I have been fiddling around a bit more with these fantasy page-spreads. I have been quite tempted to make an alternative, more decorative version of the Let's Get Lost book: probably not the whole thing, just some selected pages, perhaps even fewer than the condensed Let's Get (a little) Lost. However, as I have sold the princely total of one copy of the original (thanks, whoever you were), it's probably not worth converting this fantasy into hard-copy reality.
In fact, my preference is to make them into these large, framed pairs of faked page-spreads, as mocked-up below, in a sort of dummy dummy book-dummy. (Hey, isn't that a song?)
That's not my real signature, by the way... Far too legible. Mind you, with the decline of cheques into historical memory, I sign my my name so infrequently now that I might well end up using the wobbly "X" that authenticates the birth / marriage / death certificates of some surprisingly recent forebears. Odd, really, that all illiterates seem to have used that same "X" as their mark, rather than something more personal or even creative: I expect that's what they were told to do, and saw no reason not to comply. Literacy is liberating in more ways than one.
2 comments:
When an illiterate signs with an X, doesn't someone who can write have to witness the identity of the person who made the mark? In which case, it doesn't really matter what the mark is, does it?
Interesting idea of having a personal design. When I settle my credit card bill at the end of the month, I always like to have the clerk's signature over the bank's stamp, with the amount paid written in ink. One month, a young woman refused to sign. I think her thought was she didn't want customers to have a specimen of her signature to copy and use fraudulently. Thinking about it, I came up with the same solution for her: as long as she always made the same mark and the bank had a copy of that mark, then it wouldn't matter if that was not the same as her normal personal signature, would it? It would still prove (once compared to the bank's specimen)that she was the one who recorded the amount paid.
Zouk,
True, although in many pre-20th c. communities those literate persons would have been scarce and in great demand, and kept busy doing little else. You could probably have made a living doing it... Hang on, that's a "notary"...
Usually, I think, bank staff "initial" rather than sign documents, probably for that very reason. Because they do it so often, it does effectively become their "mark". Same thing used to happen to most office staff back in paper days.
Mike
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