"the History And Uncertain Future Of Handwriting" By Anne Trubek

[bogiesan]

I have several books about handwriting; if it's listed on amazon or available at your local library, I've probably got it. So, naturally, I bought this volume unseen. Anne Trubek writes well and she is an accomplished columnist whose work appears in several magazines.

 

Her 150+ page book is a fun read, scholarly, and full of great information. However, you may be quite disappointed in the book so I encourage you to glance through it in a book shop before you purchase. Unless, of course, like me, you must have everything written about a topic you hold dear.

 

My main objection, aside from the many pages wasted on the pseudo science of graphology, is the dearth of helpful and engaging illustrations. The author writes glowingly of the many different styles, hands, scripts, and historical variations of handwriting, from cuneiform through the industrial revolution, the rise of Spencerian, and everything in between, including the development of writing instruments and machines. You might think discussing these hundreds of writing styles and interesting objects would benefit from the inclusion of many gloriously curated illustrations, photographs, charts, maps, and other graphical representations. I certainly thought this book would be liberally illustrated and literally crammed with examples, comparisons, and helpful depictions.

 

Not so.

 

There are 17 images and 6 of them are of people or machines; only 11 portray the entire 5,000 year span of the entire world's multicultural history of handwriting.

 

Imagine a book about photography that inlcudes only words; vacuous descriptions of how a camera's mechanisms function, how to compose a good photograph, and what the mnay historically significant cameras look like. Trubek's book design is like this. The book presentation is stupidly inappropriate for the topic she has selected.

 

Buy this book only if you must have it. The historical information is mostly available in other volumes. The author's position on the theoretical "uncertain future of handwriting" is not disclosed until quite late. It is an opinion fountain pen enthusiasts probably will not share but I'll not spoil it for you here.

Edited October 29, 2016 by bogiesan

[estie1948]

That does strike me as an extremely odd omission for book with such a title. Surely there are sufficient examples of writing styles and forms with available rights to include some in the book. Usually, what must be guarded against with a book on such a topic is that the book will be to illustration heavy.

 

I haven't read the book, but is it that the author is so certain that handwriting in the future will be so completely extinct that no one will even want to see and example of it?

 

-David (Estie).

[Beauport]

........
Buy this book only if you must have it.

.....

 

+ 1 I felt the same way. There was tremendous potential for the author to inform her readers and was instead we were given way too much technical stuff, almost unrelated.