Script and Scribble

by Kitty Burns Florey

  Translation: Can a man walk on hot coals and his feet not be scorched? (image credits 4.15)

  GRAFFITI

  As an ex–New Yorker, I know what it is to live with graffiti painted on every bare wall, every phone booth, every advertising sign—on sidewalks, water towers, the sides of buses, the doorways of venerable brownstones. In the rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood I used to live in, it was often in Polish, and the most popular graffito was some variant of YUPPIE GO HOME.

  The urgent need to write things for public view in a prominent place has been with us since people learned to write. It appears in all cultures. The Greeks and Romans did it. The Vikings did it. The Chinese did it on the Great Wall. Michelangelo did it in the ruins of Nero’s villa. That mad, bad, and dangerous-to-know Byron did it in Greece, in 1810, quite prettily.

  Byron’s graffito at the Temple of Poseidon, in Attica (image credits 4.16)

  When I visited Glastonbury Abbey in England I was stunned by the dense hodgepodge of eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century graffiti carved into its soft stone walls. Hoboes in 1930s America scrawled their names on the freight cars they hopped. The ubiquitous KILROY WAS HERE was here, there, and everywhere in the ’40s, perpetrated by G.I.’s in Europe—no one knows why:

  People routinely sign home-made cement walks with their initials and the date. My friend Eileen stood on a chair and penciled her signature discreetly on the wallpaper above every doorframe in her family’s apartment. Antiwar slogans were rife during the ’60s. Simple gang markers began to be seen in the ’70s. And then there were the heart-rending post-9/11 memorials in New York City.

  Today, when most Americans think of graffiti, we don’t think of tastefully carved Roman capitals or quaint obscenities like FUTUI COPONAM13 or a simple name or political message. We think of the miles and miles of spray-painted tagging that defaces buildings in big cities. Much of it is downright ugly, and most people instinctively recoil from it: it’s incomprehensible, it’s intrusive, it’s pointless, and until you get used to it, it seems threatening. But it’s impossible to ignore—and that, of course, is why it’s there.

  In 1971, the New York Times validated graffiti as a cultural phenomenon in an article about a writer whose tag, TAKI 183, was plastered all over the city. (Taki was an otherwise mainstream, well-behaved kid named Demitrius who lived on 183rd Street. His modest explanation for his compulsion to wield his black magic marker all over the city was a shrugged “You do it for yourself.”) Many graffiti historians claim that, from that moment, graffiti as we know it began to spread not only around New York, but around the world. Others say that it began in Philadelphia a year earlier. Wherever it was born, it proliferated like a kind of urban kudzu.

  It was also rapidly evolving. Markers were replaced by spray paint. Simple name tags morphed into big, fat-lettered signatures in wild color schemes. Writing on trash cans and doorways gave way to elaborate decorations on the mega-canvases known as subway trains.14 Legible bubble letters and 3-D alphabets gave way to what was known as the often unreadable, abstract “Wildstyle” that was carefully planned out in advance and usually executed by crews of artists.15 The bigger, the bolder, the more visible, the better, because graffiti was no longer done for “yourself,” it was about being seen by the world, competing with your peers, getting recognition, making your mark—literally.

  (image credits 4.18)

  Modern graffiti artists have little in common with young Byron scratching his name on a wall in Greece, and the value of what they produce is the subject of impassioned debate. Graffiti is vandalism perpetrated by antisocial punks—or it’s a colorful, vibrantly creative art form that deserves to be recognized as such. The two points of view are alive and well. Graffiti writers are both prosecuted in court (2,962 arrests in New York City in 2006) and enshrined in art exhibits.

  Some graffiti—lots of it, actually—is hideous, offensive, a mess. But the bold originality of graffiti alphabets is undeniable.

  And even as I’m thinking one of the best things about graffiti is that there’s no way a computer could do this kind of thing, I’m chagrined to discover that there are dozens of graffiti fonts available.

  HANDWRITING ORGANIZATIONS

  The concept of “slow writing” humorously suggested in the Oregonian is not an idle dream. It’s actually a burgeoning movement produced, and promoted, by organizations like IAMPETH, the International Association of Master Penmen, Engrossers16 and Teachers of Handwriting. To say this organization is a throwback to another time would be unfair in view of its 400-strong membership, its quarterly newsletter (Penman’s Journal), its vast and fascinating website, its lively Ornamental Penman Discussion Group on Yahoo, and its annual convention, which in 2008 was on the West Coast so that fervent members of the Japan Penmanship Association (not to mention those from western Canada and Mexico) could more conveniently take part.

  One thing that I’ve learned after many years of poking into oddball corners of culture for purposes of research or out of simple nosiness is that the world is indeed full of a number of things.17 Who knew there was a National Pie Day?18 Or that cotton candy at the circus in Madison Square Garden is going to set you back twelve bucks? Or that Mohammed’s pet cat, Muezza, was once sleeping on his cloak and, rather than disturb her, Mohammed cut around the cat with scissors and wore the cloak with a hole in it? Or that gray whales love to have their bellies scratched, the average American walks a mile and a half a week, and Edith Wharton secretly loathed her friend Henry James’s later novels?

  And who knew that there are active associations of enthusiasts dedicated to practicing and preserving the fabulously fancy, flourished hands of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? That copperplate is still avidly practiced? That Spencerian is galloping along, alive and well? As a former president of IAMPETH, Rick Muffler, put it, “There’s a theory that computers are going to replace us, but it’s not going to happen. They make what we do even more valuable.”

  IAMPETH is the oldest and largest penmanship association in the United States, and the goal of its membership is to “preserve and share with others the rich tradition of American Penmanship.” The organization confers a Master Penman certificate: each master writes his or her own. (Penman as used here is a unisex term.)

  The calligraphy world is pleasantly stocked with organizations whose purpose is to promote the art, hold classes and workshops, sponsor exhibits, introduce calligraphy into the schools, and—quite often—produce a newsletter full of calligraphic art and articles on such matters as monogram design, making your own paper, and the joy of Roman Half-Uncial. The Association for the Calligraphic Arts is an umbrella organization, and most states have at least one individual guild. Oregon has seven.

  IAMPETH Master Penman certificate (image credits 4.19)

  One of my favorite passionate penmanship promotion programs is run by Michael Sull (a past president of IAMPETH). Sull learned ornamental penmanship from one of the art’s old masters: Paul O’Hara, who boasted, “I’m ninety years old but I can still throw a pen.” Sull put in his time at Hallmark Cards, which eventually decided his preferred script was “too ornate” and booted him off the staff. He says it’s the best thing that ever happened to him. In 1986 (“I couldn’t let it die”) he began teaching Spencerian penmanship in Kansas. He and his wife, Deb, are now full-time Spencerian penmen. They conduct workshops all over the country, as well as in Europe and Japan (where, perhaps because of its long calligraphic tradition, Spencerian has as many fans as it does in the U.S.).19 Sull has also devised a handwriting curriculum for schools, using a script he has aptly dubbed American Cursive, a synthesis of the work of Palmer and the other great American penmen. He has boiled it all down to what, for him, are the most important fundamentals—and, for Sull, “most important” encompasses “most beautiful,” an idea Spencer himself would have surely approved of. Sull’s true love is Spencerian script—though he writes and teaches a more highly ornate version than the “everyday” Spencerian
of the workbooks—and his hope is that the American Cursive program will be a kind of gateway drug, gently nudging students along a road on which the next stop is vintage Spencerian cursive and the final destination is true ornamental penmanship, with its thicks and thins, its flourishes and frills, and its prominent position in America’s rich cultural history.

  What most intrigued me about Sull’s work is the annual weeklong Spencerian Saga Workshops (traditional and advanced), held every autumn in Geneva-on-the-Lake, Ohio, since 1986.

  The Spenciarian Saga Workshop logo (image credits 4.20)

  “Join us for a visit back in time to America’s Golden Age of Penmanship,” the website exhorts. The menu includes a hefty entrée of Spencerian script, with side dishes of Off-Hand Flourishing, Monogram Design, and a study of “The Secret of the Skill of Madarasz.”20 Best of all, for what I, at least, would consider dessert, participants take a field trip to the Evergreen Cemetery in nearby Ashtabula, where they make rubbings of Platt Rogers Spencer’s memorial with its stupendous three-foot quill pen.

  Sull is eloquent on the subject of good handwriting. “Penmanship these days is thought of as a vestigial organ because it’s not translated into dollars, like computer skills,” he says. “But if you need to relay information immediately and have just a half-second to grab anything, maybe just a napkin, penmanship is so valuable. It doesn’t rely on batteries or power. It’s like breathing—it’s always with you.”

  Today Spencerian is something of a fine art, but for half a century it was the basic everyday script of educated Americans. I was curious to see what it would be like to go back in time and give it a try. I took my oblique pen in hand and, after a demanding but enjoyable ink-stained hour with Michael Sull’s very well-made instructional video, this is what I produced (below).

  Author’s Spencerian script

  PEN COLLECTORS

  Writing with a good fountain pen is supremely pleasurable in a way that’s hard to describe. It involves both the necessity of writing a bit more slowly (which instantly improves my own deteriorated day-to-day script), and the way the letters look as they form at the base of the graceful tapered triangle. This experience inspires a surprising amount of lyrical reflection among pen people—and there are still plenty of pen people in this world. I’m one of them.

  All through high school, even after the transition to ballpoints, I remained nostalgically, almost romantically attached to my Esterbrook fountain pen.

  The Esterbrooks had barrels of marbled celluloid, they came in tastefully muted colors, and, best of all, they had interchangeable screw-in pen points, so that you could vary your handwriting—make it thinner, thicker, more shaded—simply by changing the nib.

  In college, I clung to my fountain pen. It was better suited than a ballpoint to the affected and precious quasi-printing I cultivated, especially in the self-consciously literary letters I wrote to friends—though I sometimes typed them, too, usually sitting on my bed with my portable typewriter on my lap.

  My roommate, Sara, with her “laptop,” 1963 (image credits 4.22)

  Esterbrook “Dollar Pen” (image credits 4.23)

  Parker 75 (image credits 4.24)

  When I graduated from college, my then-boyfriend gave me a Parker 75, a very classy and expensive pen with an arrow-shaped 14-carat gold clip and an interesting grid pattern.

  I worshiped that pen. It seemed to me the zenith of sophistication—the pen of a real writer. I used it constantly for a few years, then brought it out only for special occasions, then chucked it into the drawer where one chucks things one doesn’t use but can’t bear to throw out. At some point it disappeared, as things do. I wish I still had it.

  As with almost anything you can think of, fountain pens have their own fan base and are highly collectible. Every year, at least half a dozen major pen shows are held across the country, and there’s an Esterbrook chat room on Yahoo. Pen Collectors of America is another of those wonderfully peculiar organizations full of people who are ardently keen on a tiny piece of American culture—in this case, the fountain pen. It began in Southern California in the 1980s, when a group of pen enthusiasts who used to run into each other at flea markets decided to get together at someone’s house and talk pens. In the miraculous way that these things happen, their fame spread, their membership grew, and today there are nearly two thousand of them. The primary mission of their organization is to “foster and maintain the integrity of pen collecting” and “promote the use of fountain pens.” They publish The Pennant, which features articles with intriguing titles like “A Penman’s Walk Through Downtown L.A.,” “Collecting Japanese Pens,” and “Smoothing Scratchy Nibs,” as well as book reviews, lists of pen shows and repair shops, and impassioned letters to the editor.21

  The Pennant magazine (image credits 4.25)

  Making a wooden fountain pen from scratch is probably the most extreme Nostalgia Planet pastime, and yet there are quite a few books and articles devoted to the subject. It does have a certain nutty charm. You’re going to need your lathe, your mandrel and bushings, your locking nut, your collet, your pen tube insertion tool and glue, possibly a hex wrench and a squaring jig, and, of course, the wood: Bolivian Rosewood, Bubinga, Zebrawood, Granadillo, Cocobolo, Yellowheart, Ebony, Curly Maple.… Just reciting their names makes the true pen nut dream about rolling up her sleeves and getting to work.

  I took a stroll through the pen department at a nearby office-supply store, fifty feet of writing implements: ballpoints, fountain pens, rollerballs, gel pens, felt-tips, highlighters, bold points, fine points, superfine points, micro points, needle points, comfort grips, super-comfy grips, rubber grips, precision grips, non-slip grips, classic grips, water-resistant pens, fade-resistant pens, airplane-safe pens (“won’t leak in flight”), pens “specially formulated to help prevent check fraud,” latex-free pens, “go-anywhere” pens (“clip it, hang it, wear it”), erasable pens, expandable pens, pens with built-in highlighters, “won’t bleed thru paper” pens, permanent markers, washable markers, china markers, click pencils, pencils that support breast cancer research, refillable pencils, never-need-sharpening pencils, drafting pencils, antimicrobial pencils.…

  I was dazzled. I buy way too many of these doodads.

  The cornucopia in the pen aisle represents mega-marketing and mass production at their most extreme. It can’t be only pen crazies and nostalgia buffs, dazed by inky abundance, who are buying this stuff. We all write. Some of us like it, some hate it. Some write well, others badly. A lot of us try to write more legibly, vow to improve. But scrawling things with pens and pencils on pieces of paper is something we all do. There’s no getting around it. As one of my calligrapher friends put it: “Try to go through the day without writing anything down.”

  Author’s desk

  1 I also signed up for her Gregg Shorthand class, partly to avoid trigonometry and partly to prepare myself for heavy notetaking in college. I never used it—it seemed so dorky—but I have not forgotten it—or rather:

  2 In the pre-computer age (1931), Virginia Woolf said something similar as she was finishing The Waves: “I reeled across the last ten pages with some moments of such intensity and intoxication that I seemed only to stumble after my own voice.” (She also said, “My handwriting is going to the dogs.”)

  3 Berry’s writing has to get keyed or scanned into a computer at some point in the publishing process. Most contracts include a clause requiring final manuscripts to be submitted in electronic format. Verbatim magazine’s facetious editorial guidelines go even further: “Under no circumstances will a handwritten MS be read. Instead, it will be roundly ridiculed, unless it is written using the Palmer method, in which case it will be stared at in amazement.”

  4 The consensus among autograph dealers and collectors is that such signatures don’t constitute “real” (i.e., saleable, collectible) autographs, but I wonder how anyone would prove they were done long distance. LongPen duplicates not only the appearance of the autograph but th
e speed and pressure the writer used to produce it. A forensic document examiner would be stymied.

  5 On the first page of which—September 21, 1939—he “apologizes” for using pen and ink even though he has “some degree of proficiency in typewriting.”

  6 Even handwritten music notation (invented in the tenth century by Guido of Arezzo, a Benedictine monk), which is just as fascinating as handwritten words, and just as varied and individual, is in danger of extinction: notation software for computers has been around for several years.

  7 There are dozens of pen pal organizations, some of which still encourage handwritten, snail-mailed letters even in the age of e-mail.

  8 This despite the critic Louis Menand’s probably true observation: “The impulse to keep a diary is to actual diaries as the impulse to go on a diet is to actual slimness.”

  9 It wouldn’t be: everyone named Gertrude was thoroughly instructed in penmanship in school.

  10 Last time I checked, there were more than 7000 of them listed on the diarist. net site. One diarist confesses that she loves the Victorian Age, believes in ghosts, and has a drinking problem. Another hates her underwear and likes taking pictures of penguins.

  11 To which Lord Byron might add, “One of the pleasures of re-reading old letters is the knowledge that they need no answer.” But that was a joke: Byron was one of the world’s great correspondents, and his collected letters fill many volumes.

  12 As Leon Edel pointed out in his biography of Henry James, “His condolences were so fine, so properly measured and elegantly turned, they seemed almost worth dying for.”