About Connections: Love it or hate it, history is a map. Those who hate history think it irrelevant; many who love history think it escapism. In truth, history is the clearest road map to how we got here: America in the 21st century.
As you open the book “Alphabet Crash: A 21st Century Handwriting Manual for Men and Boys” by S.P. Bachelder, you anticipate the title is irony, allegory or symbolism. It is not. This is what it says it is: a book about penmanship for the male sex.
Bachelder’s is an agile intelligence. She moves from Cy Twombly to Cicero to Lewis Carroll to the signatories of the Constitution. You may wonder why. Well, some of the joy of the book is watching the author connect disparate parts, make her case through the use of many unanticipated references.
Twombly used script as art. Cicero’s orations were written down to circulate his ideas more widely. Lewis Carroll wrote “Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter-Writing.” While Carroll writes many more than nine words, it is, as is Bachelder’s, a practical guide.
Through these references, Bachelder is making her points: writing is also an art form or, at least, visual expression. You can trace civilization through tracing the written hand, and you can improve your hand, and as a practical matter it is a good thing to do.
Moving to the nitty-gritty, Bachelder, like Carroll, parses the finished product. She analyzes penmanship, breaks it down into its parts, and describes its syntactical roles. That is, she walks the reader through how you transform your scrawl to script.
Once upon a time, penmanship was taught. There were books on the subject. Spencerian script (think calligraphy) was used from 1850 to 1925. The use was so widespread it was the de facto American writing style. Coca-Cola selected the style for its logo and the quintessential script was joined to the quintessential American drink.
In all of this, there is a Berkshire connection. Two Berkshire cottages stand across the street from one another in Stockbridge. Bonnie Brae was built by Henry Ivison and Oronoque was built by his business partner Birdseye Blakeman. The two cottages were built with money from their New York publishing company. Among other how-to books, Ivison, Blakeman & Co. published the Spencerian handwriting manuals.
The Palmer method textbook enjoyed great success. In 1912 it sold a million copies. It would supersede and replace Spencer. Its success is interesting since publishers all rejected it and it was self-published by A.N. Palmer as a guide to a “business hand.”
Bachelder goes beyond the idea of a clear and handsome hand. She maintains that, in organizing the symbols – in creating your hand – you are also organizing your thoughts, making both the symbols of your ideas and your ideas themselves more intelligible. She does not, however, overlook the simple pleasure of a handsome, even beautiful, hand. Beginning with Twombly, Bachelder sees writing as a potential art form.
I write all the time about whatever I am thinking about. That really is my personal definition of writing: the externalization and sharing of my thoughts. The clarity of my writing is more about how easily it can be understood rather than how clearly it can be read.
I do remember practicing penmanship and liking the letters to look nice, but I worked the hardest on how efficiently I could externalize my thoughts. What is the distance between me and my words? What is the rapidity with which I can get the thoughts down?
I began writing with pencil on paper. I was physically closer to the finished product and the expression was more intimate. Look at the handwritten manuscripts of Edith Wharton for example www.theatlantic.com/doodles by lewiscarroll. You can see what she crossed out because she changed her mind or thought better of what she had written. You can see, as her handwriting trailed downward or became less distinct, that she was tiring. You can perceive in her hand when she was excited to “get it down.”
However, handwriting was a slower process than typing or word processing. With the computer, writers can turn thoughts into letters and words and sentences faster; less is lost or forgotten. However, with progress, the distance between writer and written word increased. The door on the most intimate details is closed. Here is what I mean. You cannot see anything about the writer – if he changes his mind or tires or makes mistakes. Today the writer hits delete and all that is gone; when the writer tires, he closes the document and walks away. Handwriting told us what the writer meant to say and something more about the writer; a computer doesn’t.
Bachelder knows this and she also knows she is writing a book about handwriting when we have stopped writing at all. Lost with this and subsequent generations will be writing itself. She is simultaneously encouraging writing well and writing itself.
That much is clear, but why it is for “men and boys?” Nowhere in the book is that explained, so I asked the author.
It is her contention that, even when penmanship was a required course, the males were less engaged. The notion of writing beautifully seemed a feminine pursuit. Therefore, she focused on the population left out. She meant to support, instruct, and encourage the males. That brings us to the U.S. Constitution, or, more accurately, the signatures on the document.
It might mean their very lives to sign that piece of paper. It was sedition. The men must have approached soberly and with thought. That signature was expression of more than a name; it was a commitment to an idea, a pledge to an ideal. It had to be done with clarity and verve and had to be done in one’s best hand. Look at the hands – all made by men — see the personalities.
