Hello again!

A couple of pen-folks, handwriting-hotheads, and the like have called my attention to Something Really Neat ... inscriptions by one William Moth in 1692, written in a book he had received as a gift on December 26th of that year (LECTURES ON THE LAMENTATIONS OF JEREMIAH by John Hull) — you can see Master Moth's handwriting (quite youthful in appearance) at the Folger Shakespeare Library web-page for their exhibition "Technologies of Writing in the Age of Printing" at
http://www.folger.edu/template.cfm?cid=2295

and (a closer view)
at
http://www.folger.edu/imgdtl.cfm?imageid=2039&cid=2295

William Moth must have highly valued this present, because he not only signed his name several times in the front and the back, but also penned a bit of verse (complaining about the effect ofhis pen on his handwriting) which may make a good motto for the FPN Penmanship Forum:

"Little is the Robbin
And less is the Ren
bad is my writing
And worse is my pen
And if my pen had
but been better
I might have mended
Every letter."

To the right of that appears:

"William Moth is my name
And with a pen I wrote the same"

... which I remember from my own school-days some 280 years later: in more than one school, at least half of us kids "wrote the same" using our own first and last names (and we certainly had no idea how far back it went!)
We didn't write half as nicely as this kid, though — and some of us added another two lines:

"I wrote in haste, I wrote in speed,
And left it here for fools to read."

Others (again, at more than one school) preferred to elaborate their postal address, going somewhat "above and beyond the call of duty" in this regard ...

"[name of student]
[required postal address]
United States of America
North America
Western Hemisphere
Earth
Solar System
Milky Way
The Universe
Mind of God"

The boy who sat next to me in one class augmented his textbooks, not with verse or address far from terse, but with curse (laboriously penned in Bic-ballpoint fake-Gothic):

"He who steals this book shall be slowly chopped into tiny bits, resurrected and burned alive, resurrected and drawn and quartered, then resurrected and tied to a chair in [name of teacher]'s [name of subject] class, WAITING FOR THE BELL TO RING."

Does/Did anyone else here write poems, cosmologically expansive addresses, threats to thieves, or other interesting stuff in the fronts/backs of books, along with (or instead of) merely writing one's name and usual contact-info? What do/did you write in your books?
Does your country/region/culture/native language/etc. have traditional verses/curses/other traditional stuff for schoolkids/others to write in the fronts/backs of books?

Sorry to not directly answer your questions, but...

I think this is very nice and humbling in a historical way.

My research lately has turned from number crunching to historical archives. I've been exploring colonial and Early Republic government manuscripts in North Carolina. Right now I'm reading through (microfilmed) town meeting minutes for Wilmington.

I tell ya, I wish they'd learned a thing or two from young William Moth.

I'm hoping to spend some time in Wilmington to actually lay my hands (and eyes) on some original documents.

This new avenue of research has made me look at my surroundings in a completely different way.

Re:

> colonial and Early Republic government manuscripts in North Carolina. ... town
> meeting minutes for Wilmington.
>
> I tell ya, I wish they'd learned a thing or two from young William Moth.

Yeah .. and he said he had *bad* handwriting!

Of course, good handwriting does not guarantee good government: some of the most beautiful Italic I've ever seen inhabits court-records of the Salem witch-trials. But at least we can easily *read* those records ... the voluminous handwritten records of at least one modern-day politician (Scooter Levy) use a scrawl decipherable by absolutely no one except Mr. Levy himself. (When Mr. Levy became defendant in a trial, some months ago, the prosecuting attorney requesting Levy's records could not decipher them at all ... and therefore had to ask Levy to read them to him. Given the state of Mr. Levy's handwriting, nobody but Levy himself can tell whether he read his records accurately to the attorney, or whether he took the opportunity to make the records say whatever he himself might find it convenient for them to say.)

Something that one kid (who became a famous man in later years) wrote in the front of one of *his* (then few) books:

"Abraham Lincoln
His hand and pen
He will be good
But God knows when."

Hah! Reminds me of something Augustine is supposed to have said as a youth: "God, make me pure, but not just yet."

Don

I love the little cynical notes the scribes used to write in copied manuscripts:

"Writing is excessive drudgery. It crooks your back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach, and your sides." (From "The Medieval Library" - 1956, chapter 18)

"Scribere qui cupiunt, sensum Deus augeat illis" (Let God increase sense for those who desire to write) (Drogin, Medieval Calligraphy - 1980)

"Thin ink, bad vellum, difficult text. This vellum is hairy." (Gascoigne, The Christians - 1977)

And my all-time favorite, from a 14th century manuscript:

"Explicit secunda pars summe fratris thome de aquino ordinis fratrum predicatorum, logissima, proixissima, et tediousissima scribenti; Deo gratias, Deo gratias, et iterum Deo gratias." (Here ends the second part of the title work of Brother Thomas Aquinas of the Dominican Order; very long, very verbose, and very tedious for the scribe; thank God, thank God, and again thank God.) (Parkes, English Cursive Book Hands 1250-1500 - 1969)

700 years old, and it still makes me laugh out loud!

--Rob

There is a wonderful little book by Mark Drogin called 'Anathema' which has all sorts of scribe quotes in it. I ended my thesis with one which is to my memory



rough translation: it is finished, it is over, let the writer go out and play.