The schools prospered, however, and turned into a mini-industry, spawning a series of popular textbooks. There were other gifted penmen at the time, teaching their own impressive scripts—Charles Paxton Zaner and Elmer Ward Bloser, in particular, have had a lasting impact on American penmanship. But Spencerian was the basis for the penmanship taught in most public and private schools across America. Anyone who has come across a bill of sale from, say, 1879, or a letter from a great-great-grandmother describing the rancorous Hayes-Tilden election or the ribbon trim on her new muslin bonnet, is probably looking at some approximation of Spencerian script—as in this excerpt from an 1898 letter:
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or this page from the “little red book” of home remedies compiled by a woman from the same era:
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The Spencerian Key to Practical Penmanship—written by Spencer himself and published by his five sons shortly after his death—remained hugely influential until the twentieth century, when A. N. Palmer and his famous “method” began to make serious inroads.
Spencerian is far from dead. Calligraphers love it: Maureen Vickery, a Houston calligrapher, not only hand-letters a lovely Spencerian script for envelopes, invitations, place cards, etc., but also has a small but thriving sideline teaching it as a “monoline” script that can even be effectively produced with a ballpoint:
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There are some interesting revivals from time to time—among them this 2007 ad campaign for Saks Fifth Avenue by Marian Bantjes:
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Spencer’s most enduring legacy—and the most visible use of his script today—is the Coca-Cola logo. It was designed in the 1880s by a man named Frank Robinson, a bookkeeper employed by the founder of the company. Robinson may very well have been trained in business and penmanship at a Spencerian school—the logo in his handwriting, while impressive today, was most likely a typical bookkeeper’s hand of the time. But whatever the case, it has survived. Most Americans probably see this sterling reminder of Spencer’s genius every day of their lives.
But generally, by the turn of the twentieth century, the Spencerian style was becoming as passé as the horsehair bustle. Spencer’s elaborate loops and curls, which for most people had to be executed with painstaking care, had become less appealing to a nation that was rapidly swooning into the romance with business and commerce that would dominate it for the rest of the twentieth century and beyond. A 1902 lament in a Zaner-Bloser publication, the Penman, Artist and Business Educator, puts it this way: “The young men of today do not exercise the patience which leads to the top in ornate writing, nor have they the time to acquire a style of handwritng for which there is only a limited market in these strenuous times.” Even the relatively stripped-down Spencerian script taught in business schools was considered too slow, too nit-picky, possibly even too feminine in a culture that worshiped masculine achievement and saw the prospect of women entering the business world—something they were doing increasingly—as a potential threat.3
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THE PALMER METHOD
A. N. Palmer’s patented “method” was designed to be the perfect script for the world of commerce. Palmer was another lover of letters who wanted nothing more than to simplify penmanship, to transform it into “rapid, plain, unshaded, coarse-pen, muscular movement writing,” as the subtitle of The Palmer Method of Business Writing puts it.
A. N. Palmer (image credits 2.18)
Teddy Roosevelt, the Rough Rider who carried the big stick, was president of the U.S. (1901–1909) during Palmer’s rise to penmanship prominence. Just as Garfield—himself a teacher and a penman as well as a lover of poetry and student of the classics—was the right president for Spencer, Roosevelt seems emblematic of the Palmer era. Indeed, Teddy’s life mirrors handwriting’s evolution from Spencerian to Palmerian: he started out as a sickly, delicate, myopic, dandyish young man who went west, hung out with cowboys, and transformed himself into a superb, vigorous specimen of masculinity.
Palmer, in his introduction to The Palmer Method of Business Writing, states that it “has not been written to exploit anyone’s skill as a pen artist.” Palmer was a great admirer of Spencerian writing, but in his new, improved script there would be no curls and swirls, none of this moral uplift stuff, no wifty meanderings about flowers and sunbeams. America needed “good, practical business writers,” and—by jingo!—his little red book was going to produce them.
Palmer (1860–1927) was born on a farm in St. Lawrence County, New York, and, like Spencer, he lost his father when he was young—Spencer at six, Palmer at thirteen. The widowed Mrs. Palmer moved the family to Manchester, New Hampshire. There, Palmer enrolled in the Bryant & Stratton Business College,4 run by George Gaskell, an admirer of Spencerian handwriting and the author of the popular book Gaskell’s Complete Compendium of Elegant Writing (1873), which over the years sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Gaskell’s Compendium of Forms, Educational, Social, Legal and Commercial was another smash hit, a “complete encyclopedia of reference” that included sample letters (concerned mother to daughter away at school: “I have been somewhat alarmed because your last two letters do not run in that strain of unaffected piety as formerly. What, my dear, is the reason? Does virtue appear unpleasant to you? Are you resolved to embark in the fashionable follies of a gay, unthinking world?”), tips on Street Etiquette (“When a gentleman is escorting a lady …, it is his duty to insist modestly on carrying any article she may have in her hand, except the parasol …; that article must not under such circumstances be borne by the gentleman.…”), a Political Dictionary (Abolitionist to Yankee), a section on The Language of Flowers (apricot blossoms express doubt, marigolds despair), and Maxims of George Washington, including, “In the presence of others sing not to yourself with a humming voice, nor drum with your fingers or feet.”
An entrepreneur who believed in the power of advertising, Gaskell was one of the most prominent penmen in America. It was at his school that the young Palmer was introduced to the glories of penmanship, and was such a devotee that (again like Spencer) he became a teacher when he was still a teenager, moving west from New Hampshire to Missouri as an itinerant penman—an occupation that was far from unusual. In 1880, Palmer finally settled in Cedar Rapids, working in an office as a clerk and bookkeeper—his first real job. It was there that Palmer had the revelation that changed his life and the lives of countless American schoolchildren: writing with curls and flourishes was all very well, but in the world of business, speed was all-important. As he watched his colleagues at work, busily scratching out inventory lists and columns of numbers in a brisk utilitarian ad hoc scrawl—probably a severely minimal, unadorned running hand—he realized that the lifted-arm movements necessary to produce gorgeous Spencerian script not only required “a deal of pains,” they also required a deal of time. And if you tried to write Spencerian quickly, you’d end up with a sore arm and a nasty scribble.
A clerk or a penman who had to write all day—and was sometimes paid by the word—needed a new method with no superfluous motion, no tiring lifts, arm on the desk, the work done by the hand, wrist, and forearm working together. Thus was fixed in the mind of Austen Palmer the concept of muscular movement that would bedevil schoolchildren for nearly a century: “with the larger part of the arm below the elbow on the desk, the fingers not being held rigid, but remaining passive, and neither extended nor contracted in the formation of letters.”
The concept of muscular movement was not new—penmen throughout the nineteenth century had used the phrase—but the insistence on forearm and hand movement over fingers was pure Palmer. So too was the notion that handwriting should become automatic, that the muscles of the properly trained writer could do the job and not much mental effort should be required.
Armed, as it were, with a steadfast faith in the value of this daunting calisthenic, Palmer quit his job and went back t
o teaching. He was just past twenty. By the time he was twenty-eight, he had founded the first American penmanship magazine (The Western Penman), published Palmer’s Guide to Muscular Movement Writing, and mastered, as Gaskell had, the art of advertising, using his own publication to tell the world about the course of instruction he devised.
Easter 1896 issue of The Western Penman (image credits 2.19)
His ideas caught on. They appealed strongly to the Catholic schools, probably because they emphasized discipline and hard work. In 1904, Palmer demonstrated his Method at the St. Louis Exposition, complete with a collection of persuasive befores and afters—ugly scrawls magically transformed into efficient communications. It took the public schools longer, but a New York City superintendent who saw the exhibit was blown away. Within four years, half the students in the public-school system there (285,605 of them) were toiling away at the Palmer Method.
By 1912, his name was a household word, and a million copies of his textbook had been sold. When he died, at age 66, in 1927, the A. N. Palmer Company was a corporation with offices in New York, Chicago, Cedar Rapids, and Maine—a giant in the education world that, in addition to supplying books and writing utensils, rigorously trained scores of teachers in Palmer’s “commercial cursive.” More than twenty-five million people had been Palmerized, and the Method was being taught in three-quarters of the schools in America.
Palmer Method Progress Pin, awarded for superior handwriting (image credits 2.20)
Palmer was interested in consistency, legibility, and—especially—speed. It was increasingly true that, as Calvin Coolidge famously put it, “the business of America is business.” There wasn’t much room in that world for individuality. Palmer paid lip service to the idea: individual variations in the Method were permissible “within certain well-defined boundaries”—and enthusiasts regretfully admitted that individual character was impossible to suppress. But in practice, the entire classroom was supposed to be making their letters in exactly the same way, the same size (lower case was about one-sixteenth of an inch high), and even at the same speed (seventy capital C’s per minute). All this probably made good sense at a time when industrialization, the assembly line, and mass production were coming into their own. It was all about control.
Palmer’s books, like Spencer’s, are full of precise, detailed, rigorous, and supremely tedious drills that seem designed to squeeze to death even the most forceful and artistic handwriting. His famous bedspring ovals, for example, were meant to be done for “at least” five minutes:
After five minutes of drawing ovals, or up-and-down lines, or
or
or
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you’ll agree to anything, even to making Palmer’s awkward capital X—which, contrary to the basic idea of an X, doesn’t actually cross, but merely seems to cross. (To be fair, this was not invented by Palmer: it was the X of choice by most penmen going back to the Bickham era. Still, you’d think someone as practical as Palmer would have simplified it.) In Sister Victorine’s third grade, getting those swooping curves properly aligned was a frustrating challenge, and it’s no easier now.
Palmer capital X
Then there are his strange capital Q’s.5 At first glance, they look confusingly like the number two. But the 2 form is not as illogical as it seems: it evolved over the years as scribes fiddled with the classic lower-looped Roman Q, attempting to turn it into a quicker one-stroke letter:
Palmer simply took it a step further, so that there is in effect no difference between his Q and a normal 2.
In one manual, Palmer cites a lad of twelve who produced three thousand of the bedspring ovals across a page only eight inches wide, “maintaining a uniform speed of two hundred to a minute.” He includes tips for students who were not so proficient: if your ovals are too narrow, it might help to repeat over and over (presumably sotto voce), “Wider, wider, wider, rounder, rounder, rounder,” until you get it. According to Palmer, with half an hour of practice daily, the average student should be able to “lay the foundation for an excellent script” in one school year. But he emphasizes the importance of constant vigilance—not just of letterforms but of posture and movement—if that script is to be maintained.
Some of the illustrations in the Palmer manuals seem designed for Martians unfamiliar with human anatomy. This photograph of a glowering youth demonstrates the proper fingers with which to hold the pen:
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Palmer spared no pains in making everything crystal-clear. Like Spencer, he believed that diagrams would help. He recommended “a medium coarse pen” and blue-black ink, and was uncompromising on the role of the right forearm muscles in the production of perfect penmanship. In one of his “To the Teacher” notes, he cautions, “See that pupils’ arms are free of heavy clothing,” and comments, with approval, “Many good writers consider this of such importance that they cut off the right undersleeve at the elbow.”
“A represents the square turn at the right elbow and its position on the desk, B is the muscular rest of the forearm, C the position of the left hand in its relation to the paper and the right hand, D the penholder, and E-E the imaginary line between the eyes along which the pen should travel.…” (image credits 2.28)
A class of students demonstrating the above diagram (image credits 2.29)
It’s interesting to compare the scripts that have dominated American penmanship over the last 250 years. The flourishes wax and wane, the loops get longer or shorter, and each script seems reflective of its time. Additionally, with the passing of years, each has acquired baggage it didn’t have when it was in common use. Copperplate is the iconic image of America’s great historical documents. The Spencerian B looks to me like the monogram I used to see on my grandmother’s towels. Palmer script has a tame, uptight schoolmistressy aura. At their core, though, all these scripts are similar, and all remain readable today:
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PALMER AND GENDER
This may be an untenable generalization, but when it comes to handwriting, it seems to me that men have traditionally felt freer to be more creative, or more iconoclastic, or perhaps just messier. They were given more leeway than docile young ladies when it came to producing a careful, readable script. Certain men (the “real-men-don’t-eat-quiche” types) consider good handwriting to be a bit sissified, and even today some busy male executives who take pride in their scrawled signatures persist in viewing a legible one as the mark of someone without enough important documents to sign.
But the fact is that the small-motor skills of boys lag behind those of girls, so that in third grade, as we pigtailed darlings were forming our perfect loops and ovals and looking with distaste at the hopeless scrawls of the little boys in our class, we had no idea that they really couldn’t help it. And some of them never recovered.
My husband, Ron, effectively demolishes one of my romantic theories. Until I met him, I always assumed artists had “artistic” handwriting, meaning artistic in the conventional sense: beautiful and well-proportioned. But, despite his great-looking signature and his awesome abilities as a painter, Ron has what can only be described as “bad handwriting” that drifts in and out of legibility. It gets the job done, but (to my penmanship-crazed mind) with the finesse of a chainsaw:
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Ron was an army brat whose family was always moving around the world; he finds my twelve years in the same parochial school as exotic as I do his watercolor lessons in Okinawa. Not only did he lack the fine-motor skills all small boys are deficient in, he also lacked anything resembling continuity in his education. He does, though, remember the Palmer Method exercises he did in his public school in Maine, where his father was briefly based. Ron was especially fond of the bedspring doodles. He saw the Palmer exercises as a challenge, but he approached them more as an artist than as a penman. While I was laboring over my handwriting, trying to make it express the central truth of my inner being, he was scrawling page
after page of ovals for the sheer joy of it, as if it were a drawing lesson.
Much earlier in the twentieth century, both my parents were, of course, subjected to Palmer Method in the Catholic schools. My mother was a stellar handwriting student who—maybe because she was forced by her mother to quit and get a job when she was sixteen, putting an end to her hopes of going to college and becoming a Latin teacher—retained an abiding respect for what she learned in school. She stuck closely to Palmer Method, and her handwriting hardly changed from the time she was a young woman until her extreme old age.
One of the biggest events in my mother’s life was her elopement to California with my father at the height of the Depression, in the rumble seat of a friend’s car. They were married in Joplin, Missouri, by a justice of the peace who gave them a 1921 “Miss Liberty” silver dollar, which I still have—their only wedding gift. They lasted a year in L.A. before homesickness drove them back to Syracuse, flat broke and without winter coats. My dad got a job as a roving PR man for Pepsi Cola6—then a fledgling soft drink company—and for nearly ten years he and my mother traveled all over the East Coast, living in hotels. My mother sent regular postcards home to her friend Lee Dusenberry, and Lee saved them all—a colorful record of a memorable time that would lose a lot of its charm if it consisted of printed-out e-mails:
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