THE STORY OF

HANDWRITING
Origins and Development
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 $7-95

THE STORY OF

HANDWRITING
by

ALFRED FAIRBANK

In this clear and authoritative introduc¬

tion to a complicated but fascinating
subject, Alfred Fairbank traces the history
of writing from its beginning in Sumer,
Egypt, and China, to the present day. He
discusses the deciphering of ancient
scripts, the Phoenician invention of the
alphabet, the Latin, Carolingian, Medi¬
aeval, and Renaissance scripts, as well as
print-script, the italic hand of today, and
the revival of formal calligraphy to which
he himself has contributed so much.
Fairbank then considers the basic
principles involved in good handwriting
—legibility, different writing styles, mo¬
tions and shapes in writing, pattern, and
spacing—and the writer’s tools: pens, ink,
and paper, vellum, or papyrus.
The book is very fully illustrated with
plates and line drawings throughout, and
includes advice on the teaching of hand¬
writing, encouraging words for left-
handed writers, and a useful bibliography.

136 pages. x 64 color plates, 38

monochrome illustrations, and 21 line
drawings.

Watson-Guptill Publications
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2018

https://archive.org/details/storyofhandwritiOOfair
 THE STORY
OF
HANDWRITING
 by Alfred Fairbank
A HANDWRITING MANUAL

by Alfred Fairbank and Bertbold Wolpe

RENAISSANCE HANDWRITING
An Anthology of Italic Scripts
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A. Plutarch. Pyrrhus’s Last Fight in the Market-place of Argos. Fifteenth century.

British Museum (Add. MS. 22318).
 THE STORY
OF
HANDWRITING
Origins and Development

ALFRED
FAIRBANK
S0Ufh Hunterclon Re&onal High School Library

Watson-Guptill Publications
New York
 First published in lgyo
by Faber and Faber Limited
24 Russell Square, London, W.C.i
Published in lgyo
by Watson-Guptill Publications
63 West 46 Street, New York, N.Y. 10036
Library of Congress
Catalog Card Number: yy-84820
All rights reserved

© Copyright lgyo by Alfred Fairbank

For Richard, Anna and Ruth
 Acknowledgements

G rateful acknowledgements for permission to use copyright

material or for assistance is made as follows: to the Director
of the British Museum, the Keeper of Western Manuscripts,
Bodleian Library, the Deputy Keeper of the Public Record Office,
the Vice-prefect of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, the Con-
servateur du Departement des Antiquites Orientales, The Louvre,
the Director of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, the
Superintendent of Antichita Dell’ Etruria, Florence, the Director
of the Stifsbibliothek, St. Gall, the Montpellier Medical Library,
Montpellier, Professor I. J. Gelb and the University of Chicago
Press, the Mansell Collection, Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Mr. Philip
Hofer, Mrs. Chi Chou Watts, and Dr. Berthold L. Wolpe.
 Contents

Introduction page 17
The Beginnings of Writing 19
Sumerian Writing 25
Egyptian Writing 27
Chinese Calligraphy 29
The Deciphering of Ancient Scripts 31
The Alphabet 37
The Latin Scripts 41
The Carolingian and Mediaeval Scripts 45
The Scripts of the Italian Renaissance 47
Copperplate Writing 55
Print-script 59
The Italic Hand of Today 61
Formal Calligraphy Revived 67
Illuminated Manuscripts 71
Legibility 75
Differences in Writing Styles 77
Motions and Shapes in Writing 80
Pattern and Spacing 82
Pens 85
Ink 89
Paper, Vellum, and Papyrus 92
The Teaching of Handwriting 95
Left-handed Writers ioo
Some Books to Consult 102
Index 104

11
 Illustrations

Plates in Colour
A. Plutarch. Fifteenth century. British Museum frontispiece
B. The Benedictional of St. Ethelwold.
Tenth century. British Museum facing page 18
C. La Somme Le Roy. Illuminated by Honore.
Thirteenth century. British Museum 66
D. Book of Hours. Illuminated by the Master of
Mary of Burgandy. Fifteenth century. Bodleian
Library 71

Monochrome Plates
Plates 1-23 between pp. 32 and 33
1 &2. Archaicclay tablets of thejemdet Nasr type. About 2800 b.c.
3. Clay tablet from ’ Atshana with envelope. Fifteenth century B.c.
4. Senena stele showing hieroglyphs. About 2350 b.c.
5. Hieratic script and illustration from The Book of the Dead of Ani.
Eighteenth Dynasty
6. Demotic script from the proceedings of a Court of Justice.
170 B.C.
7. Chinese oracle bone. About 1100 b.c.
8. Chinese signs for sheep and ocean with the water radical
9. Phaistos Disc. About 1700 b.c.

T3
 ILLUSTRATIONS

10. Moabite Stone of Mesha, King of Moab. Mid ninth century b.c.
11. Etruscan abecedarium. About 700 b.c.
12. Athenian stoichedon inscription. 408/7 b.c.
13. Inscription on the Trajan Column, Rome. a.d. 114
14. Square capitals with palimpsest. Fourth century a.d.
15. Rustic capitals. Fourth or fifth century a.d.
16. Roman cursive writing on papyrus, a.d. 522
17. Uncials. Eighth century a.d.
18. Half-uncials. Sixth century a.d.
19. Insular scripts of The Lindisfarne Gospels. Before 698 and the
tenth century a.d.
20. Anglo-Saxon minuscules. Eighth century a.d.
21. Carolingian minuscules. Ninth century a.d.
22. Carolingian script of The Ramsey Psalter. Between a.d. 974
and 986
23. Late Carolingian script of N. Italy. Twelfth century a.d.

Plates 24-29 between pp. 48 and 49

24. Gothic textura script. About 1386

25. Humanistic (roman) script of Poggio Bracciolini. 1425
26. Humanistic cursive (italic) script of Niccolo Niccoli. ?I423
27. Roman script of Giacomo Curio. Before 1458
28. Roman script of Alexander Antonii Simonis. 1477
29. Italic script of Antonio Tophio

Plates 30-38 between pp. 96 and 9y

30. Italic script of an anonymous scribe at the Vatican Chancery.

About 1490
31. Part of a Papal brief written by Arrighi. 27th August, 1519
14
 ILLUSTRATIONS

32. Letter written by Elizabeth I when a princess to Thomas

Seymour. 1548
33. Letter written by the Earl of Essex when aged nine. 1575
34. The ‘Italique hande’ from A Booke Containing Divers Sortes of
Hands by Jean de Beauchesne. 1570
35. From The Writing Schoolmaster or the Anatomy of Faire Writing
by John Davies of Hereford. 1663
36. Specimen scripts written by John Bowack for the Earl of
Oxford. 31st December, 1712
37. Trial page written by William Morris. About 1875
38. A New Handwriting for Teachers by M. M. Bridges. 1898

Figures in text
1. Pictorial origin of some cuneiform signs page 24
2. The Narmer Palette. About 2900 B.c. 28
3. The Rosetta Stone. 196 b.c. 34
4. The signs of the Early Phoenician alphabet. Eleventh
century b.c. 36
5. The Praeneste Brooch. Seventh century b.c. 41
6a. Monogram of the Emperor Charlemagne 44
6b. The English secretary hand. Jean de Beauchesne. 1570 46
7. La Operina by Ludovico degli Arrighi. Rome, 1522 49
8. Arte de escriver by Francisco Lucas. Madrid, 1577 50
9. Portrait of Charles I by Joseph Goddard. ?i644 53
10. The Universal Penman. George Bickham. 1733-41 54
11. The Theory and Practice of Handwriting by J. Jackson.
1898 57
15
 ILLUSTRATIONS

12. Italic alphabets for infants page 58

13. Italic hand of Graily Hewitt. 1916 60
14-18. Examples from Beacon Writing Books 62-65
19. The ‘foundational’ hand written by Edward Johnston.
1919 68
20. Broad pen roman alphabets and numerals 69
21. Demonstration of the boustrophedon system 74
22. From Libellus valde doctus elegans, etc., Zurich, 1549 79
23. Wood engraving by Noel Rooke 84
24. The manufacture of Chinese ink 88
25. Teaching the alphabet 99
26. Pen in left hand 101

16
 Introduction

I nventions and discoveries were made in the remote past which

are still important. The creation and evolution of speech and
language are linked with the history of civilisation. How could
mankind have achieved what it has without them? But speech in
primitive conditions was limited to persons who were alive and
actually present on a particular occasion, for the listener had to be
within hearing. Today, speech by persons near and far is commonly
conveyed by various technical devices and processes and even the
voices of some who have died not long ago may be heard.
After the evolution of language another great stride forwards
to the social conditions we enjoy was brought about by the in¬
vention of writing, and particularly by that of the alphabet with a
limited number of signs sufficient, however, to represent the sounds
of the language.
Through language and speech it has been possible to share with
others our thoughts, ideas, and recollections, and to tell of happen¬
ings and situations, to narrate stories, and to keep records. By the
invention of writing we are able to know something of the life of
people even after the lapse of thousands of years. Writing is the
father of printing.
The story of writing begins with the use of tools, materials, and
methods now obsolete. Today we speak of handwriting, and also
of calligraphy, and we then imply the use of pen and ink.
By some, handwriting may be thought to be just a dreary
necessity we have to accept and to cope with. At its worst it fails to
be legible, has little or no value, and is a nuisance. Happily, at its
17
 INTRODUCTION

best it is a graphic craftsmanship, giving pleasure both to those who

write and those who read, and a challenge to our skill and taste.
Obviously, legibility is of prime importance. The high degree of
legibility we find in our printed books is due to standards of penman¬
ship in Italy at the time printing was invented.
What is valued in the correspondence of our friends is the
inevitable expression of personality. But the remarkable interest
shown in the revival of italic handwriting during the last few years,
both in this country and overseas, indicates that many persons have
tired of graceless scribble and wish to write better.

18
 yxplcri -uc
fi cbaiariium
di'

B. The Benedictional of St. Ethelwold. A Bishop pronouncing a blessing.

Between a.d. 963 and 984. British Museum (Add. MS. 54180).
 The Beginnings of Writing

T he invention of writing seemed to ancient people to be so

remarkable as to have a magical nature and to have been the
gift of gods or the invention of their heroes. The gods Thoth and
Isis were believed by the early Egyptians to have given them know¬
ledge of writing, whilst other peoples claimed their own gods: the
Babylonians, Nebo; the Greeks, Hermes; the Hindus, Brahma,
etc. In England, an eighteenth-century writing-master, Joseph
Champion, gave the credit either to God or to Adam. However, in
The Origin and Progress of Letters published in 1773, the author,
W. Massey, commented that he ‘saw no necessity to suppose that
our first parents should be capable of writing as soon as speaking;
. . . for of what use could that have been at the first, when none but
Adam and Eve, or a very few others were in the world?’. The
father of Chinese writing, Ts’ang Chieh, was thought to be so
perceptive that he had been endowed with an extra pair of eyes.
Today we know by scholars’ researches and discoveries that
primitive man, living in caves 20,000 years or more before Christ,
made paintings and carvings. Also that the beginnings of writing
are in simple pictures. The prehistoric paintings of bulls, bison,
horses and other animals of the Last Ice Age, on the walls of the
caves of Altamira in Spain and Lascaux in France are impressive and
powerful works of art we can admire and enjoy. Some of these
paintings are thought to have served a purpose, aiding in the
pursuit of beasts or as part of fertility rites, and were not made only
to satisfy artistic urges and energy. Man’s ability to depict was
developed into two directions: towards art and thus to producing
,J9
 THE BEGINNINGS OF WRITING

the superb sculptures of Greece and the paintings of the Italian

Renaissance, but also by simple pictures and many stages to
calligraphy.
We can and do communicate without the help of language or
speech. There are, for example, the gestures, when no word needs
to be spoken to convey meaning yet what we wish to express can
also be conveyed by words: the agreeing nod, the welcoming
smile, the shrug which tells of doubt. Communication can be by
a simple picture or graphic sign irrespective of words. Two con¬
ventional and simplified signs commonly in use today are of an
arrow-head or of a hand with a finger pointing which indicate a
direction to be followed. That an arrow or a hand is represented
does not mean we have to think of the words arrow or hand.
When trading began it was necessary to establish ownership. In
Sumer, labels of clay were attached to objects as property marks and
the marks were made by stamping clay with a seal. The later
cylinder seal was rolled to make a rectangular design or a repeating
pattern, and takes a place in the history of glyptic art. The mark
of the seal was for personal indentity and represented a name and
not a word to be associated with other words and to communicate
(Plate 3). For this reason seals have not been held to be the actual
beginning of writing. Today there is still the use of related signs of
ownership and personal association such as the brand, the heraldic
device, and the trade mark.
Some of the terms applicable to features found in the ancient
writings may, as a convenience, be listed at this stage:
pictograms. Simplified and conventionalized pictures of
familiar objects, animals, etc., used as signs to represent what is
depicted (picture-writing, pictography).
ideograms. Word signs. An important development of picture¬
writing allowing the representation of ideas, actions, and associa¬
tions. (The motorist is instructed by many ideograms as road-signs.)
20
 THE BEGINNINGS OF WRITING

phonetic writing. Each sign (phonogram) stands for a sound

of the language. This principle leads on ultimately to the alphabet.
phonemes. The constituent sounds of a language: vowels, con¬
sonants, diphthongs.
determinatives. Signs added to basic signs which help to fix
meanings and remove ambiguities, but which are not pronounced.
There are, however, also phonetic complements, a form of
determinative where the addition is to be pronounced.
transitional scripts. Scripts partly ideographic but partly
phonetic.
linear writing. Signs that have been developed from pictures
but curves have changed to lines and are no longer pictorial. The
Sumerian signs in Figure i are relevant. Some signs are simple geo¬
metric forms.
syllabaries. These relate to writing of words of one or more
syllables where signs represent syllables and not letters of an
alphabet.
cursive writing. Signs and styles of writing changed in form by
everyday use and quickly executed construction.
acrophonic principle. That signs derived their sound-values
from the pronunciation of the initial of the word sign.
Picture-writing was used to help memory or to identify posses¬
sions or to make records of transactions, but its link with language
was the key to civilisation. The pictograms were formalized so that
they were recognized by persons other than the one making them.
Moreover, they were changed in form by the materials and methods
used, as well as by the cursive principle. Such drawings have been
called shorthand-pictures, from being reductions to the merest
indication of the things drawn. The picture of the head of an ox
would serve just as well as a drawing of a whole ox, and be so simple
that it could be drawn quickly and with little skill.
In simple pictography a circle might represent the word ‘sun’,
, 21
 THE BEGINNINGS OF WRITING

but as an ideogram it might stand for ‘bright’, or ‘light’, or ‘day’ or

‘time’. The ideographic system requires many signs: e.g. Chinese
writing is ideographic and the literate Chinese need to be able to
read and write thousands of different signs.
In the device we know as the rebus, pictures are used to represent
words or syllables. A picture of an inn and a spire could be read as
‘inspire’, or a picture of a saw and the sea could read ‘saucy’. It is even
possible today to make sentences by the rebus principle: e.g. a
sentence could be read from pictures of an eye, a can, a knot, a bee,
a tray, a hymn (I cannot betray him).
A full system of writing was not achieved until the visual signs
represented the sounds of the language, thus linking speech and
writing. As these sounds are limited in number (in English there are
forty-five vowels, consonants, and diphthongs) the economy is
obvious.
Our word ‘sun’ has the same sound as ‘son’, and so in writing
a distinction is made by the change of vowel. In some English
words we have to distinguish the meaning by the context: e.g.
‘fair’. Such words are homonyms. In ancient systems a clarifying
device was used, namely the determinative, which could precede or
follow the phonetic sign but was not pronounced. In Chinese the
determinative, known as a radical, is embodied in the sign. There
are 214 radicals used in teaching Chinese writing today. The
Chinese language is basically monosyllabic and there are many
words in it similar to others which have a different meaning. An
example given by Professor W. Simon in How to Study and Write
Chinese Characters is that the sound of the word for sheep is yang
and is also the sound for ocean. So as to make the meaning of the
character clear that ocean is intended and not sheep, a ‘water radical’
is incorporated in the phonetic symbol for yang (Plate 8).
The stages of development of writing did not run in a straight
line of descent from pictures to alphabet, with each stage surplanting
22
 THE BEGINNINGS OF WRITING

the earlier stage. There were mixed features in the transition, and,
indeed, the Egyptians did not devise an alphabet though they
reached a stage where letters (elements of an alphabet) were used.
The story is complicated, conjectural, and confusing, and only
clear in parts where knowledge has come by archaeological and
lingual researches and the yield of remains. The outline and simple
account in this book traces the handwriting of today, and particu¬
larly the italic hand, from beginnings in Sumer and Egypt, to the
Phoenician invention of the alphabet and the writing of Greeks and
Romans, and down to the Christian Era. The full story of what is now
known is so extensive that it is not possible in this book to cover
such systems as the Hittite hieroglyphs, the Indus Valley script, the
Cretan hieroglyphs, Aztec writing, etc., though a glance aside at
Chinese calligraphy seems appropriate and permissible because of
its quality as an art.

,23
BIRD
V “I V *4<T

FISH x>

DONKEY
& 'IP*- —

OX
=J>
SUN o
$ ❖
GRAIN i 4^
f
Fig. i. Pictorial origin of some cuneiform signs. (From A
Study of Writing by I. J. Gelb)
 Sumerian Writing

S umerian was the first language to be written and it is largely

monosyllabic. The writing began as simple pictures and some
can be traced to about 3100 b.c. How far back from this date
picture-writing began is not yet clear for the earliest writing may
have been scratched on wood and have decayed. Ideograms, phono¬
grams, determinatives, and phonetic complements were used and
indeed the Sumerians had established a full system of writing by
about the middle of the third millennium B.c. Later in that millen¬
nium about a thousand symbols were in use in Uruk (the Biblical
Erech, now named Warka), but this number may originally have
been greater and in time reduced considerably. Each sign represented
a word.
Sumer, the Land of Shiner in the Bible, may well be called the
cradle of civilisation. It was but a small part of Southern Mesopo¬
tamia, lying at the head of the Persian Gulf, between the Rivers
Euphrates and Tigris and within what is now Iraq. The highly
original and gifted non-Semitic people of Sumer are appreciated
today for their literature, myths, knowledge of mathematics, their
curious ziggurat architecture, and much else. They may have come
down from the Iranian mountains to form in time their city-
states, one of which, Ur, is famous for its works of art. For 1500
years the Sumerians were influential in the Near East.
Much of the land of Sumer had been marsh and swamp and was
irrigated. It was abundant in alluvial silt, deposited by floods and
rivers on sedimentary rocks. The mud was excellent for cultivation,
but also it was used as a writing material.
'25
 SUMERIAN WRITING

The surface of a formed lump of clay, shaped like a cushion

and held in the hand, could be scratched to make signs. A better
practice was adopted later which avoided the fragile edges thrown
up by the scoring. This was done by pressing down the end of a
triangular reed or other stylus so that it produced wedge-shaped
strokes. This writing, changing from curved to linear forms, is
called cuneiform, from the Latin word cuneus, meaning wedge.
When baked, or dried in the hot sunshine, these tablets of clay were
durable, and very many thousands have been discovered in good
condition and can be read by scholars. Among the surviving
Sumerian tablets are simple exercises in writing; but the earliest
examples are lists of objects and relate to the economic activities of
the priests of the Sumerian temples. Some of the characters were
borrowed from the designs of seals.
An invention so convenient to commerce would impress neigh¬
bouring peoples when trading. The non-Semitic Elamites, and the
Semitic Accadians (Babylonians and Assyrians), and later the
Hittites and Persians, followed the Sumerians by writing in a
cuneiform style. Fine examples of Mesopotamian inscriptions cut in
stone exist which were carved by Babylonian and Assyrian Royal
scribes.
Plates i and 2 are of early pictographic tablets of the Jemdet
Nasr period of about 2800 B.c. Such early texts have not been fully
deciphered but these are thought to be accounts of some kind. The
tablet shown in Plate 3 is from ’Atshana (N. Syria) and is of the
fifteenth century b.c. It concerns the settlement of a legal dispute
between Abban and his sister Bittati over the division of property
inherited from Ammurabi. The ‘envelope’ has the same text as the
tablet and bears seal-impressions of the witnesses to the settlement.
Figure 1 illustrates the transition of signs from pictograph to
cuneiform.

26
 Egyptian Writing

I n ancient Egypt there were three scripts in use: hieroglyphic,

hieratic, and demotic. The hieroglyphic style was used principally
for sacred inscriptions on buildings and monuments. For a period of
3000 years down to Roman times the signs were carved in stone or
painted with artistic discipline and little change in form. The
characters include formalized pictures of men, animals, birds,
household articles, tools, etc. and we can recognize them as such.
They are the means of representing ideograms, phonograms, and
determinatives, as word-signs or syllable signs. The characters did
not include vowels. Some signs stood for consonants only and not
for words or syllables (as seen in the cartouches of the Rosetta
Stone) and were the elements of a possible alphabet that was not
achieved.
Hieratic, deriving from the hieroglyphic, is explained by two
circumstances. Papyrus was made from the pith of reeds and could
be written on by brush and reed pen. Another economy was from
the cursive principle. A more rapid style, the demotic, evolved
from hieratic, and fluency caused a marked departure from the
pictorial quality of hieroglyphs and even to the linking of signs. The
hieratic system, used by priests, was in existence in the First Dynasty,
but the demotic, the script of everyday affairs, has not been traced as
existing earlier than the seventh century b.c.
Examples of the very beginnings of Egyptian writing have not
yet been discovered but an early and important discovery was that
of the Narmer ceremonial palette found in the temple of Hierakon-
polis in Upper Egypt in 1898. This slate palette was carved on both
11
 EGYPTIAN WRITING

sides about 2900 b.c., one side of which is shown in Figure 2. The
king, wearing the crown of Upper Egypt and holding a mace, is
striking an enemy. Here we have communication and recording
by pictures but also, at top centre of the palette, a transitional semi-
phonetic writing that could be read as ‘Narmer’.
Hieratic writing changed from vertical columns to horizontal
strips and was then directed from right to left.

Fig. 2
The Narmer Palette.
First Dynasty,
about 2900 B.c.
The top central
rectangle has signs
which could be
read as ‘Narmer’.
Cairo Museum.
(From A Study oj
Writing by
I. J. Gelb)
 Chinese Calligraphy

T he writing of China began with pictures which in time evolved

into symbols that had lost their pictorial character, just as in
Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian demotic. The earliest
known inscriptions had already passed the stage of pictographs and
were made in the Shang-Yin Dynasty by astrologers for the purposes
of divination (Plate 7). The inscriptions were scratched on bones and
tortoise shells, and a Chinese scholar, Professor Ch’en Chih-Mai,
has stated that 100,000 oracle bones have been excavated and on
them over 2000 characters have been noted and 1,300 interpreted.
The inscriptions on the oracle bones relate to many subjects:
ancestor worship, war, expeditions, weather, birth, death, etc.
Their date is about 1,100 B.c.
Bronze vessels of singular quality of design and workmanship,
bearing valued inscriptions, were produced in the Chou Dynasty,
which succeeded the Shang Dynasty in 1,027 b.c.
By the beginning of the Christian Era a highly developed script
had been formed which has hardly changed. A person who could
read Chinese would be able to read an inscription of the Former
Han Dynasty of the second century a.d. There are several contem¬
porary styles. Among Chinese calligraphers of the past are
Emperors, Court and Government officials, for calligraphy has been
highly esteemed.
The Chinese language is mainly monosyllabic and each character
represents a whole word, whereas we use a number of signs (letters)
to make words.
In China calligraphy has a great status as an art and some have
29
 CHINESE CALLIGRAPHY

regarded painting as but a branch of calligraphy. Mr. Hugh

Gordon Porteus commented some years ago: ‘When a Chinese
calligrapher “copies” the work of an old master it is not a forged
facsimile but an interpretation as personal within stylistic limits as a
Samuel or Landowska performance of a Bach partita’. The copying
of old writing is how calligraphers learn. The characters are abstract
patterns, devised in the mind and written within the boundaries of
the square. These units are placed and spaced in vertical columns
starting from top right, the columns moving leftwards. The writing
with its curves and angles is seen to have fluency, harmony, strength,
balance, and a sophisticated and individual beauty. Chinese calli¬
graphy is brushmanship and inkmanship and it has been said that
the ink supports the brush and the brush supports the ink, which is a
way of saying that they play their parts together. The brush has
long hairs tapering to a sharp point. It is made so as to respond to
sensitive pressures. Rabbit hair is popular for small writing and
sheep hair for bold characters, but brushes are known to have been
made of the hair of gorillas, tigers, wolves, and even of the whiskers
of mice. The brush is held vertically but not necessarily so when
painting pictures. Ink, dried into sticks or blocks, was also produced
with care. The Emperor Chien Lung (a.d. 1736-93) would present
ink-blocks to courtiers, moulded into exquisite but curious shapes
quite unsuitable for the process of rubbing down the ink on a stone
palette, but which would be valued as a gift of fine ink.
The calligraphic tradition in China is now under some strain, for
it is reported that the Chinese are manufacturing fountain-pens on
a mass-production scale. One wonders whether attempts at
romanizing Chinese writing will ever be successful.

30
 The Deciphering of Ancient Scripts

T hat difficulty should be experienced in deciphering ancient

scripts is not surprising, for the language may be unknown, or
the texts recovered may be insufficient, or the clues are few. Indeed,
there are systems of writing which still cannot be elucidated or only
partly deciphered. Among the many scholars who have sought to
solve the enigmas there are three in particular who had outstanding
successes: J. F. Champollion, H. C. Rawlinson, and M. Ventris.
In July 1799 a French officer of Engineers named Bouchard,
serving in Napoleon’s army, found a slab of black basalt in the fort
of Saint Julien near Rosetta in the Nile Delta. The Rosetta Stone,
broken in antiquity, has inscriptions in three texts and two languages:
14 lines of Egyptian hieroglyphs, 32 lines of demotic script, and 54
lines of Greek uncials (Figure 3). The obelisk was removed to Cairo
where Napoleon had copies made for issue to European scholars. In
1802 the stone came to England under a Treaty of Capitulation,
was deposited in the rooms of the Society of Antiquaries, and plaster
casts were distributed. The stone was exhibited in the British
Museum in the same year and is there still.
The texts are of a decree passed in the year 196 b.c. by the
General Council of Egyptian Priests in honour of Ptolemy V,
Epiphanes. The decree enumerates the benefits conferred by the
King upon Egypt (gifts, remission or reduction of taxes, release of
prisoners, rebuilding of sacred buildings, etc.) and records measures
decided upon to do the King honour by statues, festivals, etc.
31
 THE DECIPHERING OF ANCIENT SCRIPTS

What can be faintly observed in Figure 3 are signs within ovals

(cartouches). Thomas Young, a scientist of wide interests, had
demonstrated that cartouches contained royal names and had
deciphered the names of Cleopatra and Berenice inscribed in
phonetic characters in another obelisk. However, the credit for the
decipherment of hieroglyphs is accorded to a French scholar, Jean
Francois Champollion (1790-1832), who identified the name of
Ptolemy in the cartouches of the Rosetta Stone. By this key and his
knowledge of Coptic, the last stage of the Egyptian language, he
succeeded in translating the hieroglyphs of the memorial by 1821
and in making a dictionary.
As with hieroglyphs, the cuneiform scripts engaged the attention
of a number of scholars before they could be read with ease. A Ger¬
man schoolmaster, George Friedrich Grotefend, had discovered a
dozen sign meanings by 1815, but the true ‘father’ of cuneiform de¬
cipherment was Major (later Major General Sir) Henry Creswicke
Rawlinson (1810-1895). While serving in Persia he studied three in¬
scriptions on the Rock of Behistun, which record the achievements
of Darius the Great (521-486 b.c.), and he published a translation in
1846. The texts of the inscriptions were in the languages of Old
Persian, Elamite, and Accadian, and were written in different
cuneiform systems. The story of his endeavours is one of deter¬
mined persistence and also of athletic stamina and courage, for the
inscriptions, cut in the rock face and associated with sculptures,
were 300 feet above ground level. He copied the Persian text whilst
in a perilous position on the topmost rung of a ladder. The ladder
was standing on a narrow ledge of rock, not more than two feet
wide, with a chasm below.
A great achievement, as recent as 1952, was that Michael Ventris
(1922-56), an architect, in collaboration with Mr. John Chadwick
and others, succeeded in deciphering clay tablets found in Mycenaean
sites in Greece and Crete, inscribed with Linear B script, and in
32
 I & 2. Archaic tablets of the type found at Jemdct Nasr. About 2800 b.c. British
Museum.

3. Tablet from ’Atshana with envelope. Fifteenth century b.c. The settlement of a
legal dispute. The envelope bears seals of witnesses. British Museum.
u

4. Limestone memorial with hieroglyphs from tomb of Senena, a ‘Sole Companion

and Chancellor’ of Pepy II. About 2350 b.c. British Museum.
5- Hieratic script with an illustration from The Book of the Dead ofAni. Eighteenth
Dynasty. British Museum.

6. Demotic script. Proceedings of a Court of Justice. 23rd June 170 b.c. British
Museum.
y. Chinese oracle bone. About noo b.c. British Museum.

(a) (b) (<=)

8. Water radical (a), sign for the word sheep (b), and sign for ocean (c) with water
radical included. Written for this book by Mrs. Chi Chou Watts.
10. Moabite Stone of Mesha, King of Moab. Mid ninth century b.c. The
Louvre.
ii. Etruscan alphabet written from right to left. Marsiliana abecedarium. About
700 b.c. Archaeological Museum, Florence.

4HAOH
#! EHo
P 04 E I <T o H I
3A! AHE>! I A©
AYjA! 1 A I AH
QH
A f

12. Part of an Athenian stoichedon inscription. 408/7 b.c.

13- Inscription at the base of the Trajan Column, Rome. a.d. 114.

ffruemn

IfflfRQ^ASC^RXMCl YA1 FNF.NAK

VOl CANIMARTISQ:DOLOSETDVLCJ
,UX\V ECHAODENS0SDI VVAUWVM1
I'ARAl IN F.QV OCAPTA F. DV At FVS! M
PEVOLWNT 1TE RV At At ATE RNAS i
tVrrvSARISTAEl VITREISOiSEDJ t.l,
OFSTirVF.RESEDAMTF.ALl ASARE f i
PROS PI Cl E MSS VAtAt A Fl AVVAt£A/
ElTROCVlOGEAt 1TVNON ElWSTRA
CYRENESOR.ORI PS F.TtRlTVAAtAX
FRISTIS ARISTAE VSrENFIGF.N I TOR
14. Square capitals, with palimpsest. Virgil. Fourth century a.d. Library of St. Gall.
 COM i Ci 5 AT CM 501 or AO a A

15. Rustic capitals. Virgil. Fourth or fifth century a.d. Vatican Library.

, -iif r

'frlA-VsCv}

JT>
16. Roman cursive writing, on papyrus. Deed of sale, Ravenna, a.d. 522. British
Museum (Addl. MS. 5412).
pbxnesxuTecnce uo ROxcnxu reco
NuiTesnocn NCUTXBJTvCr)
csuocr>\aTecn qe xm v\a i ecnceNorrxsx
J

nottvr\cr> xsxxuTecn cexiuiT

J
XRxcnxu TccoceNuiT lOSXpbXT
xcniNxox© JO sxpt-vxrxu Teen
xcniNxDVBxaTeor) qeNuiTiOR\<D
CeNUITNXXSSON jonxcnxtiTecnccNaiJ
xi xxft son xa Tecr> 9e ozixan
' * t’&isHgk

'NU7TSXLcr>ON 02 i xs xoTomceNci j r

7. Uncials. Gospels. Eighth century a.d. British Museum (Addl. MS. 5463).

c^ciodit>icx^pr^eacxj^ cuiv ot.lepc^cxgriNicoJ

C|ocioCiXi>i coca amd iuihi CO ij^xocorr* tfverc
CDU N OCcLol i 1 fu O CO fCaCOJ ll>tOC DU tx-
JO6lacaiC|uodj^ctOio(0pbpctcrviO
* Xctt 0^ccode«) Ltrvocjcictcfcio

cpbeic5locojropexemfoo[opceoidtoGnefi
aliCutfcor^o ttnH [ctM l) Cciim tcoiBuivcLCat
C|aodcipudlciciNorNou&Ndicilcxpp6uiXh
cadi hcXCOOr>ilcieCXiclr r-4 opr^o b t Cetsdfficjcii
oat a ext fis*ctmetvut^» feivticsuM oq cir*»<*^tf

8. Half-uncials. Eugippio. Sixth century a.d. Vatican Library (Vat. lat. 3375).
muto enim uemeutrr
♦viinvim

luuomniGTneo diceons
ie tum cr»y*
Cro sum vps ecmutros
^Viiu yuvCuy

s**" ti^5’'5'
cxuonxini eumn efbs 0*r\0
zo
IT y
pnorficeCfcopmiones
Fayi* Zi\wu

pRoelioTuun
s*y**r?* «*■?*'?*' s^ir*^*^^
uroetcuCtiiTi^einiui ie,
^rWiy V p*rA *rr
Insular half-uncials written by Eadfrith before a.d. 698. The
Lindisfarne Gospels. The Anglo-Saxon translation written between
the lines was by the priest Aldred in the tenth century. British
Museum (Cotton MS. Nero D.IV).

^tcc^^tdrps^cficlin? fin^wnr)

.ymdiebn pimp /«jui hcycpjy

«px abippo ceWe-.jnpvo timcict c»nt
jfaclnwy attz^wtiyjmiico 71^10
- cm tfv yw&ilfoosH) Ipx irunpo
► fuunfcitj euv>3
-^\ydjn&\- ayvf&fcfy

20. Anglo-Saxon minuscules from Bede’s Historia

Ecclesiastica Anglorum. Eighth century a.d. British
Museum (Cotton MS. Tib. C.II).
 >/ »V* • v> > • . w».«,

uc^ioxcvt 67ccoLatrroe/cci iicem Cxmcliurn

■u
AurCm ^-Ctrrxierrr^Y^

1*^
cjaiccmunjaz&rcjuoJJefbr^rtfi calia f*

c^cr ^yxt^JbO^f* 1 mxifJLcrrerript^rii fctrrrr

f^Lj^inJL C^zr trim tin JrnJL pfxain (xes^fTcxe^

pr~iuC cji
ida.pr^ur'cjuoc/imxxr
ce^ rryunciJL: ^fzrcJilicif^

21. Caroline minuscules. Ninth century. British Museum.

B cn aji^U dm dno.fcodi dno •...

B ch atjiLie omf<quit flip cdof
tunc dno:f> ornfairuievfdmdno
B en fblcvturu dno / C

bmedicnr ftdlae cdi dno

r _ .
22. From The Ramsey Psalter, written between a.d. 974 and 986. British
Museum (Harley MS. 2904).

p oreu . ud etb cm *ueLtoc

Ab
di b ttu tup uoUmtif-S <
ultra emu quy funt -et c /

Ufvnnme tbeolojjie per

23. From an Italian MS. of Homilies, etc. Twelfth
century. British Museum (Harley MS. 7183).
 THE DECIPHERING OF ANCIENT SCRIPTS

doing so revealed that the language was an archaic form of Greek.

Sir Arthur Evans had discovered at Knossos in Crete, at the begin¬
ning of the century, two cursive scripts which he differentiated as
Linear A and Linear B. The language and the scripts were not known.
Unlike Champollion, Ventris and his friends did not have the same
text written in two languages for comparison. The problem of un¬
ravelling was most complicated, as we learn from John Chadwick’s
The Decipherment of Linear B.
The three decipherers referred to above showed at an early age a
prophetic interest in the subjects of their successes. Champollion
is reported as having said at the age of eleven that he was determined
to decipher hieroglyphs some day. Rawlinson at the age of seven¬
teen began to take an interest in Persian affairs. John Chadwick
records that Ventris at the age of seven had bought a book on Egyp¬
tian hieroglyphs. When Ventris was fourteen he heard a lecture by
Sir Arthur Evans on Crete and he began ‘then and there to take up
the challenge of the undeciphered Cretan writing’.
Among the scripts not yet deciphered is that of the fascinating
and unique Phaistos Disc, found in 1908 by an Italian scholar, L.
Permer, and dated to about 1700 B.c. This terracotta disc is about
6-Jin. in diameter and bears 31 groups of characters on one side
(Plate 9) and 30 on the reverse side. The signs were made by press¬
ing into clay punches of wood or metal, of which 45 different signs
were used. (One may think of how a seal is pressed into sealing
wax.) It is assumed that the writing is syllabic and that the spiral
began from the rim.
The Etruscan alphabet is known, and is shown in Plate 11, but
the language has not been deciphered.
Other ancient scripts have not yet yielded their secrets and these
include the Cypro-Minoan scripts written in the Bronze Age in
Cyprus, the Cretan Linear A, and the Indus Valley script of
Northern India.
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Fig. 3. The Rosetta Stone. An Egyptian decree in hieroglyphs, demotic characters, and
Greek uncials. 196 b.c. British Museum
 THE DECIPHERING OF ANCIENT SCRIPTS

In 1947 shepherds found seven sheepskin scrolls in a cave near

Qumran in the Judean Desert which came to be known as the Dead
Sea Scrolls. Since then a large number of scrolls, documents and
fragments, have been discovered in other caves, and these, because
of their biblical and religious importance, have created great
interest. The scripts, however, are known and are Hebrew and
Aramaic, but the work of treatment, so that the scripts can be read,
translated, and preserved, has been considerable. The Qumran
documents are of the third century b.c. to a.d. 68.

35
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Fig. 4. Signs of the Early Phoenician alphabet from the Ahiram Sarcophogus
and graffito. Byblos. Eleventh century b.c. Museum of Antiquities,
Beirut. (From A Study of Writing by I. J. Gelb)
 The Alphabet

An alphabet is a collection of letters, each one indicating one of

JTjLthe sounds used in speech. So, in a sense, writing speaks in the
mind. If we write a long word like incomprehensibleness we use many
letters to represent many sounds: not musical sounds making a
melody, yet sounds that may be heard or imagined. The sounds
follow one after the other like the letters. A language requires an
adequate collection of various signs for its spoken sounds. English
spelling-reformers say that we need 40 or more phonetic symbols
in our alphabet, instead of the 26 we have. Sometimes a simple
sound is indicated by two letters, such as ch, sh, th, 00 (digraphs).
We could spare the letters Qq, Kk, and Xx. Robert Bridges held
that the diphthongal sound in the words eye and right has all man¬
ner of forms in our present spelling and he gave as examples indict¬
ment, tie, eider, fly, dye, style, tile, sign, sigh, height, buy, ay, aisle,
eying, eye. Our a has to serve for four sounds (day, all, and, father)
and g for two distinct consonants. The situation is complicated also
by local or national ways of pronouncing vowels, and because
sounds have varying musical pitch as syllables are accented. We do
not drone on one note.
Was there an individual who invented the first alphabet? Is it
possible that some genius, living far back in antiquity, whose name
we shall never know, had the idea of making symbols represent
simple spoken sounds and thus of words? The circumstances of the
origin of the alphabet are still not known.
At Ugarit, now Ras Shamrah, on the Syrian coast, a large num¬
ber of clay tablets have been found inscribed in a cuneiform writing
37
 THE ALPHABET

style unlike any other known cuneiform writing. Among them a

tablet discovered in 1949 is the oldest known example of a complete
alphabet. This has 30 letters and was probably written in the four¬
teenth century b.c. Dr. David Diringer in his book The Alphabet
suggests that this alphabet was invented by a person who knew an
earlier North Semitic alphabet and was accustomed to the use of
clay and stylus, or perhaps it was invented by the priests of Ugarit
because they regarded cuneiform as correct for religious usage.
A trustworthy starting-point for the history of the ancestral Phoeni¬
cian alphabet was, in particular, the inscription on the sarcophagus
of King Ahiram of Byblos, which may have been incised in the
eleventh century b.c. and which has 22 signs (Fig. 4). However, Dr.
Diringer suggests that a primitive Semitic alphabet probably ori¬
ginated in the period 1730-1580 b.c. and that in Byblos one or
more attempts to introduce alphabetic writing were made in the
Early Second Millennium b.c. There are many descendants of the
Byblos alphabet including Arabic, Hebrew, and the Phoenician
from which branch our alphabet descends.
In the Bible (2 Kings iii, 4-27) there is an account of how the
Israelites put down a revolt by the Moabites. Mesha, King of Moab,
gave a contrary description of the rebellion and this is preserved by
the Moabite Stone in the Louvre, Paris. This inscription has 22
characters and is thought to have been made in the middle of the
ninth century b.c. (Plate 10).
The view is now generally held that the Phoenician alphabet
was influenced by Egyptian writing. In turn, the Phoenician alpha¬
bet influenced the writing of Greece and Rome. The Phoenicians
were great sea-traders and did business about the Mediterranean
and travelled as far west as Cornwall, where they obtained tin.
Their alphabet may have been adopted in Greece about 1000 b.c.
The Phoenician alphabet of 22 letters lacked vowels and it has been
argued that for this reason it is not a complete alphabet. The Greeks
38
 THE ALPHABET

added vowels to the consonants and thus brought the alphabet to

a further stage of development. The first two signs of the Phoeni¬
cian alphabet are named aleph and beth. The Greek names for letters
derive from the Phoenician names and the Greeks called the first
two letters of their alphabet alpha and beta, and from these names,
which have no other meaning in Greek, we have the word alphabet.
The Phoenician sign aleph is a glottal stop and not a consonant. As it
was not required by the Greeks for its phonetic value it was made to
serve as a vowel.
There were differences in alphabets as between Eastern and
Western Greece. In 403 b.c., the Ionic form of the Eastern Greek
alphabet was adopted in Athens and became the classical Greek
alphabet of 24 letters. The Greek alphabet came to Italy among
various places and there a Western Greek alphabet was used by the
Etruscans.
The first civilization that flourished in Italy was that of the
Etruscans, a mysterious people of unknown origin who were the
predecessors of the Romans. The Etruscans may have received the
Greek alphabet at the Greek colony, Cumae, near Naples. An
interesting find at Marsiliana d’Alberga of an early abecedarium,
dating from the seventh century b.c., is shown in Plate xi. This
tablet was doubtless intended to be a pupil’s model to copy, and
shows the entire Etruscan alphabet of 26 letters written from right
to left, which may be compared with the Moabite signs.
There was a time when early Greeks and Romans were alterna¬
ting the direction of writing from line to line and reversing the
letters as well as the direction so that E in one line became 3 in the
next. This system of writing, which had ceased by the fifth century
b.c., is called boustrophedon, a Greek word meaning ‘ox turning’.
The ox when ploughing is turned when it has crossed the field. This
style, of course, doubled the shapes of many of the letters of their
alphabets. Figure 21 taken from a Victorian booklet demonstrates
' 39
 THE ALPHABET

the inconvenience of the style. This directional system would be

just ‘too much’ to include in the Athenian stoichedon style of the
fifth century b.c., where letters are seen in Plate 12 to be aligned
vertically as well as horizontally from left to right.
Alphabets today may be different in appearance yet indicate the
same set of sounds. Capitals are mostly different from the small
letters (minuscules, or as the printers call them, lower case letters).
There are other differences clearly to be seen in the following alpha¬
bets used in printing:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
ab cdefghij kl mnop qr s tuv wxy z

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRS TUV WXYZ

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

abcbefgfjiifelmnopqrgtubtDxp^

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

40
 The Latin Scripts

A n invention as valuable as that of the alphabet was bound to

.spread as did cuneiform writing, and so it passed on from the
Greeks, via the Etruscans, to the Romans. Some of the letters used by
the Etruscans were discarded and at the time of the Roman Republic
the alphabet had 21 letters, A to X, but later the Romans added
Y and Z. We have inherited this alphabet of 23 letters but it was
extended to 26 to include J, U, and W. These three additions were
made in the Middle Ages and grew from the letters I and V.
The oldest known Roman inscription was probably made in the
7th century B.c. and is on the Praeneste gold brooch, where the
letters run from right to left. The inscription is, when transcribed:
manios: med: fhefhaked: nvmasioi, which translated is:
‘Manius made me for Numerius’. Certain letters of this inscription
indicate that the Latin alphabet came from Etruscan script (Figure 5).
Because inscriptions appeal to the eye, it follows that in the

Fig. 5. The Praeneste gold brooch, made by Manius for Numerius. Seventh
century B.c. Museo Pigorini, Rome
 THE LATIN SCRIPTS

course of hundreds of years of use both the Greek and the Roman
alphabet developed in design and grace. Eventually the Roman
letters reached a standard of form that still gains the highest ad¬
miration of letterers, calligraphers, and printers. The favourite
example of classic Roman capitals, cut in a.d. 114 with exquisite
skill and craftsmanship in a hard stone, is seen in the inscription near
the base of the Trajan Column in Rome (Plate 13). There is hardly a
good contemporary book on lettering which does not have an
illustration of this superb inscription. The form of every letter is
familiar to us, for not only has the hardness of stone preserved the
shapes of letters from decay but the invention of printing and the
use of printing-types based upon Roman capitals have kept them
from obsolescence.
The forms of the Roman capitals reflect the use of the tool that
cut them, the chisel, but the incidence of thicks, thins, and the
gradations of curved strokes relate to those a broad brush or pen
would make.
A palaeographer is a historian of ancient scripts. Palaeographers
refer to majuscules and minuscules. Capitals are majuscules and seem
bounded by two imaginary horizontal lines. Minuscules developed
from majuscules but are written as if between four lines because of
their extended parts, which ascend or descend: i.e. the ascenders
and descenders. The oldest Latin majuscule writing as found in
early manuscripts is in rustic capitals and square capitals (Plates 14
and 15). The tendency to write with speed and consequently to
simplify when writing informally, produced cursive script. Such
cursive writing has been found in papyrus documents, scratched on
stucco walls, and on wax tablets, etc. (Plate 16).
Very little remains that was written in square capitals, which are
near in shapes to the carved capitals, and this script may have been
reserved for the finest manuscripts. Rustic capitals are narrower
letters written more freely and having thin down strokes and heavy
42
 THE LATIN SCRIPTS

bases. This script was the usual book-hand of the Roman Empire,
and dates from the first to the sixth centuries a.d.
Two other literary hands of the Roman Empire are uncials and
half-uncials (Plates 17 and 18). A famous palaeographer, the late
B. L. Ullman, in Ancient Writing and its Influence, has likened the
square capitals to a father and Roman cursive to a mother. Rustic
takes after a stiff and formal father, Square Capital, rather than a
slatternly mother, Cursive, but the ‘second child which grew up and
prospered was Uncial’. Another descendant was the half-uncial and
it survived and became famous.
At its best the uncial script is splendid, as can be seen in Plate 17:
rounded, clear, strong, and with a marked pen-character. Manu¬
scripts written in uncials between the fourth and eighth centuries
a.d., with texts both sacred and profane, are surprisingly numerous:
five hundred manuscripts including fragments exist. The uncial
letters adehmu have distinctive curved shapes.
The half-uncial hand, the fifth of the Latin scripts, has ascenders
and descenders, but there are contrary views as to whether it is to be
called a majuscule or minuscule hand. The earliest known half¬
uncial script was written not later than a.d. 510. It may have sprung
up in North Africa in the fourth century. After it had passed to
Ireland and England it is appreciated for the superb script of the
Lindisfarne Gospels (Plate 19) and of the later Irish Book of Kells. In
contrast to the round letters of the uncials are the narrowed Anglo-
Saxon cursive letters represented in Plate 20. There were other
national hands stemming from the Latin scripts written in Italy,
Spain, Germany, and France. Of these, the Carolingian minuscules
have had enormous influence.

43
6a. Monogram of the Emperor Charlemagne
as used on documents. From A Book of
Signs by Rudolf Koch
 The Carolingian and Mediaeval
Scripts

I n France by the end of the eighth century a.d. there had arisen
a script called Carolingian or Caroline, which stands out in our
heritage along with Roman capitals because of the ultimate effect
of this style on alphabets of today. The earliest version is in the
Bible written for Abbot Maurdramnus of Corbie who died in 778.
The Caroline hand, seen in a ninth-century version in Plate 21,
sprang largely from half-uncial but had at first some cursive charac¬
teristics. However, in time the script became quite formal. The
name of the style relates to the Emperor Charlemagne, for it was in
use under his patronage. Christian and classical manuscripts were
copied at the Monastery of St. Martin at Tours, where Alcuin of
York was Abbot from a.d. 796 to 804. Noble versions of the Carol¬
ingian script were used in Southern England in the tenth century
(Plate 22). Plate 23 shows a twelfth-century version written in
Northern Italy.
The scripts of the Middle Ages became compressed and angular.
There are many versions. Whilst Gothic writing was sometimes
ornamental, it is not so clear as the Caroline scripts and at worst was
hard to read and lifeless. (The name ‘Gothic’ was used by Renais¬
sance scholars in contempt as meaning barbarous.) Plate 24 shows
a Gothic script and an illuminated letter with an heraldic device,
which links the teaching of the alphabet with the Lord’s Prayer.
This prayer-book, written about a.d. 1386, is in the Bodleian
Library, Oxford. Gothic lettering still has some use: we may find
'45
 THE CAROLINGIAN AND MEDIAEVAL SCRIPTS

it in church notices and newspaper headings. A fortunate circum¬

stance is that the English secretary hand, a mediaeval cursive used
for ordinary purposes in the time of Elizabeth I, died out in the
seventeenth century. It is the hand which Shakespeare wrote. A
model of alphabets of the secretary hand by Jean de Beauchesne is
illustrated in Figure 6. Other mediaeval scripts were used in Eng¬
land for particular purposes of administration, and were different
according to the several offices. These were Court hands (cf. page
9 5)-

Fig. 6b. English secretary hand. From A Booke Containing Divers Sortes of Hands
by Jean de Beauchesne. 1570
The Scripts of the Italian Renaissance

T he Italian Renaissance began in the fourteenth century and this

great movement in the long history of civilization brought
about in the fifteenth century important changes in handwriting
styles. A fresh interest was taken in classical Latin literature
and accordingly searches were made for manuscripts of the
classic authors which had been perhaps neglected and forgotten;
when found, these were copied by the humanists. Petrarch and
Coluccio Salutati reformed their script in a style known as fere
hurnatiistica (almost humanistic), for they were critical of the Gothic
writing. Later, Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) wrote a book-hand
in 1402 which derived from a late Carolingian style found in
Italian manuscripts of the eleventh or twelfth centuries (cf. Plate 23).
In adopting this clear style, known to palaeographers as ‘humanistic’,
Poggio is given credit for inventing the roman letter, which
ultimately was produced as the lower case printing type (Plate 25).
Poggio’s script has oblique shading in the curves of the letters and
the thickest strokes are not the vertical ones, as they are in the script
illustrated in Plate 28 and in many later roman scripts. The Renais¬
sance scholars and penmen called the roman style lettera antiqua in
the belief that the Caroline writing they had come to admire was of
classical antiquity.
The earliest example of italic writing (humanistic cursive) is that
of a Florentine scholar, Niccolo Niccoli, and he is regarded as the
inventor. He used diagonal joins such as are found in the sort of
mediaeval cursive hand he would have been taught in his youth and
he incorporated them in the humanistic hand (Plate 26). This was
'47
 THE SCRIPTS OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE

an expression of the cursive principle. Whether Niccoli’s practice

was recognized and led on to the italic hand of the sixteenth century
is not established. There is evidence that when the roman script was
written quickly the proportions and shapes of the letters began to
change through the avoidance of pen-lifts and the use of upstrokes
and joins and thus a new style of writing was developed.
Among scribes engaged in the second half of the fifteenth
century in making books which were written in an early style of
italic handwriting were Pietro Cennini, Antonio Tophio, and
Bartholomeo San Vito. Plate 29 shows Tophio’s italic hand: like
other scribes he also wrote fine versions of roman script.
Many years passed after Niccoli’s death in 1437 before the italic
hand, used both in making manuscript books and in writing
documents, reached the point of excellence. Two other fine
examples of the italic script are shown in Plates 30 and 31. The first
was by an unknown scribe of the Vatican Chancery and was
written about 1490. The second is from a Papal brief dated 27
August 1519 addressed to Cardinal Wolsey and which has reference
to the Bishop of Winchester. The script of this brief is attributed to
Ludovico degli Arrighi (sometimes known as Vicentino) and is in
the cancellaresca (chancery) hand which he taught by the first
printed book to give instruction in the writing of this script: La
Operina, published in Rome in 1522 (Figure 7). This book has been
much admired and indeed has been reproduced five times in
different facsimiles during this century. A second manual by this
revered scribe, II Modo, gave examples of various scripts.
Books began to be printed by movable types in the fifteenth
century. The invention of printing is credited to Johann Gutenberg
of Mainz at about the year 1450 (though claims have been made that
Laurens Coster of Haarlem was the inventor). In one of his publi¬
cations Gutenberg stated that printing had been accomplished with¬
out the help of reed, stylus, or pen. However, the types he and other
48
24. Gothic alphabet and script from a prayer-book. About 1386. Bodleian
Library (MS. Rawl. liturg. e 40, 15829). From Florilegium Alphabeticum
by B. L. Wolpe in Calligraphy and Palaeography.
 • M .TVLUl .CICER0N1S.DE.ORATCRE.UBEK FRIAWS .
mmLl
$0«ITANT1.MIH1. SFPENVMERO. ETA\EMOW.\
picttniivp^rcrin pbem finite quintc fratcr ilk uidcn fckr
in optima, r.p. cpcmi oC' bonou cCi*2i<{dkui ^ion.\
florencnr at lute curium rcnctx porn mint uruel in
Y^ieqcno fine piaiio ud in one at cixtputare die pfldir.
Ac nunc rmbi cjuccj: intern rc^dceridraap animu xA utnufcj; nofbru
x-v> 4 pixclux fhxdiA i tfttmdt fotx iiiifu cC'^pp: ab ommb*ccdTitm die axdnmtx
\

>.
<■ v K' fitnfintmfhmmltu nru. Ukv Xambinemifixcupano dcaxrfu V>cv~ ctuvm
xcmfdcrtexu amltxnflcC'. 0ui {prm capnmcmu d'ccmftiun^me^ cum
ijrauef comumu repn^ ru uani nn cafuf tdellerurtr. Ham cjuiIccul ejetx'
4 4

25. Humanistic (roman) script of Poggio Bracciolini. Cicero. 1425. Bibl. Laur.,
Florence (Pint. so. 31). From Renaissance Handwriting.

h/fnmenjncr rrymh^i rmit*.

A t odi-efA i~4 vyvjOsidnun -fit ■

1 frhrnon Onrm^nwrint m -fit rv. iHHSrrvi cjtn*

H yxt-7*) ttn# rf)*dvn+ a/woft i&m mertu* -titftif

A f- lA/mini M yyunr\Yiu> fatty-(fi tpfa A& i/idyr

c S OHw/k ftftnd At fAtivr*# derf* fjhrftmA.

I

26. Italic script of Niccolo Niccoli. Lucretius. ?I423. Bibl. Laur., Florence (Laur.
35,30).
 1 n expedittcmilmf tan turn ad futtutcLim

altetnuf leftcmem commodutnefe 8oftmm

cotidictotmti noffe' ac- ftatum ixteocp nulla

tmliorttnpmCi q\n expCratorerfidelt ac

cauto atit m tranffaiga Gmulato. Iticongtu

am utdetnr impctutortf rrn litem cjut iiefte'

cr atmona puklicn pafatur utilttattlmf tta

catrprtuattf. Omnium cobotrtuim ccjuitu

7. Roman script of Giacomo Curio. Vegetius. Before 1458. Bodleian Library

(Canon, lat. 274).

o ratio &opetano adte fern per

tncipiat: Rpertecepta finiar
mponens Ora no
[fempiteruedeus oui
[uiuorum dominans
fimul 6anortuorum:omnuiq:
mifererisrquos tuos fide& o
pere futures effe prenofets: tr

28. Roman script of Alexander Antonii Simonis.

Book of Hours. 1477. British Museum (Yates
Thompson 6).
 cbd temvo^mjl / et tvmwnj't teouulri
C berntkilltd^r jrl tempo etmortt MrHrd/
L obluuov t/tjj>e£h ojcwri et Atri
Tiucbemdi on tcrwMulc i^jc ter Am no
A. rnartt nrwetucjk> lotorm Ltdri
~N elletzt puiacriU et ilcrdt htirdmm

Cow rmcTtzil beUerut ttrrrvi j^nuO

A tutte cliArifkrftuAfirw
Tc t cjuMLt dtp lAmgtruicl ttwtuIo churns

C ow XjmwA1 twoiu et colLftTMtd/ ptwnA>

Id ilcidaur at acderU’ trrfvrrd brMtut
h^rttU twfhme cbend/ct fngebewrut
muUt pi
che UwnemorU Anchor tuorSAcatnnl
p Aue jUlfo chtlhehufo ferrd>
chtvot chdMfti rtjrrejb iljuo bdueh)
S eju b&tfo chi Uuuie vnctrrdj
O r chejUs dutuHtf' A rtuederU vnaeb.

' :TeiVQ 5 •
1 nuvumt euij’dm <jtuuUtn atliti rcptrui
ynjiwdam ~Vtrpih* vwTApienn libueu :. /
ipfius m^nu jrroprut fcri^nt uc ter tut.

Italic hand of Antonio Tophio. Petrarch: Poems. Montpellic

Medical Library.
 ejuita (o cfsonfno Jcfl? ift’cbejmo
imrji cm tutte'le'Jlefyucnti, m m me
Agr7
<M do ac al cue*of<ta ad> ai cL a(mm
to aj> <tj ar as of at mycay
Hmchjmojmicon l i b tm n u.
^ Le ligature?jsil<? cjsJ t Corn
(e'vijy'tii
scriite

Fig. 7. From La Operina by Ludovico degli Arrighi.

1522. Rome
Fig. 8. From Arte de escriver by Francisco Lucas. Published in 1577.
Madrid
 THE SCRIPTS OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE

early printers used were imitations of Gothic and humanistic scripts.

Moreover, not only the letter-forms but the general design of the
splendid manuscript books of the time were models that were
familiar and respected. The clarity of the printing of this very book
owes a debt to Renaissance scribes.
The invention of printing, the mass mechanical production of
‘writing’, did not destroy what it imitated but led to more extensive
use of the pen by the spread of learning.
Arrighi, Ferdinando Ruano, and other scribes produced manu¬
script books of distinction in the first half of the sixteenth century,
although by then a large number of books had been printed and
scribes were much less needed.
Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer, produced a series of small
books printed in italic, the first of which, a Virgil, appeared in 1501.
The type was based upon an italic hand which may possibly have
been that of Pomponio Leto, a leading scholar and the founder of the
Roman Academy. Later italic types, designed by Arrighi, have
been praised by the historians of printing.
The italic hand was adopted in countries distant from Italy and as
far apart as Poland and England. In England it was first used by
those who were at the Royal Court or had travelled in Italy or were
at the Universities. When Henry VIII came to the throne the italic
hand was already in use in the Court by Italian secretaries. His
children, Edward VI and Elizabeth I, were taught to write in this
style by Roger Ascham and Plate 32 gives an example of Elizabeth’s
elegant script, in a letter, unhappily partly burnt, to Thomas
Seymour. The Duke of Richmond wrote an impressive version at
the age of eight under the guidance of Richard Croke. At Cam¬
bridge, owing to the influence of SirJohn Cheke and Roger Ascham,
many of the scholars wrote their important letters in a careful italic
hand. The most notable of these as a penman was Bartholomew
Dodington, a Professor of Greek and an accountant. Plate 33 is of
51
 THE SCRIPTS OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE

a letter from the young Earl of Essex to Lord Burghley written at

the age of nine just after the death of his father.
The first writing book to be printed in England was by Jean de
Beauchesne, a Huguenot who settled in London. His book of
examples of scripts A Booke Containing Divers Sortes of Hands was
published in 1570 and shows among the various scripts the
‘Italique hande’ (Plate 34) and the English secretary hand commonly
used at the time (Figure 6). A page of a Spanish writing-book by
Francisco Lucas is reproduced in Figure 8. His book is often studied
by calligraphers today.

52
Fig. 9. Portrait of Charles I by Joseph Goddard.
?i644. British Museum (Sloane 994)
 READING and WRITING.-,

Fig. io. From The Universal Penman by George Bickham. 1733-41

 Copperplate Writing

C opperplate is a word sometimes used to refer to any careful,

neat and disciplined handwriting, but this definition is too
wide. The models in the earliest printed copy-books were re¬
produced by engraved wood blocks (see Figure 7), but in the second
half of the sixteenth century some manuals showed exemplars
printed from engraved metal plates. This later method of repro¬
duction, coupled with changing taste, modified the style of the italic
hand through the tools and methods involved in engraving metal
plates. Soon the pen was expected to make letters which were
imitations of engraving. Some engravers’ strokes were but the
merest scratches and others dug well into the plate. The deeper the
cut the wider the stroke. A sharply pointed pen was necessary to
imitate the engraved letters. The width and variations of the pen-
strokes depended upon how heavy or how light was the pressure
put upon the pen’s point. Therefore the pupil had to learn not only
to make the shapes but also to control the pressure of pen-point on
paper. If the father of copperplate is the italic hand, the copperplate
child left home to be in servitude to the engraver’s needle. The
example by John Davies of Hereford in Plate 35 shows the child
leaving home.
Another feature of copperplate hands are the loops to ascenders,
which began to appear in writing models at the beginning of the
seventeenth century. Ultimately the aim was to write words with
one continued line: i.e. without pen-lifts. Indeed copy-books can
be named where the line did not end with the word but linked with
the succeeding word. During the seventeenth century, writing-
' 55
 COPPERPLATE WRITING

books often showed models decorated by drawings of men, animals,

birds, fish, etc. made by flourishing of pen-stokes, known as ‘com¬
mand of hand’. Figure 9 is of a head of Charles I made by Joseph
Goddard in 1644 when aged 15 and a pupil at the Writing School of
Christ’s Hospital. These flourishes by Goddard were ‘invented,
ordered and composed by Jonathan Pickes, Writing Master’, who
taught Goddard twelve different scripts.
As English trade grew, more people needed to write, and many
copy-books were produced. The most notable production in the
eighteenth century is George Bickham’s The Universal Penman,
which was issued in parts from 1733 to 1741 and has 212 large pages
printed from metal plates, presenting the work of twenty-five
penmen (Figure 10).
Early in the nineteenth century, two rival writing-masters were
James Henry Lewis of Ebley, near Stroud, and Joseph Carstairs.
Both claimed Royalty as patrons, and Carstairs persuaded the Duke
of Kent in 1816 to attend a meeting at which the Duke said he had
directed several poor boys, who had made little progress in writing,
to be under the superintendence of Carstairs. Of their rapid and
extraordinary progress he could speak in the most confident
manner. Carstairs had a considerable success in the U.S.A. with his
system.
Figure 11 shows examples of nineteenth-century models by other
writing-masters given by John Jackson as a critical illustration of
their ‘disgraceful diversity of slant’ in his book The Theory and
Practice of Handwriting, first published in 1892 and which advocated
a vertical hand. A much more severe criticism was made by Robert
Bridges, the poet, who regarded Victorian school copy-books as
soulless models and held that the ultimate degradation was won in
lawyers’ offices where clerks ‘scrupulously perfected the very most
ugly thing that a conscientious civilisation has ever perpetrated’.

56
Fig. 11. Examples of copperplate hands from The Theory and Practice
of Handwriting by J. Jackson. 1898
 Aa Bb CcDd Ee FfQg
Hh liJj Kk LI MmNn
OoPpQq RrSsTtUu
VvWwXxYyZz
Fig. 12. Italic alphabets for teaching infants. From Beacon Writing Book
No. Two
 Print-script

I n 1913 Edward Johnston was asked to address a conference of

London teachers on the teaching of handwriting. In putting
forward an ideal scheme (it proved too difficult for teachers to
adopt) he showed among other alphabets the skeleton or essential
shapes of the Roman alphabets. It was seen that a simplification of
letter-forms might be adopted for teaching beginners to write and
this would also help children to learn to read. By 1916 experiments
had begun in London schools. The style, now known as print-
script, soon spread widely in this and other countries. Miss Marjorie
Wise introduced a form of it into the United States of America,
where it is known as manuscript writing.
Although useful for teaching infants, print-script has a serious
lack as a handwriting style, for it does not develop naturally into a
running hand. Accordingly, some other style is generally taught
when the child uses a pen. Print-script is plainly uueconomical since
it has to be abandoned and a poor foundation for the acquisition of
a fundamental skill.
Attempts have been made to add joins to print-script but with
little success. A system was devised by the late Marion Richardson
which was to introduce the child to a style having some relation¬
ship to both print-script and italic by the use of writing patterns.
An experiment brought into English schools by Sir James Pitman
as a means of teaching the infant to read is the ‘initial teaching
alphabet’ (i.t.a.). This alphabet has forty characters to represent as
many sounds. It is claimed that when the child has learned to read
a transition can be made to the traditional alphabet. The i.t.a.
' 59
 Aa BbCcDd Ee FfQg
HhliJjKk LIMmNn
OoPpQq PrSsTt Uu
Vv 1A/wXx YyZz
Fig. 12. Italic alphabets for teaching infants. From Beacon Writing Book
No. Two
 Print-script

I n 1913 Edward Johnston was asked to address a conference of

London teachers on the teaching of handwriting. In putting
forward an ideal scheme (it proved too difficult for teachers to
adopt) he showed among other alphabets the skeleton or essential
shapes of the Roman alphabets. It was seen that a simplification of
letter-forms might be adopted for teaching beginners to write and
this would also help children to learn to read. By 1916 experiments
had begun in London schools. The style, now known as print-
script, soon spread widely in this and other countries. Miss Marjorie
Wise introduced a form of it into the United States of America,
where it is known as manuscript writing.
Although useful for teaching infants, print-script has a serious
lack as a handwriting style, for it does not develop naturally into a
running hand. Accordingly, some other style is generally taught
when the child uses a pen. Print-script is plainly uneconomical since
it has to be abandoned and a poor foundation for the acquisition of
a fundamental skill.
Attempts have been made to add joins to print-script but with
little success. A system was devised by the late Marion Richardson
which was to introduce the child to a style having some relation¬
ship to both print-script and italic by the use of writing patterns.
An experiment brought into English schools by Sir James Pitman
as a means of teaching the infant to read is the ‘initial teaching
alphabet’ (i.t.a.). This alphabet has forty characters to represent as
many sounds. It is claimed that when the child has learned to read
a transition can be made to the traditional alphabet. The i.t.a.
59
 PRINT-SCRIPT

phonetic symbols have been incorporated in print-script, but they

could be written in italic style.
In the view of the author, what would be appropriate for begin¬
ners would be a very simple italic print-script, following pre¬
writing exercises. Such a style could lead on from infancy to
maturity (Figure 12).

It is indeed a much more tndu rdujious duty

to acquire a habit of deliberate, lyible, and
loudy penmanship m the dadxj use of the'
pen, than to illuminate any quantity of texts.

Fig. 13. Italic hand of Graily Hewitt. 1916

 The Italic Hand of Today

T he revival of the italic hand of the Italian Renaissance began

when William Morris, the Victorian poet and craftsman, was
engaged in making a number of what he called ‘painted books',
which in fact were illuminated manuscripts. This was during the
period 1870 to 1875. Morris bought a volume made up of four
Italian sixteenth-century writing-books, namely Ugo da Carpi’s
version of Arrighi’s La Operina, Arrighi’s II Modo, G. A. Tagliente’s
Opera che insegna a scrivere, and Sigismundo Fanti’s Thesauro. He
is known to have studied Arrighi’s model but to have made his
own version of the italic hand, and to have used it in transcribing
a Horace, now in the Bodleian Library, and a copy of his translation
of a saga King Hajbur & King Siward in the Fitzwilliam Museum,
Cambridge. A fragment of the Arabian Nights, written by Morris,
with an incomplete initial, is shown in Plate 37. In 1898 Mrs. M. M.
Bridges, the wife of another famous poet, Robert Bridges, published
a book called A New Handwriting for Teachers and this introduced the
italic hand into a number of English schools (Plate 38). In 1906 Ed¬
ward Johnston published his masterly book Writing & Illuminating,
& Lettering and he gave illustrations of an Italian ‘semi-formal’ hand
which could be called italic. Copy-books were produced by Graily
Hewitt in 1916 but he taught that every letter should be made
separately. This restriction was against cursive fluency (Figure 13).
These models were followed in 1932 by those in the author’s own
book A Handwriting Manual and his copy-cards. Now there are
instructions in writing the italic hand published in the U.S.A.,
Holland, Denmark, and S. India, as well as others in Great Britain.
* 61
 THE ITALIC HAND OF TODAY

Not only is the hand taught in many schools, but there is a Society
for Italic Handwriting with membership in numerous countries.
The person learning the italic hand needs an italic nib to gain the
best result, and stationers stock several makes of fountain-pens at
small cost which take italic nibs. The learner must hold the pen
so that the thinnest stroke the pen makes runs up to the right at
an angle of 45 degrees (but not less) to the writing line. An easy test
as to whether the pen is correctly held is to cross a vertical stroke
with a horizontal stroke so that both strokes are equally thick:
If the vertical stroke is thinner, turn the pen slightly to the body. If
the horizontal stroke is thinner, turn the pen slightly from the

The italic letters are not so wide as roman or print-script letters

and their proportions are not related to the square or circle. The
letter ‘o’ is elliptical. Downstrokes should have only a slight slope
forward. (See Figure 14.)

abcdejahijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Fig. 14. Italic alphabet from Beacon Writing Book No. Five

The alphabet is best learnt by grouping letters according to the

principal movements which shape them. The groups are ilt, adgqu,
ceo, mnr, bhk, vwy,fs,jp, xz. The simple letters of the first group end

iltadqcju ceo nmr bhk vwy js jp xz

with a narrow bend (not a point) and the stroke upwards stops as
soon as it becomes a hairline. An important feature of the second
and third groups adgquceo is the counter-clockwise movement at
62
 THE ITALIC HAND OF TODAY

the bases of the letters. Here again, there are narrow bends and not
sharp pointed angles. The letters mnrbhk have a clock wise movement
springing from the base of the first downstroke. The reader may be
reminded of a rocket or a jet of water going up and then turning to
the right in a curve before dropping. Again the turning movement
does not make an angle or a part of a circle but a narrow curving
bend. The letter r could easily be made too like a v when written
quickly, so the pen must return well up the downstroke before
branching away. The letters vwy do have an angular base at the
learning stage. The letters/and s both begin and end the downstroke
by moving to the left. The/, like the ty should be crossed at the
height of the letter o and not higher. The p could be made without
a pen-lift by omitting the turn of the descender to the left and by
returning up the long downstroke. The letter x is made of two
strokes, and the z zigzags.
Joins are required for quick writing. The two principal joining
strokes are the diagonal and horizontal. If letters n are written it is
plain that an extension of the last stroke will join the letter to the
next: tltlYlt}. The join will be oblique. Such joins would naturally
follow on from acdehiklmntu. The drills suggested on page 98
would be good practice. If the word to be written is (say) town,
three horizontal joins are used, the first being an extension of the
t town.
cross-stroke of the : (Th e cross-stroke of an/will similarly
make a join.) Some letters, because of their shape, do not join up
easily or suitably, consequently letters are joined or not joined
according to what is convenient at the moment of writing.
Wherever linking strokes can be made it is sensible to use them,
for they are necessary for speedy writing. The letter e may be made
with two strokes, the first being nearly straight and the second a
small bow which can run on: teen- The virtue of this method is
that it helps to avoid blobbing and to space letters, and is not
altogether uneconomical.
63
 THE ITALIC HAND OF TODAY

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRS
TUVWXYZ
Fig. 15. Italic capitals from Beacon Writing Book No. Five

The simple capitals in Figure 15 are without serifs and have the
same slant as the small letters.
A less simple but freer alphabet of capitals is shown in Figure 16.
The flourishes will be seen to be restrained and not too decorative,
and the letters are not obtrusive.

A'BC'Dt.FqHlJKLMNOTQKS
7 uvwxyZsis
Fig. 16. Flourished capitals from Beacon Writing Book No. Five

Figure 17 shows punctuation marks, numerals, etc. At the end

of the line of stops there is a very simple ampersand: a sign for the
word and. The word ampersand is said to be a corruption of the

’”’1U)U
1234567840 i22j.$6j$()0
Fig. 17. Punctuation marks and numerals from Beacon
Writing Book No. Five

64
 tS 'Bedford Km, London,W. C. l
ijTebruary
Vear Tap 'd,
Von hairpractised italic writingfeirr
semi time and 1 hope you haw liked doing so.
Jou will haw learnt the min <x now is
the time ti> cheek whether you orefollowing
them. 'Dim.your writing slantfeorwnrd? Ife
net, try tv make it dose - hut not too much t
Voyeur thin lines run up like this ///// ?
Are youfending someparticular letter hard
tv do? Ifso, practise it. “ practice makes
perfect ”, is an old, saying, is your uniting
even in svty a nd easy to read ?
K cm ember that your writing may
giwpleasure tv yowrfeimds.
Vou rs sincerely
Calligrapher

Fig. 18. From Beacon Writing Book No. Six

 THE ITALIC HAND OF TODAY

phrase ‘and per se and', which might be recited after the alphabet,
and meaning that the sign ‘and’ was not used for connecting parts
of a sentence but for itself alone. The numerals of the first set are
written as between two imaginary lines and the second set as between
four lines. The first set, the practical one, would be generally used,
whilst the second set, which is related to the numerals to be seen in
printed books, would be for occasional use.
The italic style of handwriting is being taught in many schools
and as it is traditional, sensible, and pleasing, it seems likely that it
will establish itself in England and probably in the U.S. A. also. If one
scans the horizon for a glimpse of any future style that may follow
and displace it there is none. Marshall McLuhan in The Gutenberg
Galaxy claims that we are entering a new phase of civilization with
accompanying new forms of communication: the Era of the
Electronic Man. There is the strange alphabet used on cheques for
computers at banks and there are highly original graphic art captions
of television programmes, but these are not relevant to ordinary
usage in school and home.

66
 |

^ n- I-,, .-I-- . - ttffnawn»i»WPr»>fiW'»T»nitTTi-BWTrn—r in ■ttii in jrmn> ittir»i.»nr .n»i.n. r■—rrr" i v —i - mn 1—— - r - ■ -i r—mr--Fi r- nmtnfn- . JM ^5

€,cCc U lAtdutfe'Dce tttttg it-tjg ■ attic fc!idmit ke,an?. v’

a<vluux»^jatlf. ft. artec tet meUrn ftncfirtljucrtft’4bt^|;
'ToifCcrtr icsiint}. f^ruq.fewmncste cctV trtrdtu fortrlttA^.
one an fautr efpmt qtu Atoufett* ic tatttn. flefe-vtj. pucde*
mpuxf^cacsenjy.fetttaaaiesCteurl^AJt^.iJauimie Vf
li Vatrm&Chc qut ctnpsrottIc&An^txme dtt famt cffoxf.-

C. La Somme Le Roy. The Seven Virgins in a mystic garden, with a

hunting scene below. Illuminated by Honore. Thirteenth century. British
Museum (Add. MS. 54180).
 Formal Calligraphy Revived

A lthough manuscript books were eventually superseded by the

XJLinvention of printing, there is often a need today for calli¬
graphers to write formal book-hands but not only for manuscript
books. Ceremonial inscriptions may be required on a special occasion:
for example, a formal script would be used in writing a Royal
Patent, a roll of honour, a list of names, a presentation address, a
certificate, etc. Calligraphers do occasionally make transcriptions of
favoured literary works in book form for bibliophiles.
Printing is for making numerous copies, often millions, but
calligraphy is appropriate for the unique copy, the limited edition
of one. Professional calligraphers have generally been trained as
artists and designers. They will write a fine formal book-hand with
care and precision and skill of hand on vellum, and will possibly
decorate the inscription by illuminating. Their work will be based
on tradition but will not be a slavish copy of earlier styles. Visitors
to St. Clement Danes Church, in London, can see the formal
scripts of many contemporary English calligraphers, for there are
shrines containing ten manuscript Books of Remembrance of the
Royal Air Force, and one of the American Air Force when serving
in the United Kingdom.
There is a professional Society of Scribes and Illuminators which
also has a lay membership.
As already mentioned, William Morris made a number of
‘painted books’. These were literary works, including Icelandic
sagas, written in various scripts and illuminated, preserved in
libraries in England and the United States of America. Plate 37 is
67
 FORMAL CALLIGRAPHY REVIVED

of a trial page now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, where the

decoration of the initial is incomplete and lacks colour. Calligraphy
owes Morris a debt but a much greater one to Edward Johnston
(1872-1944), whose teaching and practice have had considerable
influence in this country and overseas. Figure 19 shows a part of a
copy-sheet written by Johnston in the style of the tenth-century

gulden: autem
ejm rtomma
vestra scripta
sunt in coclis.
Fig. 19. From a copy-sheet written by Edward Johnston in August
1919, in a style deriving from the Ramsey Psalter (see
Plate 22)

hand illustrated in Plate 22, which he called the ‘foundational hand’.

Its relationship to roman types will be noted. This formal hand was
written with a pen that had a broad point. The point was slightly
oblique, the right side of the slit, as seen above the pen, being
shorter than the left side. (If writing in this style left-handers would
68
 FORMAL CALLIGRAPHY REVIVED

need the point to be oblique, with the left side shorter.) The letters
are constructed by short strokes, pulled but never pushed against the
pen’s edge. For example: the letter ‘o’ is made of two semicircles
fitted together, the first being made counter-clockwise and the
second clockwise, but both by strokes moving downwards. The
pen has to be lifted frequently from the vellum or paper: every

DRYAD LETTERING CARD No.2

ABCDEFGH1JKLMN
OPQRST11VWXY2
abcdefghijklmnopqrst
uvwxyz. 1234567890
Fig. 20. Broad pen roman alphabets and numerals
written by the author in 1935

letter has at least one pen-lift. The broad pen makes thicks, thins,
and gradations naturally, and so regulated pressure, as in copperplate,
is not required and there is consistency in the incidence of shading.
Speed of execution is out of place in formal calligraphy, for
precision is necessary, and therefore the numerous pen-lifts and the
69
 FORMAL CALLIGRAPHY REVIVED

absence of ligatures are no drawback. It will be noticed that the

letters in Figure 19 end with a hair-line and the letters have a clean
sharpness. The ability to write the uncomplicated letters of this
script is often useful to amateurs when an italic script is not chosen
for booklets, posters, labels, etc. Edward Johnston’s Writing &
Illuminating, & Lettering is the classic work on formal calligraphy.
Inexpensive books giving simple instruction in this basic style are
Pen Lettering by Ann Camp (Dryad Press) and A Roman Script for
Schools by the author (Ginn & Co.). The alphabets of Figure 20,
also by the author, are in the Johnstonian style.

70
 1

D. Flemish Book of Hours. St. Anthony in the Desert.

Illuminated by the Master of Mary of Burgundy. Fifteenth century. Bodleian Library (Douce 219).
 Illuminated Manuscripts

P eople down the ages, whether civilized or primitive, have

decorated works which they have regarded as having impor¬
tance, and in doing so have given expression to the artistic sense.
Manuscript books made before the invention of printing were rare
and most precious and accordingly it was natural to add ornament
or illustrations or both. Because manuscripts written on vellum
were bound and kept closed, they have preserved paintings from
the effects of dust, light, climate, vandals, and other causes of decay.
Stained glass windows and wall paintings of the Middle Ages have
been vulnerable and therefore have suffered. Indeed, our heritage of
the art of the Middle Ages when illuminating was so fine would be
very much less but for the decoration of manuscripts. At the first
sight of an illuminated manuscript book people are often surprised
by its fresh quality.
The use of papyrus in remote times for writing was superseded
by the durable and accessible parchment and vellum, and by this
change of material the papyrus scroll was replaced eventually by the
book made of folded skins, namely the codex. The scroll, written by
Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, etc. was not without pictures. The
earliest of the scrolls with illustrations that has survived, namely the
Egyptian Ratnesseum Ceremonial Papyrus, was made as long ago as
the twentieth century B.c. There exist also a number of copies of the
Egyptian Book of the Dead, and these, it is thought, may have in¬
fluenced Greek illustrations. Plate 5 is from the Ani papyrus in the
British Museum and comes from the Eighteenth Dynasty. A
famous codex, the Vatican Virgil, written in rustic capitals in the
7i
 ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS
fourth or fifth century a.d., has fifty pictures painted in many
colours.
Another way other than by decoration of giving books an attrac¬
tive appearance was by staining skins saffron, crimson, or imperial
purple, and by writing on them in gold and silver.
In illuminating, the ornament which lights up the written page
is made by the use of pure and permanent pigments and by metals,
the metal being mostly gold: silver tarnishes. The gold was generally
gold-leaf beaten to infinitesimal thinness and was made to adhere
to a size (gesso) and then burnished to a glitter: a fine setting for
bright colours.
The decoration of initials gave opportunities for intricate patterns.
The illuminating extended from initials to fill the borders round the
column of writing. Included in the ornament we may see birds,
beasts, butterflies and flowers. Heraldry would show for whom
the manuscript was written. Miniatures were frequently of Bible
subjects and saints but also scenes of battle and chivalry, the changing
seasons, the occupations of land workers and even of comic situ¬
ations: e.g. a hare attacking a frightened lion with a spear.
Illuminated manuscripts were wholly made by hand, the
preparation of skins, the calligraphy, the painting, and the binding,
being the work of craftsmen, who by co-operation produced
harmonious works of art. The scribe in (say) the eleventh century
might be a monk in a monastery in Canterbury, St. Albans, Win¬
chester or Durham, etc. serving God by his work. In contrast, a
scholarly scribe in the fifteenth century may have been transcribing
classical texts. A Florentine bookseller, Vespasiano di Bisticci,
employed various Renaissance scribes to satisfy the demand for
books. Manuscripts were made for kings and queens and other
noble persons and many were intended for private worship. In the
British Museum there are famous Psalters and Books of Hours and
other splendid illuminated manuscripts on display.
72
 ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS

Many Renaissance manuscripts were illuminated in a style called

white vine. This style sprang from the Romanesque decoration of
certain twelfth-century manuscripts which were mistakenly
thought to belong to Roman antiquity, and therefore respected by
the scholars (Plate 25).
The four colour plates in this book are but a limited indication
of the artistic distinction of numerous illuminated manuscripts
which still exist, but they do show fine miniatures and also specimens
of the script in which the text of each book was written, namely
Carolingian, Gothic and humanistic hands.
The ‘command of hand’ flourishing or ‘striking’ of the seven¬
teenth-century and later writing-books, though very skilful, was as
much showmanship as decoration.

73
 But when a boy leaves school
<2fn£9l 9fl ,9g9lIo9 io y3isi9vinu ibl
if botany be a branch of his studies,
nobqunoD £ si £93 blow od3 3fid3
of the Chinese Tsia or Bcha, Cha.
si sd 3ud ; dguono 3dgh si sidT
also taught that there are three
He ,3n£lq £93 odido S9i09q3 jonbsib
belonging to the natural family
&AT yl9m£n t3S99£xm6i3srn9T
viridis, or green tea ; Thea Bohea,
bn£ • £93 dadd sd3 sbleiy doidw
Bbea Assamensls, which gives us
.mess A gnibnbni<£ibnl lo S£93 odi
At most examinations he would
li tb9doulq grxisd lo dsn odi run
Fig. 21. The boustrophedon system demonstrated in English.
From Aire We to Read Backwards by James
Millington. 1884
 Legibility

E ase in reading is helped not only by clear and simply formed

letters and words, written in a traditional style, but also by
orderly spacing and by regularity. Quick writing requires skill of
hand and calls for care. The ability to write legibly at speed is
achieved through experience and by firm intention. The writer must
desire to write clearly. The motions must become practically auto¬
matic, the pen must run easily, and the letter shapes must be recog¬
nizable. A certain degree of self-discipline is essential. The greater
the dash, the poorer the performance. This reads as if the handicaps
against legible writing are too great, yet they are overcome and
must be, for it would be nonsense to spend time and energy writing
if what is written cannot be read.
Legibility, however, depends very much on what one is used to
reading. When a person writes so badly that others cannot read the
writing or only with great difficulty, he may not quite understand
why he is being criticized, for he, himself, is used to his own writing
and is therefore likely to be able to read it.
We are not used to writing, as the Chinese do, in vertical columns,
starting from the right, nor to writing every other line mirrorwise
and backwards as in the Greek houstrophedon style demonstrated in
English in Figure 21. Writing cannot be deciphered if the language
we use is unknown to the reader, or if the script is a non-traditional
one, such as the script that gained the Bernard Shaw prize and was
used in a special Penguin edition of Androcles and the Lion: an
invented system with forty-eight characters. We should not like to
have to read a book printed only in Roman capitals, although they
75
 LEGIBILITY

are familiar and clear, for we are not used to reading more than a
few words in capitals.
The author has heard an examiner comment: ‘Why should I go
to trouble to decipher the writing of a student who has not bothered
to write clearly?’ Men have been known to confess in a boasting
way in public speeches that they find it difficult to read their own
writing, as if this was amusing and socially acceptable, but, of
course, they would never boast that they mumble when speaking.
A story, perhaps apocryphal, is that a painter named Loudon
wrote to the first Duke of Wellington to ask permission to paint
the beeches in Waterloo Park, and that the Duke replied to the
Bishop of London that he had given instructions to his footman to
put out the breeches he wore at Waterloo but that he could not
understand His Lordship’s interest in them. The Bishop expressed
doubts about the Duke’s sanity when at Convocation. The anecdote
does not record whether Mr. Loudon ever received the permission
he sought.
To write legibly is civil and logical. To write with grace is
friendly and generous, and adds a little to the virtues of civilized
life. Robert Bridges said that true legibility depended upon
‘certainty of deciphering’, which means, for example, that an n
should not look like aw. A significant circumstance is that the upper
part of words is of more importance to legibility than the lower
part, due to movements of the eyes when reading.

76
 Differences in Writing Styles

B ecause everybody is different it follows that no two persons

write alike, even though the style of writing may be a common
one. Consequently, we do not find it difficult to recognize the
writing of our friends, for we have a good recollection of their
personal styles.
The changes in writing styles down the centuries have been due
to various causes. An important stage of progress for us who are
right-handed was when the Greeks changed the direction of
writing, and broke away from Phoenician influence, by moving
from leftwards to rightwards, for this is convenient for holding the
pen in the right hand and for the manner of writing. To this day,
however, the writing of Hebrew and Arabic is directed leftwards.
When the Sumerians began to use clay as a writing material they
scratched the surface to make the signs. This practice was not
satisfactory and a natural development was when the stylus was
pressed into the clay. An effect of the change was that curves were
straightened. But another change, probably brought about by the
dominant use of the right hand, was when the Sumerians turned the
signs through 90 degrees to the left. The evolution of pictograms
to signs which are no longer recognizable can also be noted in
Figure 1.
In the time of the Romans, writing was on papyrus, wax tablets,
and parchment, and it was also on walls and bricks. For handwriting
we use paper. The professional calligrapher generally writes on
vellum. The sort of writing instrument in use, which may be stylus,
reed, brush, quill, metal pen, ballpoint, or pencil, and how it is held,
77
 DIFFERENCES IN WRITING STYLES

as well as the sort of writing material, will affect the shapes of

letters and words, and therefore the style of writing. Such a
simple letter as ‘o’ has had many set shapes: round, oval, and angular.
There is another difference to be noted, which is whether the
script is ‘formal’ or ‘cursive’. The letters seen in the formal book-
hands of Plates 17,18, 22, 23, 25, 27 and 28 were made by connecting
up simple strokes so that the joining is concealed. The letter ‘m’ of
Plate 22 was made so: mm , The pen was lifted from the vellum
twice. The letter might have been written quickly and without
raising the pen, to make it a cursive letter (see this letter in Plates
29, 30 and 31). The whole script will be affected by fluency, and
letters may link up by running on; and in doing so speed will
change the shapes of letters of the alphabets. This explains roughly
why the italic letters are different from roman: e.g. the ‘o’ is round
in roman script but oval or pointed in italic handwriting. To depart
from the formal is a human and social tendency, but there is a
contrary inclination to elevate the informal. The formal may
become cursive and then perhaps rise to become a set hand. We
may think of marching becoming easy running and conversely
quick movements being disciplined and aesthetic as a part of a
ballet.
Some changes appear to express or reflect the spirit of the time.
In the capitals of the classic Roman inscriptions, for example, we
seem to see reflected signs of the dignity and engineering skill of
that great people (though some credit is due to Greek inscriptions
and sculptors). The letters stand up nobly and with firm stability.
The architecture and scripts of the Middle Ages are held to have
some relationship to each other and to tell us something of the
period and its religious spirit. Trade and conquests and the spread of
religions have played a part in the changing styles. A system of
writing developed in a particular region or country has often
travelled to other parts. Japanese writing derives from Chinese.
78
 DIFFERENCES IN WRITING STYLES

Roman capitals and the small letters that go with them must now
be known all over the world. A style may be revived at a later time
without being a slavish imitation. The italic hand of the Italian
Renaissance travelled about Europe in the sixteenth century,
turned into copperplate in the seventeenth century, had extensive
use in Spain in the eighteenth century, and now enjoys a revival in
this countrv and overseas.

Fig. 22. From Libellus valde doctus elegans, etc., by Urban Wyss. 1549, Zurich
 Motions and Shapes in Writing

I f the reader looks at the hand of a person who is actually writing,

what is to be seen is that fingers and thumb and probably the
whole hand are moving the point of the pen on and off the paper.
When one sees a trail of vapour from an aeroplane streaking across
the sky it is evidence of movement but it is not serving a purpose.
Conversely the movement of the pen makes a trail of ink and in
laying that trail we make the shapes of letters. A copy-book shows
shapes and by the shapes the pupils learn to make the correct move¬
ments. Handwriting is a system of movements, involving touch.
Touch is a very personal sense. (Of course, handwriting also requires
action by the mind and the eyes.)
Certain of the small letters of our alphabets are shaped principally
by movements that run in opposite directions to those of some
other letters. For example, the chief movement in writing n is
clockwise, but in writing the letter u, which is much like an n
upside down, it is counter-clockwise. A problem for the writing-
master who designs the model of a cursive script is to find out how
n can be saved from breaking down and becoming u. The italic hand
may succeed in this respect where other styles fail. (The use of the
words ‘clockwise’ and ‘counter-clockwise’ might be misleading in
one respect. What is meant is the general direction of the stroke and
not that the movements are producing apart of a circle. In making o,
counter-clockwise, the pen comes down to make the left side and
moves up on the right side, and it is much more likely to be making
an oval than a circle.)
Most people have a strong sense of the perpendicular. If one bends
80
 MOTIONS AND SHAPES IN WRITING

the head over on either side the eyes tell continually what is really
perpendicular. How is it then that all handwriting is not perpen¬
dicular? The reason is that the movements of the hand are not con¬
trolled by this particular ability of the eyes.
The sort of pen in use determines to some extent the shapes of
letters. A pen with a definite point is held differently from an italic
pen. The pen pointed to the shoulder (palm downwards) may cause
writing to be flattened and spread out because of the way the hand
moves sideways. The letters of the italic hand, written with the
palm sideways, stand up more and are more closely spaced. The
upward movements bring letters together.
In the view of the author but supported by history, the elliptical
o goes with fluent writing and it is simpler to make an oval than a
circle: there are many concepts of the shape of an oval but only one
of a circle. The letter o should give a clue to the desirable movements
and shapes of other letters. The width of the letters abdghnpq would
be that of the o in an exemplar script and consequently those strokes
which curve would have a relationship.
When an italic pen is used, the breadth of its edged point, whether
broad, medium, or fine, should bear a relationship to the letter o.
This relationship is called scale. If, say, the letter s was only three
breadths high then the pen would hardly have room to move about
without blobbing. A general rule is that o should be about five pen-
breadths high. The italic pen should not be moved about in the
hand: i.e. it should be held in one direction, for if the pen is turned
or rolled into different positions in relation to the body the regularity
of writing would be spoiled.
Writing-pressure (touch) is too individual to lay down any rule
but it is desirable that it should be as light as may be. The author has
noticed that calligraphers show an appreciative interest when the
writing of a formal hand is seen to be by a delicate touch.

81
 Pattern and Spacing

I f one applies the right methods of penmanship and adopts a good

style of script then handwriting is likely to have grace and be
pleasing to the sight. A suitable pen will assist in forming good and
clear shapes with regularity. The lines of writing will have pattern.
A very simple pattern of two letters can be made so:
OIOIOIOIOIO OIOIOIOIOIO OIOIOIOIOIO
Because in handwriting there are many more letters of irregular
sizes the pattern is much more complicated. The pattern of the
characters in horizontal bands appears in Mesopotamian cuneiform
and Egyptian hieratic and demotic writing.
Pattern is not confined to what is regarded as good writing,
though it will certainly be found there. Even in illegible writing
there may be a personal quality of rhythmical and fluent line that
can be perceived to be pattern. But the pattern that will generally
be agreeable is that made with a relationship to traditional alphabets,
having a harmony of style, some discipline as well as freedom, and
a rhythm. The finest scripts are likely to show a relationship of parts
to the whole, consistency and regularity in size, proportion, slant,
and spacing; or in a word ‘unity’.
Pen-strokes, letters, words, and lines, may all be regarded as
elements making up a larger whole, whether the whole is but a
letter or a word or a line or the text. In some of the book-scripts
letters stand slightly apart, being entities as well as elements of the
word (Plate 28). In other formal hands letters are bunched (Plates
25 and 27). In cursive hands letters are likely to run on and link
(Plate 30) and then letters seem less like entities, and words are
82
 PATTERN AND SPACING

nearer to being elements of the pattern of the line of writing and

perhaps of the sentence.
Consider this pattern made by capital letters (except J and Q):

ABCDEFGHIKLMNOPRSTUVWXYZ

The letters are as if made between two horizontal lines. Words in

capitals would be short bands or strips of pattern of varying length.
Some of the smaller letters are also written as if between two lines:
acetnnorsuvwxz. To complete the alphabet we add letters with parts
above or below the strips: bdfghijklpqty. The line-pattern is then
more complicated, and the ascenders o(bdjhklt and the descenders of
gjpqy add a secondary pattern and invade and break up what would
otherwise be clean blank strips between the lines of writing.
The line-pattern seemed to Romans to be so important that they
often thought more of the spacing of letters than of words (Plates
13, 14, and 15). An even more regulated, patterned, and artistic
Greek style called stoichedon is represented in Plate 12. The letters
of this inscription of 408/7 b.c. were arranged in both horizontal
strips and vertical columns.
There are many shapes of spaces in a page of handwriting, for
what is not covered by ink remains as space. There is the back¬
ground as well as the margins. Some letters have spaces wholly
enclosed within them: abdegopq. Others have spaces partly enclosed:
chkmnuvwxyz. And others need spaces about them—obviously fst
and less obviously ijlr. In a sense, every letter has the right to as
much space as it needs, but no more, so that the words can be
easily recognized.
In addition to the space in and about letters are the spaces between
words, the spacing of lines, and the margins. The margins are im¬
portant as a means of setting off the writing. If lines are close, the
ascenders and descenders may foul the writing in the line above or
below. In printed books, words are often very closely spaced but
83
 PATTERN AND SPACING

still easy to read, and this points to the fact that it is certainly not
essential to space written words widely.
One of the virtues of italic handwriting is that letters are fairly
close together and the diagonal join allows the movement, when
convenient, to go on from one letter to another and spaces them
agreeably.

Fig. 23. Wood engraving by Noel Rooke, from Writing &

Illuminating, & Lettering, by Edward Johnston. Sir
Isaac Pitman & Sons
 Pens

T he pens of today could be divided into two sorts. There are

those that have a slit down the middle of the point of the nib
through which the ink flows and those that have a small metal ball
which deposits ink from a reservoir on to the paper as the ball
rotates. The latter sort, the ballpoint, is not a traditional pen and
might be thought of as no more than an inky pencil. The pens with
a slit, whether dip-pens or fountain-pens, are generally much
superior to ballpoint pens as writing instruments, so ballpoints
although popular are not recommended for good writing. How¬
ever, not all dip-pens are good, for some are sharply pointed and
may scratch the paper rather than run smoothly over the surface of
the paper.
The triangular reed was the writing instrument for the Mesopo¬
tamian cuneiform. In Egypt and in classical Greece and Rome
writing on papyrus was by the reed. A stylus of ivory, bone, or
metal was a convenient tool to scratch the surface of the wax tablet.
Just when the quill was introduced is not clear but a reference to the
quill pen was made by St. Isidore of Seville in a.d. 624. The wing
feathers used for quill pens were commonly the third or fourth of a
goose, but quills from the swan, turkey, raven, and crow have
often served as pens. Quills curve slightly according to whether
they are taken from the right or left wing of a bird. A choice would
depend upon whether the scribe preferred the quill to bend in a
curve away from the hand or towards it.
Bronze pen-nibs were made by the Romans and there are a few
examples in museums: one in the British Museum has a rough left-
85
 PENS

oblique point (such as left-handers might use today) and it could

have been used and was suitable for writing the Roman rustic
script. A Spanish calligrapher, Juan de Yciar, in his book Arte
Subtilissima published in 1550, mentions pens of brass, iron, and
steel for a ‘black letter’ script, but he thought that a vulture quill was
best for the particular purpose.
A steel pen was made by Samuel Harrison in 1780 for Dr. Joseph
Priestley, whilst a certain Mr. Wise made a split cylinder pen in
1803 which was sold for 5s. each. The metal machine-made dip-pen
which is slipped into a holder was evolved early in the nineteenth
century, but in slow stages. In 1809 Joseph Bramah invented a
machine for cutting up quills and using the parts as pen-nibs. Some
years later, tortoiseshell pen-nibs with diamond, ruby, and gold
points, were patented by J. I. Hawkins and S. Mordan. Machine-
made pens were probably introduced by John Mitchell about 1822,
whilst James Perry has the credit for being the first maker of the
steel slit-pen with a hole at the base of the slit (1830). Joseph Gillott
patented an improved pen-point in 1831. About this time the quill
pen began to give way to the steel pen.
The later pen-nibs were made not only from rolled sheets of the
finest steel but also of other metals. Moreover, the need for pens to
be easy-running then produced pens with a square or oblique point.
The first italic nib, the ‘Flight Commander’, was made at the
suggestion of the author in 1931 by Geo. W. Hughes, St. Paul’s Pen
Works, Birmingham, but is no longer manufactured.
Today, fountain-pens are seen everywhere and many of the
manufacturers of such convenient pens have fitted them with italic
nibs. The fountain-pen could be called a reservoir pen, for the barrel
carries a supply of ink. A complicated reservoir pen was made in
1809 by Bartholomew Folsh but it was in December 1819 that
James Henry Lewis patented a quill reservoir pen which he called
‘The Caligraphic (sic) Fountain Pen’ and which is the forerunner of
86
 PENS

the modem fountain-pen. Lewis was a writing-master and is referred

to on page 56. The commercial production of the fountain-pen and
its popularity began in 1880. To give the pen a long life, the nib of
the fountain-pen may be of 14 carat gold or of steel but with an
iridium tip. Some fountain-pens have nibs that can be replaced,
some take cartridges loaded with ink, whilst others may be filled by
suction or capillary attraction.
There are common things which are remarkably efficient and
useful, although they are very cheap: for example, pins and buttons.
The nib of the common dip-pen is one of these, for it may cost very
little and yet is expected to be so efficient that it will convey a
constant and consistent stream of ink down a slit as wide as a hair.
This is all the more remarkable when one thinks that various forces
come into play on the ink. There is not only gravity but capillary
attraction and the surface tension of fluids, and there are slight
movements of the split parts of the nib which, in the act of writing,
squeeze or cease to squeeze the ink down the slit. It is not surprising
therefore that pens must be kept clean if they are to write with a
regular flow of ink.
The sort of pen used should match the style of handwriting. The
copperplate hand is one where thicks, thins, and gradations of
strokes, are produced by varying the pressures exerted on the nib
when writing. The split parts of the pointed nib spread and come
together again by the varying pressures of pen on paper. So the
suitable pen for copperplate is one pointed and flexible.
A different and better sort of pen is that which does not require
the skill to regulate pressures but makes thicks, thins, and gradations
according to the direction of strokes and how the pen is held. This
pen has a square or oblique point and has less flexibility. The point is
sometimes described as a chisel-edge, and may be broad, medium,
or fine. The thinnest stroke will run at right-angles to the thickest
stroke and this characteristic will give a pleasing regularity to
87
 PENS

writing. Such a pen is right for the italic hand and is square-pointed
unless the writer is left-handed, when a left-oblique is suitable (see
page ioo). There are also pens which make little or no difference in
the thickness of strokes and not all of these are ballpoints.

Fig. 24. The manufacture of Chinese ink. From

Ink, by C. Ainsworth Mitchell. Sir Isaac
Pitman & Sons

88
 Ink

T o use a pen one needs ink. As with pens, a rough division can
be made into two sorts: there are carbon inks and iron-gall
inks.
A carbon ink is essentially a mixture of soot and gum or glue
mixed with water. The soot is a fine lamp-black and might be
prepared by the burning of wood or oil, but today the soot may be
gas-black. The Chinese prepared such inks for use in solid sticks or
blocks, cylindrical or rectangular. The writer, as he needs ink, rubs
the stick ofink gently on a stone with a little water. The quality of the
ink depends upon what is burnt to make the soot (pine branches
were preferred), on the animal gum or glue which holds the soot
together, and on the grinding. As calligraphy is valued so highly by
the Chinese it follows that ink and brush was a matter of fastidious
choice (‘the ink supports the brush and the brush supports the ink’).
An indication of extreme meticulosity is given by Professor Ch’en
Chih-Mai in Chinese Calligraphers and Their Art. He tells of a tenth-
century ink-maker Li T’ing-kuei whose formula for ink-making
was i-J pound of pine soot, 3 ounces of ground mother-of-pearl,
1 ounce of ground jade, 1 ounce of Baroos camphor, plus a quantity
of raw lacquer. This mixture was pounded 100,000 times! The
author remarks that in moments of extravagance Li T’ing-kuei also
mixed into the compound such expensive materials as rhinoceros-
horn, pomegranate peel, gamboge, croton-oil bean, and cinnabar.
When the ink dried it was as hard as jade.
The ancient Egyptians used carbon inks for writing on papyrus.
The Romans used sepia from the cuttle fish as well as the carbon inks
89
 INK

which Pliny said were made from soot taken from the Furnaces of
the Baths. Indian ink, sold in bottles, is also a carbon ink, and may
have an addition of shellac to make it waterproof.
The first reference to iron-gall ink was made by Theophilus, a
monk of the eleventh century, who described an ink prepared from
a mixture of an extract of thorn wood with green vitriol (iron
sulphate). There is reason to believe, however, that the earliest
known vellum document, one of Demosthenes’s De FalsoLegatione,
written in the second century a.d., and even the Codex Siniaticus of
the fourth century a.d. were written with an iron-gall ink.
In the sixteenth-century writing-books we find recipes to make
ink from galls, copperas, gum Arabic, and wine or rain water. Jean
de Beauchesne’s recipe is a quart of wine, two ounces of gum, three
of copperas, and five of galls, but proportions differ in various
recipes. Gall nuts, which contain tannin, are called in England oak
apples and are caused by gall-flies. Copperas is known today as proto¬
sulphate of iron. Roman or green vitriol is a source also of sulphate
of iron and was an alternative to copperas.
When made, an iron-gall ink would be pale but would darken
when exposed to the air. In inks sold in our stationers’ shops an
indigo or black dye has been added. The use of indigo for ink,
though described in 1770, was introduced by Dr. Henry Stephens
in England in 1836.
A jet black ink may have carbon particles suspended in the fluid
and these particles may clog the slit of a pen and prevent a free flow.
Some inks are a mixture of the two sorts: carbon and iron-gall.
Chinese ink will give the blackest writing and be the most permanent
of contemporary inks but it will lie on the surface of vellum, stuck
down by the gum or glue which is a component. Iron-gall inks may
penetrate the surface of paper and have been known to eat into it
destructively in ancient documents. The ink of ballpoint pens is
slightly sticky and is nearer to the inks used in printing.
90
 INK

The calligrapher of today making illuminated manuscripts would

use coloured inks as well as carbon black ink for his formal book-
script. These coloured inks would not be red, blue, or green draw¬
ing inks sold in bottles for draughtsmen but would be prepared
from pigments. He would choose pure opaque pigments of good
quality that do not fade or discolour, such as those used for illumina¬
ting.
A feature pleasing to mothers is that some inks are washable.
Teachers may come to like the ink-cartridges of some fountain-pens.
Another comforting thought is that in England ink does not freeze in
fountain-pens and ink bottles. Ink is sometimes called writing fluid,
but two words are not necessarily better than one.

9i
 Paper, Vellum, and Papyrus

P aper, like pens and ink, has a long history. The oldest paper
that can be dated is one made by the Chinese in a.d. 406 but the
invention is traditionally attributed to an official of the Han Court,
Ts’ai Lun, in a.d. 105, who is said to have used as raw materials rags,
fishing-nets, and tree bark. The knowledge of the Chinese process
was carried overseas to Korea and thence to Japan in the seventh
century. The Arabs learned the method from Chinese prisoners
taken in Samarkand in a.d. 751. The oldest known European paper
bearing a date, namely a.d. 1102, is a deed of King Roger II of
Sicily. In Europe paper began to be used for the less important
documents, household accounts, etc. in the fourteenth century.
Most paper used in England before the seventeenth century was
imported, but a paper-mill was established at Stevenage by John
Tate in the fifteenth century.
The forerunner of paper was papyrus, made in ancient Egypt
from a reed-like plant belonging to the sedge family (Cyperus
papyrus). This aquatic plant grew abundantly along the Nile and the
Delta, but it is no longer found in Egypt, though it grows in Sicily.
The earliest example of papyrus discovered so far is a blank sheet
which dates back to the First Dynasty. Plate 16 shows Roman
cursive writing on papyrus.
The long triangular stems of the plant bear a mop-head of thread¬
like growths. Six such stalks, signifying Lower Egypt, are repre¬
sented in the Narmer Palette (Figure 2).
The Egyptians produced papyrus from strips of the pith of the
92
 PAPER, VELLUM, AND PAPYRUS

plant arranged in two layers, with strips laid side by side and touch¬
ing. The first layer was perpendicular and the second horizontal.
By soaking in the Nile water and by addition possibly of glue, the
two crosswise layers were united. Then the sheets were pressed,
pounded, and dried in the sun, and finally the side formed by the
horizontal strips was polished by shells or ivory, and rendered fit
to receive writing. The sheets would be joined to make a roll, which
might on occasions be over ioo feet long. Greece and Rome im¬
ported papyrus from Egypt in rolls about thirty feet long and about
nine inches wide. In Imperial Rome papyrus was graded according
to its quality.
Paper is made of vegetable fibres, pounded to a pulp and thinned
out by water. In the eighteenth century, because of an expanding
demand for paper for printing and writing, there were searches for
inexpensive substitutes for cotton rags, and Dr. Jacob Schaeffer, a
German clergyman, experimented with almost eighty different
substances, including potatoes, beans and cabbages. Today, the best
writing papers have cotton and linen rags in their composition,
others have esparto grass.
Hand-made paper, though the most durable of papers, is rapidly
becoming rare. A hand-made paper is difficult to tear because of the
interlocking of the fibres. A slightly rough surface is corrected by
hot-pressing. There are many machine-made papers which are
tough and durable and have a surface smooth enough to allow the
pen to run easily.
The mould for making paper by hand is like a shallow frame and
is usually of mahogany. The covering of the mould through which
water drains is either a laid wire sieve, for ‘laid’ papers, or a woven
wire cloth, for ‘wove’ papers. When a sheet is held up to the light
the sort of covering, whether laid or wove, shows through, and a
laid paper reveals lines some distance apart, but a wove paper is
without lines. The watermarks are designs that are nearly trans-

93
 PAPER, VELLUM, AND PAPYRUS

parent: a design in wire is attached to the wire sieve or cloth of the

mould, which will thin the fibres and show the design.
The mould is framed by the ‘deckle’ which limits the size of the
paper and gives it its deckle edge. The deckle edges are the rough,
thin, uncut edges of a sheet of hand-made paper. The ‘vat-man’
when making a sheet of paper dips the mould into the ‘stuff’ (pulp)
in a vat and gives it a shake to mat the fibres. Water drains away.
The sheet is removed and squeezed between felts (which explains
why hand-made papers sometimes have hairs on the surface). The
sheet is then dried and sized to prevent ink sinking into it, as it
does in blotting-paper, and is ‘finished’ by being pressed.
Mass production by machine frequently develops from hand
processes. The cut and shaped quill is the ancestor of the fountain-
pen. Ink has the same constituents whether made in small or large
quantities. The processes of paper-making by hand are imitated by
complicated machines, except that sheets may be of tremendous
length.
Paper has replaced prepared skins as a writing material except for
such ceremonial documents as the roll of honour, the Royal
Patent, and the presentation address, which may be illuminated in
gold and colours. The prepared skins are known as parchment or
vellum and are from lamb, calf, or kid. The skin is called vellum if
from a calf, but parchment iffrom a lamb, but the use of the names is
not always precise. The finest vellums are the small skins of calves
unborn or which died at birth. The vellum-maker supplies skins
ready for writing but the calligrapher dusts the surface with a
resinous gum called sanderach to prevent the ink soaking in.
When writing is erased and the skin is used again for writing, the
manuscript is called a palimpsest. Plate 14 shows an example.

94
 The Teaching of Handwriting

I n mediaeval times the teaching and practice of writing was

principally supported by the monastic scriptoria, the notaries,
the scriveners, and the Government clerks. Before the Dissolution
of Monasteries the chantry priests would teach the young, but the
Reformation caused their place to be taken by parish priests and
others. Scribes making copies of texts became redundant by the
invention of printing, but scriveners were needed for the writing of
legal documents, and were organized by Guilds and recruited by
apprenticeship, which usually lasted seven years.
The late Sir Hilary Jenkinson studied The Common Paper of the
Scriveners' Company ofLondon and found the names of 585 scriveners
active between 1540 and 1628. York also was an important centre of
professional handwriting. The requirements of the Government
were met by clerks writing hands special to the particular office, the
Royal Chancery, the Pipe Roll Office, the Exchequer, the Courts
of the Common Pleas.
After the Dissolution grammar schools were founded by Edward
VI and Elizabeth and by merchants and lawyers, and in these schools
the pupils would be taught ‘fair writing’, but some grammar
schools required entrants to be able to write. The petty schools
were for younger pupils to learn the three R’s.
A famous writing school within Christ’s Hospital was founded
about 1577 with a master and an usher to teach writing and the
casting of accounts, but prior to this foundation John Watson, the
first teacher of writing at the Hospital, received -£3 6s. 8d. in 1553.
A later master at the school, Jonathan Pickes, referred to on page
95
 THE TEACHING OF HANDWRITING

56, taught 200 pupils, but early in the eighteenth century, when the
accomplished George Shelley was the Master, the attendance had
risen to 455. (Shelley was dismissed after seventeen years of service
and among the charges made against him was one of staying out
late at nights.)
Plate 36 is from a thin book of examples of scripts written on
vellum by John Bowack for presentation to the Earl of Oxford,
Lord High Treasurer, on 31 December 1712. Bowack was writing-
master at Westminster School for some years. This amusing page
of the specimen book gives a display of various scripts and is a
demonstration of skill, but such a mixture hardly counts as fine
calligraphy. The words in the bottom panel Capacious, Ocean,
Unconfind, and Southern were written in the narrow Italian Hand
and are in contrast with the wider letters of the Round Hand.
The writing-master of the Tudor period would write the models
to be copied, but the publication of printed writing-books lightened
his task. Competition had the effect of making many copy-books
into exhibitions of skill in penmanship and engraving, and often it
was the decoration of writing by flourishes that was significant
rather than the writing. Doubtless teaching was also done by
itinerant writing-masters. Whilst boys were taught to write, read,
and cast accounts, the teaching of girls to write in schools was
dilatory. Martin Billingsley stated in 1618 that the ungrounded
opinion of many was that writing was unnecessary for women, but
he regarded it as commendable. Governesses would teach the ladies
of the ‘gentle’ classes, but Elizabeth I and Lady Jane Gray had
scholars as tutors: Roger Ascham taught Elizabeth, who did him
much credit as a teacher by her penmanship when a princess (Plate
32).

The author was able to bring to notice numerous letters written

from Cambridge to Elizabeth and Lord Burghley in fine italic
hands. Most of the Public Orators at Tudor Cambridge University
96
 in j W5 jc.rijrtn o^fmdu tutrttrn rum trrrn

d ^rtno^iu4 bo ^rc^<x £it

\nrU)UntuU^ f f f 1 c f* ' °
1 ^ c aiturr orxio iactraotaki • bttvhmms act:

veney*Ul*m ^cxwnAat ILoryuxnurn trn^ermm

f in ptr^cnuirri {arch a &rpvp$

QtUf*trcvntfubt in Gernuinos QlliMtitt <T{o >

'* \J l c-& lu*4 ♦
manus Tormfrx 'ZZl^nariat fciluet-

TLet^tm Jranccrtmi rum

^ j>rocv cjuod tcmtpj>otzjfzt&

erat^nitiht a dtpc^uU : ct Ttjn /

rmm (arch nva^rn inr^atxmt

in tint locum : cmntfcj: 'Jran /

cv^rwX6 a fiAtlucUit absoUut.

JeSvrUtn etrs j ^nrocentm^ t>cwtz cruartvtt 7riAerutmxj

Jwj^z^rrn? /if45 U^Urnn ^z-ccwht Sc

30. Italic hand of an anonymous scribe. Hadrianns: De Romanae Ecclesiae Postestate

About 1490. Harvard College Library.
■
J
VI

jaw •».
i\r. V
■
* •.

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• .i
•:'r ,»vi
i
3
!
I
I

31. Part of a Papal brief to Cardinal Wolsey. 27th August, 1519. Writing attributed
to Arrighi. Public Record Office (S.P.1/19, f. 11). From A Handwriting Manual.
 though your hitfnys fetters fernowl ie\;Luil to, me m afjens,yet a

p a me tiit ys to you tc Write ** your trace ferine jojpr'cnt With i

yefur cofttev nut

yottr feltfc with the Wei iiktttge of the country} With thy it
that your peace Wtjjhed me with you tti I Ware Wery of if

tilthtiys were [ike to he comfered if 1 ffufdc not depart ty(

bernse With \jouy ciftfouoh fit were tti tfc worjlrn t

ynrprcjence wofde make it pfenfant . -f can not rep roue'

not dottipc your comemfnci/ons m his fettur for fc did fit:

O r ^ f r .r ft

fie had not}y:t f wif not cop lame on him tor that
yuc me -Lttole^c frome tnne to trmc foW fie

l Were at im birth no dom l wofde fc iwn

f.%
put vou to ■ faster "Dentil- pud nijf
* ‘ for
tq i vour
^ j ; r f (trace
u; / o v t ^

prni/eth me si mtiref/^ prnm^t the almyofith/

luck. 1/ Heitueranct, find my misfres wdseth

■oTr -huttibe! thtt&i for her ctfmcnciauorti

1for this Inst-dm nil

*j

32. Letter written by Elizabeth I when a princess to Thomas Seymour, husband of

Catherine Parr. 1548. British Museum (Cotton MS. Otho C.X.).
 f ^-{j reamtf ytw L. fig L ft
- ^k&uft.wfafin 1 tf«*s uyfcff £mufe „ £
v tor /««»• mufeff an& ureceBus S«> r c „ • */ J~' ”

fvat a iMtm m ' [<( *' * ft £ciJy/our I~. w/ww

’-'Jfrimtf rgg vfth
J^Kc &t cmbCe Btt^J^ fft i™**Jf^at

*7*P*&Yi&ts£#l *£&<*»
"Ai- jfort^ir f,„ cs^. * 'Ljf“7 «<«,£r
.1 J "7 '* Jcviif™of THcuemSa-^
(ouem£er tfyf.

L. (it cvnntjfi}Hi{zvHtHt
&S ycttv ft mu:

(- J ^
- s~> _
-iCT
jjr ■■ ,l
/*[■».:..: i .

33. Letter written by the Earl of Essex when aged nine to Lord Burghley. 1575.
British Museum (Lansdownc 22, ft 200).
 t is t(iejmrt of a yciuje man to rcuerctice Cis cfifcrs, am f offucCc
to cdoosc out tf)e Ccffe an/ moil: commcncCafwhofc anmjarlcj
an/anCLcritic face mayc Cane zmtvCFcr tfie vtfhCjuinfc rf
tauCrjrarcs muff fy oCCtnais cxvcriencc, fc cr/rc/CtPjoucrn.

.frB.CrD-'ETq.U'f.K.

34. Italic hand from A Booke Containing Divers Sortes oj Hands by Jean de Bcauchesnc.
1570. From A Handwriting Manual.

c rr . /
abed e j p ink / m a of cj rJj t v u wx // c dO
Ci r x - ~ r S' / r /-
pjuc cpojen floe clean Can a m cj / immaculate waiC. (0^0)
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tie: an fdecorling tv tine cm matin demon tee cured
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l Oou m’AleddAtheumif cdutCo omnipotent^ ’etc
r ^ r k
lid [far mamCarrmine enemies, 0 lord, thou Jmewet i

JO: UJiUUCJ.

35. A page of The Writing Schoolmaster or the Anatomy ofFaire Writing

by John Davies of Hereford. 1663. From A Booh oj Scripts.
 1
i'
v V"" C v '• ^ v ^
;» 0 on,Greatkf3?ttatima claims your care,
J6oh)Vbohm anti fctrcrD bv a tedious Jran
Wixjmites tobilc’Y<?£7 erect BcrbroopiujllcaD,
% 11b ^iolumg* Vigour d)ro cad) member %tati.
vO v * w 1 <-\;x ^'

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1 downev
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• V ^ N,• ' •— . , ""■''S ' *
• Did not yowvHj/Para point out remedies.,;.
<V * 0 * C 0 ^ ,‘ ' c \ C> o
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•
..f(ndOcnlincn/jtfic«Ta/z/Ona.7a?fan//n•///. 0

36. Specimen scripts written by John Bowack for the Earl of Oxford. 31st December,
17 [2. British Museum (Harley MS. 1809).
 HE wot i iw(tftc Uisloviaus
luwc related tiiai tUc
dicr oj l\(ia fpcf ,\v(io SV<4>»
uiffed P>emunU Ks’as feme oj the flood
oj die ancient (u'nys oj Ycrsia ; jajjtev
tlk e (it) [ere UttheVt \V7(S tu (ft) x'oano days
J . j r , t>
A SStyDruyi’etoJ the > treT A tut yrtes f eft
the jy're teinyfc o j the td\ oj Hrt f k(>;
Yift 5addenW by the decree oj tftc divine
ntercsywUlch Sttjjert not the e(ecf to
Ji'de tit error, thesyarUs oj trntfisvere
lighteeftfp ftt (if) tntrafi ettid the ofor/of
’ > / { f ^
ms State recetvea tiesy syleiuionrj ram
the rcjuiociit graces oj ^siaam: With
fas fstn arid (ns ^oorfv (te deyarleefand

cdmC to 0antascctSr svhere a * t fieri

37. Trial page written by William Morris. About 1875. Bodleian Library
(MS. Eng. Misc. d. 265, f. 6).'
 C cmic & 5tf ivruie my skmeymvc that

marmu/ry w nancy
k sweet as it (rends lo'
the sdjt western breezy ; & Ic tins he nay
dwjymhj jcimtam^rtwre ’ j (rimy sweet
sleep,pUunny on my lonely reeds_>

du/ms, tkt rertlieg the keeper 6^ the nymph*

sheep, chyrsvs wherpipes on tht> reed khc'Yaov,
havmp dmvnh at noon, sleeps vender the shady
pvn€j> & Love Iwmseij' has taken the crcnslt (S
Matches the.’ tiodesd^

38. A Ncu> Handwriting for 'Feathers by Mrs. M. M. Bridges. First published 1898.
Oxford University Press. From Renaissance Handwriting.
 THE TEACHING OF HANDWRITING

were excellent penmen, and preferred the italic hand for their
ceremonial letters.
In future the teaching of handwriting may be by loop-films,
for this device would not only show clearly the movements making
letter shapes, but relieve any teacher who found himself an in¬
adequate and reluctant performer.
Usually a pupil learns to write by copying carefully the letters
and joins .of a model hand. Time and again in history, pupils have
been taught by tracing the letters of the model. Beauchesne’s
manual for Elizabethans gives this rule:‘To folio we strange hand
with drie penne first prove’, which means one could use a pen
without ink and trace the letters as if one were actually writing.
By tracing, both the shapes and the movements which make them
could be learnt. G. B. Palatino, an Italian calligrapher of the six¬
teenth century, used another method of tracing, namely to take a
tablet of hard wood or copper with the alphabet cut into it. The
beginner, using a stylus of tin, was intended to trace the incised letters
to learn their shapes. Erasmus recommended both these methods.
Pupils are taught by teachers but they have also to teach them¬
selves. They need to be critics of their own performances and should
examine their writing to see how they can improve. This means
they should know what produces good writing. A helpful way of
forming taste is to study writing one believes to be good whether
the examples are of the past or the present.
Richard Brinsley wrote in 1612 in Ludus Literarius: ‘Great care
should bee had withall, to make every writer to keepe even compasse
in the height, greatnesse, and breadth of his letters; that no one letter
stand either too high or too lowe, be over long, or over short, nor
anie way too bigge, or too little, too wide or too narrow’. He
might have added: ‘It should be just right!’ What he was aiming at
was regularity.
When copying one has to go slowly but when the pupil has
' 97
 THE TEACHING OF HANDWRITING

passed that elementary stage then his writing will change. Running
is different from walking and the movements in quick writing will
not be the same as when carefully copying the model. Writing
will become more personal and individual. So the model is like a
sign-post: it points the way but does not take it. The model should
encourage writing with a rhythm (writing is a dance of the pen) and
a pattern that is not against legibility.
Writing looks sloppy if it does not have a regular slant: i.e. the
straight downstrokes should have a consistent slant or be vertical,
according to the style. A backslant is to be avoided. Backslant may
be due to the elbow being too far from the body or to the hand
as a whole not being moved enough and the movements being
wholly controlled by the bending of fingers and thumb. Most good
writers think any slant should be slight and in the direction of the
writing. The forward slant must not be so great that the letters look
to be tumbling down. Sharply angular letters brought very close
together make reading difficult, whilst letters flattened and widely
spread and spaced, lead to a sprawling unattractive writing.
As handwriting is by movements of the pen, certain selected drills
and exercises are valuable. Of particular value in learning any
Western handwriting style are drills which are short words with
contrary movements, clockwise and counter-clockwise, as in n and
u. A set of such words is as follows: an, bun, can, dim, end, fun, gun,
hum, inn, jam, kin, lump, mum, nun, one, pun, quince, run, sun, tan,
unto, van, won, yon, zinc.
Spacing is very important to good appearance, whether of letters
or of words or of lines or of the whole writing on the sheet. Letters
are more legible when they appear to be equally spaced. Margins
will set off writing.
Capitals do not have to be large or too flourished or they may
be too obtrusive. Everybody who receives handwriting will be
pleased if it is clear and easy to read and particularly if it has a good
98
 THE TEACHING OF HANDWRITING

appearance. ‘Practice makes perfect’ is quoted in Figure 18 but

perfection is hard to attain and something less has to be accepted in
fast writing for changes are inevitable and occur both from speed
and personality. However, writing is a fundamental skill in making
small shapes and it is by practice that skill is developed.

Fig. 25. Teaching the alphabet. Woodcut from Ein

heylsame lere und predig by Geiler von
Keiserberg. 1490. (From Calligraphy &
Palaeography)
 Left-handed Writers

O ur handwriting has been developed over the centuries by the

right-handed, but in spite of this handicap there are left-
handed persons who write very well indeed. In Teaching Left-
handed Children, Miss Margaret Clark has given particulars of a
survey held in Scotland in 1953 which showed that among pupils
of ten to eleven years of age there were more left-handed boys than
girls and more in cities than in rural areas. In contrast there is the
statement in the Old Testament (Judges 20, v. 16) that among the
children of Benjamin ‘there were seven hundred chosen men left-
handed; every one could sling stones at an hair breadth, and not
miss’. If this number was out of‘twenty and six thousand men that
drew sword’ then the proportion of left-handed was considerable.
The principal strokes made by the right-handed, whether the
movements are straight or curved, are down, towards the body,
and up, away from the body. The strokes away from the body are
naturally to the right by the right-handed. The outward movement
of the left-handed is opposite and to the left. The left-handed must
therefore learn to make strokes to the right as they are made by the
right-handed.
Advice to the left-handed is to place the writing-paper a little to
the left of the body and to slant it so that the top left corner is
higher than the top right corner. To avoid smudging, the hand
should be below and not hooked above the writing. What in
particular the left-handed may have difficulty with are the upward
movements to the right. In the italic hand the hair-line upstrokes
are most important for fluency, and the left-handed are helped to
100
 LEFT-HANDED WRITERS

make them by using a pen with a left-oblique point. Such pens are
available. Another italic pen on the market for left-handers is one
where there is a bend to the left near the point and the slit is not
straight but has an angle.
The left-handed writers of other styles suffer a second handicap
if sharp-pointed steel nibs are used which may scratch the paper. A
blunt pen which can be pushed against its point without much
resistance or friction would be suitable for them. Fingers-and-thumb
movements to form the letters and words are more appropriate to
the left-handed than movements of the whole hand, except, of
course, that the hand must move to the right as the writing pro¬
gresses across the page.

Fig. 26. From Sigismundo Fanti’s Theorica et pratica de modo scribendi.

1514. (From Renaissance Handwriting)
 Some Books to Consult

F or the history of ancient scripts the following works are recom¬

mended and should be available in Public Libraries:

A Study of Writing by I. J. Gelb, University of Chicago Press,

1952, revised 1963.
The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind by David Diringer,
Hutchinson, 3rd edition 1968.
The Decipherment of Linear B by John Chadwick, Cambridge
University Press, 1958, revised i960.
Ancient Writing and Its Influence by B. L. Ullman, Harrap, 1932.
Articles on Palaeography by Julian Brown in The Encyclopaedia
Britannica and by R. W. Hunt in Chambers's Encyclopaedia, 1966.
The Handwriting of English Documents by L. C. Hector, Edward
Arnold Ltd., 1956, revised 1966.
Elizabethan Handwriting by Giles E. Dawson & L. Kennedy-
Skipton, Faber & Faber Ltd., 1968.
A Newe Booke of Copies 1574. A facsimile of an Elizabethan
Writing Book, edited by B. L. Wolpe, Oxford University
Press, 1962.
A Book of Scripts, Penguin Books Ltd., 1949, revised 1968.

Some books relating to Renaissance Handwriting are:

The Origin & Development.of Humanistic Script by B. L. Ullman,
Rome, i960.
Renaissance Handwriting: An Anthology of Italic Scripts by Alfred
Fairbank and Berthold Wolpe, Faber & Faber Ltd., i960.
102
 SOME BOOKS TO CONSULT

The Script of Humanism by James Wardrop, Oxford University

Press, 1963.

Books on formal calligraphy:

Writing & Illuminating, & Lettering by Edward Johnston, John
Hogg, 1906. Numerous later editions published by Sir Isaac
Pitman & Sons.
The Calligrapher s Handbook. A collection of essays by calli¬
graphers, Faber & Faber Ltd., 1956, revised 1968.

The author has also published the following works:

A Handwriting Manual, Faber & Faber Ltd. Third revised edition
1961.
Beacon Writing Books (with Charlotte Stone and Winifred
Hooper), Ginn & Co. Ltd., 1957-61.
Humanistic Script, Bodleian Library Picture Book (with R. W.
Hunt), i960.
The Italic Hand in Tudor Cambridge (with Bruce Dickins), Bowes
& Bowes, 1962.

103
 Index

Abban, 26, Pi. 3 Bickham, George, 54, 56

Abecedariuin, 39, Pi. 11 Billingsley, Martin, 96
Accadians, 26 Bittati, 26, Pi. 3
Acrophonic principle, 21 Book of Hours, Pi. D
Adam and Eve, 19 Book of Kells, 43
Ahiram, King of Byblos, 36, 38 Book of the Dead, 71, Pi. 5
Alcuin of York, 45 Bouchard, 31
Aldred, Pi. 19 Bowack, John, 96, Pi. 36
Aldus Manutius, 51 Brahma, 19
Alphabets, 23, 33, 36-42, 58, 59, 62, 64 Bramah, J., 86
Altamira cave paintings, 19 Bridges, M. M., 61, Pi. 38
Ammurabi, 26, Pi. 3 Bridges, Robert, 37, 56, 76
Ampersand, 64, 66 Brinsley, R., 97
Ani Papyrus, 71, Pi. 5 Brushes, 30, 89
Arabian Nights, 61, Pi. 37 Burghley, Lord, 96, Pi. 33
Arrighi, Ludovico degli, 48, 49, 51, 61,
Pi. 31 Cambridge penmen, 51, 96
Ascham, Roger, 51, 96 Camp, Ann, 70
Assyrians, 26 Carpi, Ugo da, 61
Athens, 39 Carstairs, Joseph, 56
’Atshana, 26, Pi. 3 Cennini, Pietro, 48
Chadwick, John, 32, 33
Babylonians, 19, 26 Champion, J., 19
Ballpoints, 77, 85, 90 Champollion, J. F., 31, 32, 33
Beauchesne, Jean de, 46, 52, 90, 97, Charlemagne, Emperor, 44, 45
PI.34 Charles I, 53, 56
Behiston, Rock of, 32 Cheke, Sir John, 51
Benedictional of St. Ethelwold, Pi. B Ch’cn Chih-Mai, Professor, 29, 89
Benjamin, Tribe of, 100 Chien Lung, Emperor, 30
Berenice, 32 Chinese radical, 22, Pi. 8

104
 INDEX

Chou bronze vessels, 29 Gillott, J., 86

Christ’s Hospital, 56, 95 Goddard, J., 53, 56
Clark, Margaret, 100 Gray, Lady Jane, 96
Cleopatra, 32 Greece, 20, 38, 39, 85, 93
Command of hand, 56, 73, 96 Grotefend, G. F., 32
Corbie, 45 Gutenberg, Johann, 48
Coster, L., 48
Croke, Richard, 51 Half-uncials, 43, Pi. 18
Cumae, 39 Handwriting [see Writing)
Curio, Giacomo, PI. 27 Harrison, S., 86
Cyprus, 33 Hawkins, J. I., 86
Henry VIII, 51
Darius the Great, 32 Heraldry, 20, 45, 72
Davies, John, 55, Pi. 35 Hermes, 19
Dead Sea Scrolls, 35 Hewitt, Graily, 60, 61
Deciphering of ancient scripts, 31-5 Hierakonpolis, 27
Demosthenes, 90 Hittites, 26
Determinatives, 21, 22, 25, 27, Pi. 8 Homonyms, 22
Differences in styles, 77-9 Honore, Pi. C
Direction of writing, 28, 39, 40, 77 Hughes, Geo. W., 86
Diringer, Dr. David, 38
Dissolution of Monasteries, 95 Ideograms, 20, 22, 25, 27
Dodington, Bartholomew, 51 Illuminated manuscripts, 45, 61, 67,
71-3, 91, Pi. 24, A, B, C, D
Eadfrith, Bishop, Pi. 19 Initial teaching alphabet, 59
Edward VI, 51, 95 Ink, 30, 89-91
Egypt, 23, 28, 31, 85, 92, 93 Insular half-uncials, 43, Pi. 19
Elamites, 26 Ireland, 43
Elizabeth I, 46, 51, 95, 96, Pi. 32 Italian Renaissance, 20, 47-52
Erasmus, 97 Italic print-script, 58, 60
Essex, Earl of, 52, Pi. 33 Italic types, design of, 51
Etruscans, 39, 41 Italy, 43
Evans, Sir Arthur, 33
Jackson, J., 56, 57
Fanti, S., 61, 101 Jemdet Nasr, 26, Pi. 1, 2
Folsh, B., 86 Jenkinson, Sir Hilary, 95
France, 43 Johnston, Edward, 59, 61, 68, 70, 84
Joins in writing, 27, 47, 55, 63, 84
Gelb, Professor I. J., 24, 28, 36
Germany, 43 Kent, Duke of, 56
Gestures, 20 King Hafbur & King Si ward, 61
105
 INDEX
Koch, Rudolf, 44 Oracle bones, 29, Pi. 7
Oxford, Earl of, 96, Pi. 3 3
Language, 17, 20, 37, 75
Lascaux cave paintings, 19 Palaeographers, 42, 47
La Somme le Roy, Pi. C Palatino, G. B., 97
Left-handed writers, 100, 101 Palimpsest, 94, Pi. 14
Legibility, 18, 75, 76 Papal briefs, 48, Pi. 31
Leto, Pomponio, 51 Paper, 92-4
Lewis, J. H., 56, 86, 87 Papyrus, 27, 42, 71, 77, 89, 92, 93
Lindisfarne Gospels, 43, Pi. 19 Pattern in writing, 82-4
Li T’ing-kuei, 89 Pens, 30, 55, 62, 68, 77, 81, 85-8, 101
London, Bishop of, 76 Permer, L., 33, Pi. 9
Loop-films, 97 Perry, J., 86
Loudon, 76 Personality, expression of, 18
Lucas, F., 50, 52 Petrarch, 47, Pi. 29
Phaistos Disc, 33, Pi. 9
Phonemes, 21
Majuscules, 42 Phonetic complements, 21, 25
Manius, 41 Phonograms, 25, 27
Marsiliana d’Alberga, 39, Pi. 11 Pickes, J., 56, 95
Massey, W., 19 Pictograms, 20, 21, 24, 77
Master of Mary of Burgundy, Pi. D Pitman, Sir James, 59
Maurdramnus, Abbot, 45 Pliny, 90
McLuhan, Marshall, 66 Plutarch, Pi. A
Mesha, King ofMoab, 38, Pi. 10 Poggio, B., 47, PL 25
Millington, J., 74 Poland, 51
Minuscules, 40, 42 Porteus, Hugh Gordon, 30
Mitchell, C. Ainsworth, 88 Praeneste Brooch, 41
Mitchell, John, 86 Priestley, Dr. J., 86
Moabite Stone, 38, Pi. 10 Printing, invention of, 42, 47, 48, 51,
Mordan, S., 86
67, 7L 95
Morris, William, 61, 67, Pi. 37 Ptolemy V, 31, 32
Movements in writing, 62, 80, 81, 84, Punctuation marks, 64
98, 100
Quill pens, 77, 85
Napoleon, 31 Qumran scrolls, 35
Narmer Palette, 27, 28, 92
Nebo, 19 Radicals, 22, Pi. 8
Niccoli, N., 47, 48, Pi. 26 Ramesseum Ceremonial Papyrus, 71
Numerals, 64, 66 Ramsey Psalter, 68, Pi. 22
Numerius, 41 Ras Shamrah, 37
 INDEX

Rawlinson, Sir H. C., 31, 32, 33 Stylus, 26, 77, 85

Rebus, 22 Sumer, 20, 23, 25
Renaissance, Italian, 47 Syllabaries, 21
Richardson, Marion, 59
Richmond, Duke of, 51 Tagliente, G. A., 61
Roger II, King of Sicily, 92 Tate, John, 92
Roman Academy, 51 Teaching of handwriting, 45, 95-9
Rome, 42, 85, 93 Theophilus, 90
Rooke, Noel, 84 Thoth, 19
Rosetta Stone, 27, 31, 32, 34 Tophio, Antonio, 48, Pi. 29
R.A.F. Books oj Remembrance, 67 Tours, 45
Ruano, F., 51 Trajan Column, Rome, 42, Pi. 13
Rustic capitals, 42, 43, Pi. 15 Ts’ai Lun, 92
Ts’ang Chieh, 19
St. Clement Danes, 67
St. Ethelwold, Pi. B Ugarit, 37
St. Isodore of Seville, 85 Ullman, B. L., 43
St. Martin’s Monastery, 45 Uncials, 43, Pi. 17
Salutati, Coluccio, 47 Unity in writing, 82
San Vito, Bartolomeo, 48 Ur, 25
Schaeffer, J., 93 Uruk (Warka), 25
Scrolls, 35, 71
Seals, 20, 26, Pi. 3 Vatican Chancery, 48, Pi. 30, 31
Senena Stele, Pi. 4 Vellum, 71, 90, 94
Shakespeare, W., 46 Ventris, Michael, 31, 32, 33
Shang-Yin Dynasty, 29 Vespasiano di Bisticci, 72
Shapes in writing, 80, 81 Vicentino (see Arrighi)
Shaw, George Bernard, 75 Virgil, 51, 71, PL 14, 15
Shelley, G., 96
Shiner, Watson, J., 95
Simon, Professor W., 22 Watts, Chi Chou, Pi. 8
Simonis, A. A., Pi. 28 Wax tablets, 42, 77, Pi. 11
Slant in writing, 81, 98 Wellington, Duke of, 76
Society for Italic Handwriting, 62 Westminster School, 96
Society of Antiquaries, 31 White vine illuminating, 73, Pi. 25, 28
Society of Scribes and Illuminators, 67 Wise, Marjorie, 59
Spacing in writing, 83, 84, 98 Wolsey, Cardinal, 48, Pi. 31
Spain, 43, 79 Writing:
Speech, 17, 22 Accadian, 32
Square capitals, 42, 43, Pi. 14 Anglo Saxon, 43, Pi. 19, 20
Stephens, H., 90 Arabic, 38, 77
 INDEX
Writing:—cont. Humanistic cursive (see Italic)
Aramaic, 35 Indus Valley, 23, 33
Assyrian, 26 Italic, 47-52, 61-6, 79, 81, 84, Pi. 26,
Athenian, 39, 40, Pi. 12 29-34
Aztec, 23 Japanese, 79
Babylonian, 26 Latin, 41-3, Pi. 14-18
Boustrophedon, 39, 74, 75 Lettera antiqua, 47
Byblos, 36, 38 Linear, 21, 32, 33
Cancellaresca, 48, Pi. 31 Mediaeval (see Gothic)
Carolingian, 43, 45, 73, Pi. 21-3, B Mesopotamian, 26, 82
Chinese, 22, 23, 29, 30, 75, 79, Pi. 8 Persian, 32
Copperplate, 54-7 Phoenician, 23, 36, 38, 39
Coptic, 32, 33 Phonetic, 21, 59, 75
Court hands, 51, 95 Pictographic, 21, 24
Cretan, 23, 33 Primitive Semitic, 38
Cuneiform, 24, 26, 32, 37, 38, 41, Print-script, 59, 60
77, 82, 85, PL 1-3 Roman (Ancient), 23, 41, 42, 77, 78,
Cursive, 21, 42, 43, 46, 78, 80, 82 83, 85, 89, Pi. 13-16
Cypro-Minoan, 33 Roman (Renaissance), 47, 48, Pi.
Demotic, 27, 31, 82, Pi. 6 25, 27, 28, A
Egyptian, 23,27,31,38.85, pi. 4-6 Secretary hand, 46, 52
Elamite, 32 Stoichedon, 40, 83, Pi. 12
Etruscan, 39, 41 Sumerian, 20, 23-6, 77
Fere humanistica, 47 Syrian, 26, 37
Formal calligraphy, 67-70, 78 Transitional, 21
Foundational hand, 68 Victorian, 56, 57
Gothic, 45, 46, 73, 99, PL 24, C, D Writing-masters, 95, 96, Pi. 34-6
Greek, 23, 31, 38, 39, 41, 42, 77, 78, Writing-pressure, 55, 81
83, 85, Pi. 12 Wyss, Urban, 79
Hebrew, 35, 38, 77
Hieratic, 27, 82, Pi. 5 Yciar, Juan de, 86
Hieroglyphic, 27, 31-3, Pi. 4 Young, Dr. Thomas, 32
Hittite, 23
Humanistic (see Roman, Renais¬ Ziggurat architecture, 25
sance)

jouth Hunterdon Regional High School Library

108
A
/

716.6 C 1
Fa
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AUTHOR 1 1,1 Ua,U
Jl-
/i 1 f rpH
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TITLE
The storv Qfha.nclwr i 11 nou- ]

745.6 Fairbank, Alfred

Fa
The story of
handwriting

DATE DUE

0£C 2 '71
-

. '-f ff
•. . .

<

MP i ^

— UUF %—

GAYLORD FRINTED IN U.S. A.

Alfred fairbank was awarded the
C.B.E. for his services to calligraphy. He
is the author of a number of other books
on the subject, including A Handwriting
Manual, and the Beacon Writing Book,
which was produced in association with
Charlotte Stone and Winifred Hooper
and has helped to form the handwriting
of thousands of children.

CALLIGRAPHIC LETTERING

by Ralph Douglass

Entirely hand-lettered, this best-selling

introductory handbook, now in its fourth
edition, has long been a basic book for
professional lettering men, commercial
artists, teachers, and students of com¬
mercial art. The author begins with the
essentials of tools, materials, correct writ¬
ing position, and practice strokes. He
then introduces the student to the Roman
alphabet; scripts; historic forms such as
black letter, versals, lombardies, and
Irish uncial; brush lettering; designed
letters and type. The reader will also find
an introduction to typefaces, a biblio¬
graphy, and reproductions of historic
examples of calligraphy.

112 pages. 7! x io£. Bibliography.

Index. Spiral or hardbound. $5-95

Watson-Guptill Publications
 -MERCATOR 1
o
LU
DC

A. S. OSLEY 1
DC
LU
*—

Gerard Mercator, the great 16th-century geographer, was exceptional ^

skilled as an engraver and letterer. Professional calligraphers have loi S3
admired his treatise on the italic script, with woodblocks cut by himse
originally published in 1540.

Dr. Osley examines the origins of the italic hand in the Netherlands,
as well as Mercator’s own practice, and reveals the surprising extent of
Mercator’s contribution to calligraphy. He demonstrates the revolutionary
influence which Mercator’s example exercised in the Low Countries, not
only on the lettering of maps and globes, but also on book production,
scientific instruments, and picture-engraving.

A facsimile of the rare first edition of Literarum Latinarum-scribendi ratio,

Mercator’s treatise on lettering, is accompanied by an English translation
by Dr. Osley. This is followed by Osley’s translation of the Vita Mercatoris,
Ghim’s contemporary biography of Mercator, which is both a primary
source for the geographer’s life and an affectionate portrait of a gentle and
lovable humanist. These are the first translations of these works to be
printed in English.

208 pages. 8J x 10^-. 123 black-and-white illustrations. Bibliography.

Index.

$35.00

Watson-Guptill Publications