Loops! Loops! Loops!

Calligraphic graffiti

Handwriting – or, more specifically, the decline in the use of handwriting – has been cropping up as a subject of concern in various places lately. Apparently 23rd January was National Handwriting Day (what, you didn't know?), which may not be unconnected with a recent journalistic flurry, such as this extract from a book in the Guardian. But these pieces are really a sub-category of the perennial worry, "The internet: My God, what have we done?", itself merely a contemporary instance of that eternal lamentation, "Modern life is shit, isn't it?", which is actually what those Palaeolithic cave paintings are all about. Fire? That fire nonsense is for softies – put another skin on, lad! – and don't get me started on what your precious bows and arrows have done to the mammoth population around here... Kids today!

But many of the comments in a Language Hat post, Reading Cursive for the Archives, reminded me of the sad history of my own handwriting. Setting aside the core bewilderment that, apparently, few Young People Today in America are taught and therefore most cannot read "cursive" handwriting – can't read it? Can this really be true? – the various sorry tales of disastrous interventions into the commenter's handwriting style resulting in illegibility brought back some long-buried memories.

At my primary school (Peartree Spring Junior, Stevenage, an admirable institution that seems to come up a lot in these posts) we were taught to write in italics, a beautiful, if somewhat sterile hand when done carefully with the right pen by a budding calligrapher. Other local schools had other preferences, such as the style pioneered by the educator Marion Richardson, as well as that universal British cursive script once described to me by a colleague as "girly curly". But at Peartree it was italic, and we were all required to get a Platignum brand fountain pen (good, cheap, and made in Stevenage) with an italic nib, and a bottle of blue-black ink. 

Well, fine. Except that most 8-year-olds are neither careful nor budding calligraphers, and a few of us have the cheek to be left-handed. Even equipped with a so-called left-handed italic nib – basically one with the flat tip cut off at an angle – the lovely alternating thicks and thins achieved by a few became a cack-handed travesty when using a chisel-tipped tool clearly designed to bury itself nose-first into the page, and wet ink which was constantly smeared by the trailing edge of my hand as it passed across. Omar Khayyam could not have been more wrong:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
     Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Yeah, right, Omar. Lucky old Moving Finger isn't left-handed! Although... Isn't Persian written right to left? So how does that work?

Somewhat cruelly, I think, from a left-hander's point of view, the use of biros and other writing implements with instantly dry ink was banned at both primary and secondary school. Biros, it seemed, lacked moral seriousness, like jeans and coloured shirts. But I learned to cope, mainly by adopting that awkward back-to-front pen grip that so many of us lefties use. Our genius lies in our adaptability.

So things were OK for a while. My writing was never a thing of beauty, but I managed to produce legible schoolwork in those ruled and red-margined exercise books we were all issued with in those days. However, the pressure of nightly homework at secondary school meant I had to speed things up a bit, and the first casualty of haste is legibility, especially when the shapes you have been taught have been designed for the leisurely pace of a monastic scriptorium.

Then disaster struck in the shape of a teacher named George Partridge. George was Old School personified. He had been a pre-war pupil at our school himself (then Alleyne's Grammar, Stevenage), and I believe his father had also taught at the school. He was the only member of staff to wear an academic gown in classes; a real remnant of a previous era in what was now a state school, with a mainly young staff who had graduated in the post-war years. He was very free with spontaneous corporal punishment – he once lined up our entire class for a painful rap on the palm with a cane for mucking about in a music lesson – but was also a talented painter and musician with a deep affection for the school and the boys who had passed through it. However...

One year we had George for our English classes, and it turned out that he had a thing about italic. Basically, he wouldn't tolerate it. He hated those open hooked ascenders and descenders, I have no idea why, and insisted on loops. He refused to mark homework unless and until it complied with his preferences, which, frankly, is insane. It became a battle of wills between us – he would annotate my unmarked work with "Loops! Loops! Loops!" and red-inked examples of what he wanted to see –  a battle I was never going to win, so my handwriting became a peculiar mashup of italic and cursive loops, went into a sulk, and gradually sank into "fuck you" illegibility. At the end of that year, nonetheless, I came top in English, and my report book had a single word summary from him: "Exemplary", with a fancy gothic E. Very George Partridge, that, the old bastard.

The next year we had a new headmaster, also rather Old School, also a gown-wearer, and a different English teacher, an accomplished linguist with a Cambridge PhD. So, early in the school calendar the head came into our classroom and went round the lines of desks, inspecting our efforts over our shoulders as we wrote, accompanied by our teacher. When he came to me, you could sense the double take. He then said, out loud, "This boy's handwriting is ... strange. He's either very bright or very stupid. Which is it, do you think, Dr. Splett?" To which the only possible reply was, "Once I've figured out how to read it myself, I'll let you know, headmaster..."

1965 (age 11)

2006 (age 52)

The use of keyboards, real or virtual, is now so universal it's hard to recall a time when pretty much every kind of communication, private or public, went through a manuscript stage, if we can dignify a page or two of semi-legible scribble that way. But, when it came to typewriters – the steam-engine phase of keyboarding – Omar Khayyam did have a point. If you tried to compose something straight onto paper with a typewriter the chances are that half of it would end up in the bin, or covered in scabs of deathly-white Tipp-Ex "correction fluid", like some horrible disease. Despite a strong family resemblance to the keyboard both you and I are using right now, there is no delete, or cut and paste facility on a typewriter; no, children, not even on an electric one. It's just tap, tap, tap, nooo! Then reach for the Tipp-Ex, or backspace and xxxxxxx over the mistype, or just start all over again... I typed out two master's dissertations myself in those years, and know the meaning of despair.

So, readable handwriting used to have an importance it has more or less lost now. Who cares today if no-one else can read your shopping lists or your self-indulgent "journalling"? But it used to matter a lot, especially if you were in the sort of job where a handwritten draft would be handed to a competent typist to "type up". True, if you were sufficiently senior to have a long-suffering personal secretary then they would probably be able to make sense of your scrawl, but most of us would have to hand off a job to a "typing pool" or, in the intermediate period that lay between fully manual operations and the advent of individual desktop computers, a "data preparation" team.

Even something as humble as a 5" x 3" card of the sort you would find in the drawers of any library catalogue cabinet would start life as a hand-written draft on the back of an old card. This draft was handed to the Data Prep people, who would type out the "body" on a fresh 5x3 card, and then – in what at the time seemed like a masterstroke of labour-saving technological wizardry – rack them into a frame that held a dozen or so, duplicate them with a photocopier onto a sheet of card as many times as required, guillotine the sheet into 5x3s, and then type onto each copy of the body the required "heading" (author, editor, etc.).  So, when I was first chained as a wage-slave into the cataloguing galley of Bristol University Library in 1977 I had to revise my writing style yet again to make it legible enough for a typist to cope with foreign languages or possible ambiguities. There were no excuses for Data Prep being unable to read my Russian transliterations, say, or to muddle "works" with "monks", "wonks", "winks", or worse. 

Initially, the "automation" of office processes brought new variations of essentially the same elaborate procedures: there was still a lot of writing out by hand, passing paper around, and data entry by a pool of skilled typists, initially onto 80-column punched cards, then "dumb" terminals. But with the advent of the networked beige plastic PC on every desk the surge in professional-class DIY – word processing! spreadsheets! databases! – inevitably led to what one of my mentors, Geoffrey Ford, called "horse-holding" jobs. This referred to a Great Teaching, a story – probably apocryphal, or possibly even made up by Geoffrey – according to which an artillery exercise was taking place, and an observer asked what the two soldiers standing idly off to one side of each gun were doing. "They are holding the horses, sir, in case they are panicked by the gunfire, sir!" But there were no longer any horses to hold – horse-drawn gun-carriages having been abandoned by the Royal Artillery decades ago – but the role of Horse Holder had simply persisted, regardless.

As a good trade union activist, I did my best to preserve the ongoing employment of those former horse holders, but with each resignation or retirement the pool of clerical specialists grew ever smaller and, seemingly in direct proportion, our handwriting grew ever more idiosyncratic: no-one else ever needed to read it, after all. As for mine... Well, it was never that legible to start with, unless I carefully printed the individual letters, so it quickly atrophied into a personal semi-shorthand, with a legibility half-life in the worst cases of about three weeks.

Now I'm no graphologist but, as you might expect, artists and writers have often paid more attention to their handwriting than is perhaps typical: not necessarily from a legibility point of view, but as an expression of identity and personality. So much so that the Smithsonian has published a book, Pen to Paper, containing facsimiles of handwritten letters from a broad selection of artists, and there is also a similar compilation by Michael Bird, Artists' Letters: Leonardo da Vinci to David Hockney. Over the years I have acquired a number of handwritten items myself, sent to me by artists and photographers of varying renown; generally seasonal greetings, or notes to accompany the purchase of a book or print. Here are three that came readily to hand which strike me as interesting:

Isn't that extraordinary? Tom Phillips couldn't help himself: even a casual postcard with a gift for a fan has been rendered into a thing of calligraphic beauty. It's intriguing, the way not just letters but entire words have been linked together; the ornamental impulse seems to have overwhelmed the boring quotidian practice of separating words with spaces. Tom's fondness for decorative work undoubtedly hampered his wider reputation as an artist, unfairly I think. For his own thoughts on the matter, see his lecture, The Nature of Ornament.

The handwriting of John Blakemore is utterly distinctive, bold, and very strange: lying somewhere between italic and a 17th century hand. It's attractive but not really what you would call beautiful – it always makes me think of a pirate's bold signature – and actually rather distracting when inked on the bottom edge of a print. Particularly strange are those looped first "legs" of the Ms and Ns – maybe John also encountered a George in his time? – and that crazy R that at first glance looks like a perfectly normal "re". This is clearly a man with a taste for the retro who insisted on going his own idiosyncratic way.

By contrast, photographer Raymond Meeks has a style that is unassuming, almost self-deprecating; if not quite a handwritten whisper, then it is certainly more intimate than declarative. There's definitely something of Emily Dickinson about his briskly minimal way with punctuation. Ray's pencilled signature on the prints I have is unusually small, faint, and almost invisible; note, too, those lower-case initials. I've never met the guy, but if I did let's say I wouldn't be expecting some extroverted loudmouth to turn up. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if he were late, or even forgot to turn up at all: his writing shares certain characteristics with that of my very oldest friend, Bruce, who was never known to be on time for anything, and has a very uncertain grasp on the generally-agreed sequence of the days of the week.

And with that, I'll hand off this post to my secretarial team for proofreading, correction, and typing up for consumption by that destroyer of handwriting, Weird Wild Wol [Is that right? Couldn't quite read that last bit? Ed.].