Script and Scribble Read online

  The flawed American graphite was notoriously brittle and gritty but it made for a pencil that was cheaper than imported ones, and good enough for the average user. In 1837, fresh out of Harvard (where pencil profits had sent him), Henry David Thoreau—who had helped out in the family business from childhood—applied his intelligence and ingenuity to figuring out a way to mix graphite with clay instead of with wax, glue, and spermaceti, which was the current practice. (Conté’s formula hadn’t crossed the ocean.) He also devised a machine for grinding the graphite more finely to reduce grit.21 By all accounts, the Thoreaus started to make some pretty nifty pencils—they won the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association award for excellence in 1847 and 1849—and they sold well, even though they were costly: twenty-five cents each, as opposed to about a nickel for inferior pencils. In 2006, two Thoreau & Son pencils (one sharpened, one not) sold in a Massachusetts auction for $2,088 to a Maryland bookseller with a serious Thoreau collection.

  Inside label of an original Thoreau pencil box (image credits 1.34)

  A typical pencil can draw a line thirty-five miles long. A pencil stuck into the soil will keep mealy bugs from attacking a plant. Graphite is non-toxic: pencil makers claim you could eat a pencil a day and not get sick. However, breathing it is another matter: the graphite dust that permeated the Thoreau household may have led to the death of several family members, including Henry, who died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-four. Automatic pencils turned up toward the end of the century, colored pencils in the 1920s.22

  A California sculptor named Agelio Batle makes clever writing instruments out of pure graphite combined with “smudge-resistant compounds.” They are clean and lustrous, pleasant to write with and great fun to draw with, and beautiful objects in themselves. Among Batle’s creations are a cast of his own hand (index finger pointing), a grasshopper, a magnolia bud, a gingko leaf, and a pepper—but the most whimsical is a graphite quill. Writing with this combination of the quaint and the practical almost elevates even the most humble penciled scribble (“buy onions”) to the level of art.

  (image credits 1.35)

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  1 In 1989, the Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco made a batch of beer called Ninkasi (after the Sumerian goddess of brewing), based on a recipe inscribed on a clay tablet in 1800 BC. (Soak barley malt, spread it on a woven mat to drain, mix it with date juice or honey, filter it into containers to ferment, then let it pour “like the Tigris and Euphrates.”)

  2 Roman teachers would also spread sand on a table to teach letters and do sums, writing on it with a stick.

  3 The origin of the word uncial in this context is obscure: the usage originated with St. Jerome in the preface to his translation of the Book of Job (c. 388) in which he refers to “unciales litteræ.” The term is assumed to refer to the size of the letters (uncia means both “inch” and “ounce” in Latin), perhaps facetiously (i.e., they were big and bold), though it could also be either a misspelling or a misreading of Jerome’s script.

  4 George Sand was prolific in everything she did: her correspondence has been collected into 25 volumes, she smoked like a chimney, and, according to her biographer, Belinda Jack, she even made jam in “ludicrous” quantities.

  5 The pasta known as penne—Italian for “feathers”—actually look more like little writing instruments. The German word for pen is Feder and the French is plume, feathers all.

  6 Harry Potter sometimes performs the awesome feat of writing with a quill and a bottle of ink, on parchment, under the covers with a flashlight.

  7 They were termed “Gothic” by Renaissance scholars who found them as barbarous as the bloody and warlike Germanic tribe known as Goths—Gothic cathedrals were given the same sneering epithet. Plutarch said Gothic script was “pleasing to the eye but tiring to read.”

  8 This is from Marc Drogin’s informative, entertaining, and useful book Medieval Calligraphy: Its History and Technique, which I recommend to anyone with even a passing interest in the subject.

  9 None of Shakespeare’s manuscripts survive; the only handwriting that can be authenticated is his signature—and even that is considered iffy by some Shakespeare scholars because there are so many variations in spelling and letter formation among the six that have been discovered.

  10 Books of Hours—devotional texts produced not only for clergy but for especially pious (and wealthy) lay people—were among the most sumptuous of medieval illuminated manuscripts. The Medici example is bound in purple velvet and encrusted with pink quartz and lapis lazuli set in silver gilt.

  11 The Arts and Crafts movement was a reaction against the perceived “soullessness” of manufactured goods, including commercial publishing. The leader of the movement, William Morris—himself a calligrapher, printer, and textile designer as well as a poet and artist—was a fervent champion of calligraphy and other traditional arts.

  12 The word copperplate is often misunderstood as a generic term for fancy, old-fashioned handwriting. In Thomas Harris’s Hannibal, Hannibal Lecter is said to have copperplate handwriting. A character named Dr. Doemling comments: “You see that sort of handwriting in medieval papal bulls.” But copperplate, of course, was a far later phenomenon, unknown to medieval prelates.

  13 Literary anthologies containing the “flowers,” or absolute best, culled from one’s personal reading.

  14 The typeface used by, among others, the Museum of Modern Art, is named after him: Franklin Gothic—though it seems about as Ben-like as the MoMA building resembles Independence Hall.

  15 The handwriting of nineteenth-century America. (See Chapter Two.)

  16 As I write these words, I wonder if fuddy-duddy, whose origin, says the dictionary, is “unknown,” is in fact an offshoot of Luddite—the kind of facetious mangling that turns little into itty-bitty.

  17 With the “51,” Parker began numbering its pens as a response to the growing export market. Numbers didn’t need translation.

  18 Where a ballpoint is still called a biro, pronounced “bye-ro.”

  19 An edible, water soluble substance derived from the sap of the acacia tree, still used today, not just in inks—to increase viscosity—but in aspirin, crayons, and marshmallows, and Gummi Bears. In Africa, it’s used to feed livestock and cure the common cold.

  20 In Borrowdale, with appropriate Olde World picturesqueness, it was called simply “wad.” Then it was known as “plumbago”—a form of carbon—but it came to be called “graphite” from graphos, the Greek word for writing.

  21 Thoreau was nothing if not ingenious: in addition to his pencil innovations, he not only built his famous cabin at Walden Pond, but is said to have invented raisin bread.

  22 There are two great pencil tunes that I’m aware of: “Lead Pencil Blues” written by Johnnie Temple in 1935 and recorded by many of the great bluesmen, including Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, and also Horace Silver’s “Pencil-Packin’ Papa” on his eponymous 1994 album.

  SPENCERIAN SCRIPT

  It was during the quill era that Platt Rogers Spencer devised his philosophy of penmanship. The “father of American handwriting” was born in 1800 on the Hudson River, but spent his youth first in Greene County in the Catskills, then (after a fifty-two day trip in a covered wagon) on what was at that time the frontier: Ashtabula, Ohio, in the Western Reserve.

  Platt Rogers Spencer (image credits 2.1)

  He was the youngest son of a widowed mother who encouraged in her ten children a love of learning—a love that young Platt took to his own extreme. Even at an early age, he was crazy about handwriting but, in a family too poor to provide him with paper, he was forced to practice on leaves and bark, in the snow, and on the sandy beach of Lake Erie, where sometimes his obsessive script would stretch for half a mile. Finally, when he was seven, he got hold of some paper to write on and never looked back: he blossomed into an excellent junior penman—and the kind of remarkable child who inspired heroic tales: He once walked twenty miles, barefoot, to bo
rrow a book, with only raw turnips to eat on his journey.1

  Spencer was a mere fifteen when he began teaching handwriting to others—probably the ubiquitous copperplate—and so intense was his zeal that he sometimes forgot to collect payment from his students. He was also an intensely moral young man, and would have liked to become a minister, but a period of alcoholism convinced him that a religious career was not the path for him. As was the case with many great men, though, his fall was followed by redemption: in an effort of will, he gave up drinking in 1832 (“I hereby pledge to God and the world that I will never taste another drop of liquor”). He became a lifelong teetotaler and a vigorous advocate of the benefits of swearing off, and in a poem from 1837 he advised young people to “Touch not the juice that woos the taste.”

  Spencer’s sweetness and tenderness of heart were often mentioned by his family and his students. He was a gentle soul who loved to sing, and, according to one of his pupils, he filled his schoolrooms with “sunshine, life and song.” President James Garfield, when he was still a congressman, first met Spencer at a lecture in Ohio in 1857, and the two struck up a friendship—united by, among other things, their staunch opposition to slavery. After Spencer’s death, Garfield called him “a gifted, noble, and true-hearted man” and noted the admirable fact that “at a time when sympathy with the slave meant not only political but social ostracism, Mr. Spencer was outspoken in his denunciation of slavery in all its forms.” As for Spencerian script, Garfield called it “the pride of our country and the model of our schools.”

  Spencer worshiped poetry, and had a vast stock of it—some his own—stored in his memory. But instead of becoming a poet, as seemed likely, he relegated the art to a sideline and, demonstrating a highly unpoetical practical streak, became a professional penman and teacher. He founded a chain of business schools (which, at a time when there were less than a hundred public high schools in the entire country, actually functioned as private secondary schools), beginning with the Spencerian Commercial College in Pittsburgh, where penmanship was a vital part of the curriculum along with accounting, bookkeeping, and business law.

  In 1828, Spencer married a woman with the marvelously apt name of Persis Duty, who stuck by him through his drinking years: as he put it, she saved him, by her devotion, from “the drunkard’s melancholy fate.”

  Persis Duty Spencer (image credits 2.2)

  She also bore her husband eleven children (the last when she was fifty years old), assisted in the running of his schools, established a free library in Ashtabula County, joined him in speaking out against slavery, and was his enthusiastic handmaiden in his passion for penmanship.

  By then, he had perfected his own script. Just as Somerset Maugham couldn’t look at a sunset without thinking how he would describe it, Spencer couldn’t look at a leaf or a stone without thinking how to turn it into a letter of the alphabet. His script was based on natural forms. To Spencer, the stones washed smooth by the lake became the ovals that are the foundation of his letters; arching tree branches and smooth-flowing streams led him to his graceful connecting lines. Remembering the joys of nature—the wild flowers, the smooth pebbles, the beams of sunlight, the flight of birds across a sky traced with wispy clouds—he mingled round and angular, light and dark, trailing vines and curling stems, slender upstrokes and shaded downstrokes, swooping capitals and judicious flourishes.

  Spencer’s script was meant to be rhythmic and comfortable, a reaction against—though definitely an outgrowth of—the slow, laborious copperplate. Spencer always carried a few pebbles in his pocket—one of the many endearing facts about him—that he would trot out to illustrate the shapes his students should strive for. He also wrote a poem about his inspiration that sums it up nicely, if a tad floridly:

  Evolved ’mid Nature’s unpruned scenes,

  On Erie’s wild and woody shore,

  The rolling wave, the dancing stream,

  The wild-rose haunts in days of yore.

  The opal, quartz and ammonite,

  Gleaming beneath the wavelet’s flow,

  Each gave its lesson—how to write—

  In the loved years of long ago.

  To Spencer, the ideal of the eighteenth-century writing masters—six to twelve hours of practice a day—would have seemed exactly right. In reality, the average pupil didn’t have such long hours at his disposal, but an approximation of the script could be learned by any conscientious striver. In the 1840s, a student named Charles N. Hall at the Bridgewater Normal School in Massachusetts (now Bridgewater State College), worked diligently to perfect his penmanship. After pages and pages of drills like this:

  (image credits 2.3)

  young Charles could produce a pretty creditable hand:

  Spencer’s business colleges, and especially the handwriting philosophy they espoused, were an enormous success. Spencerian script became the official hand of government clerks,2 and even the lowliest handwriter aimed at some species of Spenceresque elegance. Today, the Spencerian school slogan, “Education for Real Life,” may seem singularly unrealistic. Spencerian script, to our modern eyes, isn’t much easier or plainer than its predecessors, and has little to do with a real life that is usually rushed and fragmented—probably no less a century and a half ago than it is today.

  But there were degrees of “fanciness.” The “business” Spencerian hand could be markedly faster and less ornate than the script one might use to copy out a poem or write a love letter. The variations ranged from “running hand” (smaller and with more widely spaced letters than standard Spencerian), which could be rapid indeed, though it is far from plain:

  Practice from a nineteenth-century copybook

  to the heavily shaded and embellished ornamental versions executed by professional penmen, who were greatly in demand both as teachers and as calligraphers for the creation of invitations, diplomas, calling cards, and legal documents:

  Script by the revered penman Francis B.Courtney (1867–1952), a graduate of the Spencerian Business College in Cleveland, Ohio (image credits 2.6)

  For half a century, from before the Civil War to the end of the Victorian era, the hegemony of Spencerian was a testament to an appreciation for beauty that lurked in the souls of Americans—an appreciation that was closely tied to upward striving: such an extravagant, impressive, high-class script, such an obvious love of the noble and the beautiful—these were surely the mark of a gentleman or a lady. Spencer taught that, by contemplating—and reproducing—the beauties of nature, the young penman would keep his mind out of the gutter (and himself off the juice) and become a refined person of high moral integrity.

  But it was mostly after Spencer’s death in 1864 that the empire really took off, turning out a nation of writers who were eager to learn the value of an elegant hand and didn’t shy away from the seriousness of the quest. As they learned to train the mind by disciplining the hand (and vice versa), Spencerian aspirants were made to break down the letters of the alphabet into seven “principles”:

  The 1st is a straight line, the 2nd is a right curve, the 3rd is a left curve, the 4th is an extended loop, the 5th is a direct oval, or capital O, the 6th is a reversed oval, the 7th is the capital stem. (image credits 2.7)

  From these few essential lines, curves, and loops, the letters can be constructed systematically and with proper proportions that have been carefully worked out. Written on lined paper, a capital E, for example, which utilizes principles 2, 3, and 5, is divided into three spaces: the top oval fills the highest space; the bottom oval fills the two lower ones, with a width of a space and a half; the width of the top oval is half that of the lower; the length of the first curve takes up three-quarters of a space; and the length of the smallest loop one-third.

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  The lower-case k requires four principles (1, 2, 3, and 4), and particular care must be taken to ensure that between its two loops the distance is half a space.

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  These constructions
were built using Spencer’s famous “whole-arm movement,” which—unlike the hand movements necessary for copperplate script—emphasized bringing the entire arm, from shoulder to fingers, into play when writing.

  From Theory of the Spencerian System of Practical Penmanship (image credits 2.10)

  As Spencer warned in one of his didactic poems:

  He who would be a writer, fine,

  Must take a deal of pains,

  Must criticize his every line,

  And mix his ink with brains.

  Spencer died, at sixty-three, upon his return from a trip to New York City to give a lecture on his methods at a business college. His last request was for his pen, and he died with it clutched in his hand. The pen might well have been one of the new metal ones, but on Spencer’s seven-foot-high tombstone (in Evergreen Cemetery in Geneva, Ohio, nine miles from Ashtabula) is carved his famous signature and under it a magnificent goose-quill pen, three feet long—the instrument with which he began his amazing career:

  Spencer’s tombstone (image credits 2.11)

  Spencer’s schools continued, run by his siblings, his sons and daughters, and various other relatives. There was some strife among the numerous descendants: his sons apparently tried to shut out his daughters and claim sole credit for the triumph of the Spencerian juggernaut. Sara, his oldest, became a dedicated writing teacher and a renowned penwoman in a world in which most penmen were just that: men. She never forgave the refusal of some of her sisters to do the same.