the writer was so inclined, and unconstrained by religious strictures—in other words, if the writer was a professional penman whose chief obsession was with his craft—roundhand could be endlessly embellished with fancy swirls and shadings. The process was accelerated by an instrument that was just being introduced: the flexible pointed pen, whose dainty point provided an alternative to the traditional blunt nib, which was shaped like a small screwdriver. At first, these finer pens were used only as drawing implements, and when the penmen took them up it was small wonder that their scripts began to undergo “the transformation of ordinary handwriting into a performing art,” as Charles L. Lehman put it in Handwriting Models for Schools (1976).

  Most ordinary writers continued to use the ubiquitous quill, and were still writing the Gothic-tinged Italic that was the norm. But penmen in England, and eventually the colonies (particularly Boston and Philadelphia), were more interested in roundhand and the extremes to which it could be taken. I have a facsimile copy of George Bickham’s The Universal Penman, a 1743 collection of sample scripts by twenty-five notable English penmen of the day, including Bickham himself. In his introduction, Bickham warns against excessive flourishing, and is critical of too many “turns of the pen” that “seem rather designed to fill up Vacancies on the Paper than studiously compos’d to adorn the Piece.”

  The tolerance for such embellishment must have been fairly high in the 1740s. Bickham includes a relatively straightforward selection of alphabets—not only roundhand but Roman, Italic, Court Hand, Old English (which looks suspiciously like Gothic), and even “Arabick” and “Syriack”:

  (image credits 1.20)

  But this was, after all, the age of rococo, and everything from hairstyles to silversmithing was way over the top. The glory of Bickham’s book is its flourishes, which abound—as do scrolls, spirals, frames, flowers, doves, and putti:

  (image credits 1.22)

  Despite their excesses, the accomplishments of the eighteenth-century quillmeisters look mighty impressive to the modern eye. My own experience of paging through Bickham and taking notes in my ungainly modern scribble was instructive. Marc Drogin reminded me that most of these elaborate early scripts were not “handwriting” as we know it: “They were ‘display lettering,’ slowly produced elaborate declarative lettering that announced its own importance. It is the quick sloppy cursives that were used at the same time—for lists and notes, personal notebooks or florilegia,13 the second and third copies of court records—that were ‘handwriting.’ ”

  Still, as Jackson points out in The Story of Writing, “Kings, clerks, and educated men and women everywhere imitated the style of the writing masters.” What a different world it was, when a supremely legible but elegant script was the standard to which everyone, in some measure at least, aspired. If we try to imagine what it was like to receive in the mail a bill that looked like this:

  (image credits 1.23)

  instead of like this:

  we can begin to comprehend what changes 350-odd years of culture have wrought, and to understand—despite the belief that the makeup of humans stays essentially the same over the centuries—what a vast gulf there is between the world we live in and the London world of 1743.

  Fashions in script—like the latest bonnet styles—traveled swiftly across the ocean; the work of the English writing masters was enormously influential in the colonies. Roundhand is usually known in America as copperplate, from the fact that, in addition to being written by hand, this was the script that was etched into copper plates for printing by an engraver. It’s the handwriting familiar to us on all the crucial American documents: the Declaration of Independence, once past its fancy Gothic heading, is all copperplate.

  Benjamin Franklin, a penmanship buff,14 wrote an elegant hand that wouldn’t have made it into Bickham, but was certainly of a high standard—and check out that signature:

  (image credits 1.24)

  Franklin included instructions for producing a nifty copperplate in his 1748 book, The American Instructor, which also contained helpful advice on “how to write letters on business or friendship”—such things were so codified at the time, they were almost ritualistic. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) might never have come into existence had Richardson, at that time a printer, not been asked by a London bookseller to come up with a book on letterwriting. The unexpected result was a novel in letters—the racy, best-selling tale of a teenage serving maid who, in her reports home to her parents, describes her successful attempt to escape seduction (read: rape) by her employer, save her virtue, and—in the end—get the cad to marry her. (The story is implausible, sexist, preachy, often hilarious, and, in the end, deeply satisfying.)

  In his own much more serious handbook, Franklin is reassuring on the subject of the limitations of the average human—he writes that “those who aim at perfect Writing by imitating the engraved copies, tho’ they never reach the wish’d for Excellence …, their Hand [i.e., their handwriting] is mended by the Endeavor, and is to
lerable while it continues fair & legible.” He was convinced of the value of a good script, and, when he founded the Academy of Philadelphia (which later became the University of Pennsylvania), Franklin stipulated that, if a young man wished to be admitted, he must “write a legible hand.”

  Admission must have been pretty exclusive. In colonial America it was considered necessary for just about everyone, including a substantial percentage of slaves, to be literate enough to read the Bible. (Religious slaveowners were sometimes torn between their desire to spread the word of God and their belief that Africans were not actually human.) White children were taught to read at home by their mothers as they were taught to tie their shoes; both were important life skills.

  But handwriting was something else. Only rich folks and businessmen learned to write, or even to read handwriting. For the average person, script was like an alien alphabet, as foreign to a colonial housewife (who could probably decipher printed texts with ease) as Chinese would be today—and as unnecessary. (And, even if they’d been grudgingly taught to read, slaves were discouraged from learning to write, lest they communicate escape plans to each other or try to contact the outside world.) As public schooling became more common, writin’ began to be taught along with readin’ (and ’rithmetic), but, although the Puritans in New England were supporting schools as early as the 1640s, this was a slow process. It wasn’t until after the turn of the nineteenth century that schooling (at least to the eighth grade) became universal, with handwriting taught as part of the curriculum.

  As it passed through all its historic stages, writing as practiced by the average person gradually evolved into something more than a purely utilitarian tool—pleasing penmanship became a sign of gentility. For a while, some wealthy men affected illegible handwriting to show that they were too important and leisured to bother with such piddling concerns. Most of the wastrels—and there are many—in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels write an arrogant scrawl. The tradition goes back at least as far as Hamlet, who saw good handwriting as a sign of base birth.