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Small Peek Into The Past


Maurizio

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I had an oral argument at the New York Appellete Division, Second Department which is located in Brooklyn on Thursday.

 

Displayed in a glass case in the lobby was this envelope. I believe this was on display for no other reason than to show what writing looked like around 100 years ago. I do not think there is anything significant about the addressee on the envelope, he did not go on to be a Senator or President as far as I know. This is what we mean when we talk about the flexible nibs of the past. Everyone who wrote as part of their work wrote like this back then and pens, ink, and paper were commonly available to provide for this type of written communication.

 

Just thought folks here might be interested in this little snapshot of the past.

post-27357-0-27229400-1547907451_thumb.jpeg

Edited by Maurizio

The prizes of life are never to be had without trouble - Horace
Kind words do not cost much, yet they accomplish much - Pascal

You are never too old to set a new goal or dream a new dream - C.S. Lewis

 Favorite shop:https://www.fountainpenhospital.com

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I am sorry, but I must disagree. While you argue from a single historical document, I argue from an economic one and non specific testimony and the citing of numerous, dare I say overwhelming alternative documents. As I do not have the time to bring these pieces of evidence to this argument I will instead simply outline my logic and if you dispute it and I have time I will bring forth my evidence. At the time of your example and for both many years before and after, even as recently as the beginning of my professional career, there were people employed for the purpose of adressing envelopes, using specialized tools and skills. Yes, anyone could with time, effort and a minimum of cost obtain them at a school, but they were real. They were called secretaries. Perhaps in popular culture you are familiar with the position, such as the character Peggy in Mad Men. She and many others went to Secretarial School. When I started with the organization I work with we had secretarial support staff. Nothing left our office except through them so that our work looked Professional. They typed up every letter and every envelope. My argument is if everyone in the past had the skills and time to write well, then one time consuming aspect, the primary aspect (take a letter sound familiar) of many office workers would not have been doing so because it cost money to employ them. Today this has largely disapeared. Today, if we do use snail mail, we generate all aspects of it, using word processing software and machines. Soon, there will be artificial intelligence programs writing and sending correspondence in common use, with the program asking the sender a few questions during the documents generation. It is already being done for common emails. In addition to my personal experience in the workforce regarding the common tasks of Secretaries, I offer the common example of Post Cards contemporary to that period. Typically they were not written in ink by pen. Typically they were written in Pencil. Pencils were the common tool. Even Abraham Lincoln write the Gettysburg Adress in Pencil.

In conclusion, there were many people with beautiful handwriting; some practiced it professionally, some as part of their larger education and some as a matter of personal pride, their were many who used this skill professionally as secretaries, office functionaries, and sometimes both formally and informally as scribes and most received education, formally in schools, and correspondence schools and informally through many of the books and practice books available. I personally drive by on a daily basis a Company still in business for over a hundred years dedicated both historically and today to teaching handwrititing simialer to your example, I have a couple of pens made for their courses, it is called Zaner-Bloser.

Edited by Parker51
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Well I disagree with your disagreement. :D

 

"Everyone who wrote as part of their work wrote like this back then and pens, ink, and paper were commonly available to provide for this type of written communication."

 

This would include census workers, bookkeepers, accountants and myriad clerks (usually men), busily scribbling away in banks, brokerages, law offices, endless government offices, so forth and so on. Marriage certificates, birth certificates, death certificates. Oh yes, the occasional secetary as well! All official documentation, all transactions business and legal, written in pen and ink. All who wrote them getting paid. The cost of doing business.

 

I challenge you, all in good fun, to show a census document written in pencil. I haven't searched. One may very well exist. The information on my own birth certificate is written, by hand, in ink. Not by a secretary.

 

So, please bring forth, and dispell my ignorance and confusion. I'll happily accept defeat, and learn from the experience.

 

:)

 

 

Edited by Karmachanic

Add lightness and simplicate.

 

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A random example from a 1-minute search for early 20th century handwriting. The link shows handwritten archives from North Carolina. Not everyone in 1911 wrote like Michael Sull but people who used pen for work - anyone who did not labor with their hands, and even some of those folks I will wager - wrote a form of Copperplate or Spencerian script in better or lesser comformity with that ideal.

 

No grown up wrote documents in pencil at work unless they were architects or artists.

 

http://www.moonzstuff.com/articles/oldhandwriting.html

Edited by Maurizio

The prizes of life are never to be had without trouble - Horace
Kind words do not cost much, yet they accomplish much - Pascal

You are never too old to set a new goal or dream a new dream - C.S. Lewis

 Favorite shop:https://www.fountainpenhospital.com

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I like the script of the note rather than that of the address.

 

Looking for a black SJ Transitional Esterbrook Pen. (It's smaller than an sj)

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I remember seeing old letters sent to my grandmother from my great aunts. They were written in some similar script as the envelope in the original post. OTOH, they were all educated (most of them were teachers -- one of my great-aunts, when she hit the mandatory retirement age of 65 in West Virginia, then got a job for the next 5 years teaching in Florida, where the mandatory retirement age of 70.

That being said, I'm betting that everyone is (to some extent) right....

Maurizio, that exemplar from the old census records is quite interesting. I'll note that I'm not surprised when the website says that "I" and "J" are hard to distinguish sometimes, because earlier in history, they were the same letter (I forget when "J" becomes a distinct letter in its own right).

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

"It's very nice, but frankly, when I signed that list for a P-51, what I had in mind was a fountain pen."

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Approaching this as an amateur historian of 19th-century writing implements and penmanship styles, I feel compelled to put in my two-cents.

 

In a way, all of you are right, and all of you are wrong. (how's that for a provocative statement).

 

In the 18th-century, good handwriting was something considered more appropriate for clerks, merchants and women. Upper class men didn't have the time, nor need, to cultivate fine penmanship. Some did, but it generally was considered the sign of someone who had to write clearly and neatly for a living. Professional men would have secretaries and clerks who would write out their rough drafts in fine penmanship.

 

By the middle of the 19th-century, with more widespread education, and with the adoption of steel pens, penmanship became more valued more generally. In the 1840's, Spencerian began to be widely promoted, and the rest of the century saw a proliferation of penmanship styles and schools. This period also saw the rise of the commercial or business college. In these schools, having a clear, readable hand was valued. But this emphasis on penmanship for commerce remained. For those more professional types, lawyers, judges, professors, writers, good penmanship was still not as emphasized.

 

By the 1860's, steel dip pen makers had begun producing a series of pens made for those who needed to write quickly, but didn't really care about the quality of their writing because someone else was going to "write it fair" before it went out. These included the stub pens, and later turned-up points and so-called oval or round points. These modifications to the normally sharp tip of a steel pen made it so that it could glide more smoothly across a page, though you sacrificed a fine line or controlled modulation in line for this ease of writing. These pens were traditionally marketed to these professionals, thus the names "Judge's Quill" or Lawyers's or Barrister's Stub.

 

But this set of professional men (and they were almost all men at the time) were still the minority. Most people got by on what penmanship they picked up at school. This was spotty and could include anything from beautiful Spencerian or Roundhand writing, to the barely legible writing you find in most letters. (hence this website you pointed out that tries to help people learn how to read old letters).

 

There was a large group of commercial folks who could write well, as it was emphasized in the commercial colleges of the time. Here's an extraordinarily good example from a fine men's haberdashery in Philadelphia in 1904.

 

fpn_1548086966__1904_habidashery_receipt

 

 

 

This is more of a representative example from the 1840's before penmanship was wide spread.

 

 

fpn_1548087137__1846_badly_spelt_letter.

 

 

 

Those the clerks who kept ledgers where expected to have a fine hand, as this example from 1853 illustrates.

 

fpn_1548087242__1853_ledger01.jpg

 

 

 

So, there was a divide. Professionals tended to keep to the old ways of not valuing so much fine penmanship for themselves. It was more about the fine flow of ideas. Someone else would make it look good. Merchants and clerks would instead cultivate a fine, clear hand for official writing. (as would women for their expected correspondence, re-read the section of "Pride and Prejudice" where they discuss letter writing with Darcy, Elizabeth, Bingley and his sisters for a glimpse into the different standards)

 

This began to change by the end of the 19th century when everyone was expected to write a clear, readable script, though fancy scripts had already given way to simpler, "commercial" or "business writing" like Palmer's method of muscular writing.

 

The letter you showed, which is cool in its own right, is actually an example of what they called Engrossing, or using a firm, italic or stub pen, and not a flexible pointed pen. The receipt from 1904 above uses a flexible, pointed pen, as does the ledger book from 1853.

 

Pencils were used even in the 18th-century more than is often thought, but anything of any importance was eventually put down in ink with a pen. Lincoln scribbled his early drafts and even speaking notes of his speech with a pencil, but later, when he wrote out the text "fair" he used a steel pen and ink. Even secretaries taking dictation usually did it with pen and ink, unless it was done somewhere other than a desk. Pencils were fine for portable writing, and even very rough drafts or quick notes, but ink was the way to make a document "legit."

 

I'll leave you with two more examples. These are two examples of clerk's writing from the 1864 lawsuit of Washington Medallion Pen Co. against Harrison, Bradford, Eberhard Faber, et. al.

 

fpn_1548088046__1864-washington-medallio

 

 

fpn_1548088124__1864-washington-medallio

 

“When the historians of education do equal and exact justice to all who have contributed toward educational progress, they will devote several pages to those revolutionists who invented steel pens and blackboards.” V.T. Thayer, 1928

Check out my Steel Pen Blog

"No one is exempt from talking nonsense; the mistake is to do it solemnly."

-Montaigne

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Here's a quote from an article in 1901 explaining the move towards "Intermedial Slant" or "Modified Slant" writing from what had been popular, "Vertical Penmanship."

 

It gives you an idea of the churning of ideas and debates within the educational systems on the proper way to write, and how important penmanship had become by the end of the 19th-century. This is from The School Journal, January 05, 1901.

 

"When the sudden rage for vertical penmanship came into vogue in 1890, [AAA: Jackson originally published his first book on vertical writing in 1875] there was not a series of copy-books published in this country that did not follow, substantially, the standard Spencerian slant of fifty-two degrees. Professional penmen were therefore very slow to follow any departure from that slant, and it was only when they began to investigate the writing that was in use in business offices that they saw there was some foundation and reason for a considerable departure from the old standard."

 

Then some penman, led by Heman P. Smith, studied the problem by getting actual samples of hundreds of clerks and others who have to write quickly and clearly. He had them write on tracing paper, and then put that up against an under-sheet with angles on it. What he found was that 90-percent wrote somewhere in the 70-80-degree slant, rather than purely vertical or the Spencerian 52-degrees. Thus, Smith's Intermedial Round Hand Penmanship was published.

 

In the same issue of the journal an ad for Esterbrook steel pens asks the question, "Vertical or Slant" They then go on to say, "Whatever is the decision of the powers that be as to which shall be used, we shall be able to supply orders for either style with Esterbrook Pens."

 

Later that year, you find this article published.

"The Solution of the Writing Problem"

Resolutions adopted By The National Penmanship Teachers' Association, at Detroit, Michigan, December 29, 1900.

We the Penmanship Teachers' Association of the National Commercial Teachers' Federation in convention assembled, in order to suggest the proper solution of the Public School Writing problem, adopt the following preamble and resolutions:

Whereas, No system of writing, whether vertical or slant, will in itself, insure good writing, whether taught by copy-book, copy-slip, tablet, blackboard, or by any other method;

Whereas, the best results can only be secured by earnest, faithful, intelligent teaching on the part of well-qualified teachers;

Whereas, It is a very well known fact that a large per cent of teachers have no prepared themselves to teach this important brand, simply because their boards of examiners have not subjected them to as rigid an examination in this as in other branches, but have simply graded them from their manuscripts, and have never refused to grant certificates however illegible the writing; ...

 

 

The article then goes to to say that the Penmanship Teachers' Association calls upon boards of examiners to examine ability to teach penmanship as rigidly as in other branches, and they should "call to their aid the assistance of specialists." (i.e. them, surprise) And that instructors of penmanship should be hired by every school in every district. (another not surprise)

 

Interestingly enough, they call for primary school students to write less, as they are incredibly prone to finger writing and it's hard to break them of that habit once it is taken up.

 

“When the historians of education do equal and exact justice to all who have contributed toward educational progress, they will devote several pages to those revolutionists who invented steel pens and blackboards.” V.T. Thayer, 1928

Check out my Steel Pen Blog

"No one is exempt from talking nonsense; the mistake is to do it solemnly."

-Montaigne

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Thank you for stopping to weigh in with your historical expertise AA.

 

Your comments are interesting and enlightening.

The prizes of life are never to be had without trouble - Horace
Kind words do not cost much, yet they accomplish much - Pascal

You are never too old to set a new goal or dream a new dream - C.S. Lewis

 Favorite shop:https://www.fountainpenhospital.com

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  • 3 weeks later...

In the U.S. specifically, we also need to understand the the literacy rate across a variety of demographics (social, racial etc.) did not become equally high(~or >90%) until the 1980's. There was a great portion of society who never received the proper education to simply write, to say anything about reading and writing the many examples above. Pencils, were and are a tool for everyday writing, and scripts in ink with dip or fountain pen were and are a tool for expression of documentation of middle to upper classes. This handwriting is not an inclusive handwriting of society at that time point, it very much obscures the writing, and communication traditions of a great many people during a given period...

Edited by JakobS

FP Ink Orphanage-Is an ink not working with your pens, not the color you're looking for, is never to see the light of day again?!! If this is you, and the ink is in fine condition otherwise, don't dump it down the sink, or throw it into the trash, send it to me (payment can be negotiated), and I will provide it a nice safe home with love, and a decent meal of paper! Please PM me!<span style='color: #000080'>For Sale:</span> TBA

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Here's a nice little chart to show illiteracy rates by year, native, foreign-born, white, black and other.

 

https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp

 

Anyone who attended school up to 8th-grade learned to use pen and ink. The illiterate and semi-literate, obviously, did not use pen and ink except when called upon to "make their mark" upon official documents. Pencils were a common writing implement in non-desk-job workplaces.

 

“When the historians of education do equal and exact justice to all who have contributed toward educational progress, they will devote several pages to those revolutionists who invented steel pens and blackboards.” V.T. Thayer, 1928

Check out my Steel Pen Blog

"No one is exempt from talking nonsense; the mistake is to do it solemnly."

-Montaigne

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It's fair to say that those who; "wrote as part of their work wrote like this back then", to quote the OP, would count as literate. Regardless of social standing. :D

Edited by Karmachanic

Add lightness and simplicate.

 

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As a historian of the 18th through 20th centuries (and veteran of deciphering all kinds of handwriting for this period). I largely agree with AAAndrew.

 

I do think we need to separate handwriting from literacy. We really can only evaluate handwriting for literate folks.

 

I work mostly on Latin America and I can tell you that handwriting varied widely over that time. In the late 18th century, most handwriting I have found is beautiful and very clear, a Spencerian type or whatever equivalent the Spanish had. Few people knew how to write, but those who did wrote very nicely. After the independence, the quality of handwriting decreases sharply. Probably even fewer people know how to write and those who did did not have as good an education.

 

Handwriting improves after the 1850s and reaches another apogee between the 1880s and the proliferation of the typewriter (1930s). At that point, handwriting quality decreases again.

 

I see our contemporary world following the trend that began with the typewriter. Handwriting continues to become poorer in quality. A sign that pens in general and penmanship is devalued is that many shirts don't even have pockets for pens anymore.

 

How this correlates to the rise and fall of the popularity of the fountain pen is not completely clear, though I hypothesize that the democratization of writing with the fountain pen created both poorer writing (more people wrote, even those who didn't have much training) as well as a growth of formal writing styles, among larger sectors of the population, because fountain pens were popular products. In addition, of course, we have to take into account the proliferation of public schooling and the classes in handwriting that existed both as "penmanship" in the elementary grades as well as art classes, which in my day (at least in Germany in Gymnasium and then in junior/high school in the United States) had a section on artistic handwriting. More schooling and better quality, better handwriting, until the introduction of the computer even for children.

 

We could write lots more on this!

 

Erick

Using right now:

Visconti Voyager 30 "M" nib running Birmingham Streetcar

Jinhao 9019 "EF" nib running Birmingham Railroad Spike

Stipula Adagio "F" nib running Birmingham Violet Sea Snail

Sailor Profit "B" nib running Van Dieman's Night - Shooting Star

 

 

 

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It's fair to say that those who; "wrote as part of their work wrote like this back then", to quote the OP, would count as literate. Regardless of social standing. :D

 

Writing as part of your work comes in many forms both short and long hand, insignificant, or important. As long as the person writing/marking the page could understand it to do their job, it didn't matter if it had fanciful ascenders or descenders, it is how they recorded the information to understand it for their daily use...

 

I mention literacy because of history, and how it is remembered. If it is only by those who write in a "proper" hand, well then there is an inherent bias in that, because those who did were of a significantly different social-economical class than those who wrote simpler, or in symbols or marks. They were born into a different world, and see it though a specific lens. If the story of the world is left only to what is recorded in Spencerian, Palmer, or whatever script was fashionable at the time, we miss a huge chunk of what actually is happening in the world then. A world that can be found by looking at it little differently, documented often times still by hand even if semi or fully illiterate, just not the "proper" hand, or organized so finely in a designated archive.

 

 

 

FP Ink Orphanage-Is an ink not working with your pens, not the color you're looking for, is never to see the light of day again?!! If this is you, and the ink is in fine condition otherwise, don't dump it down the sink, or throw it into the trash, send it to me (payment can be negotiated), and I will provide it a nice safe home with love, and a decent meal of paper! Please PM me!<span style='color: #000080'>For Sale:</span> TBA

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Amen!

 

Erick

Using right now:

Visconti Voyager 30 "M" nib running Birmingham Streetcar

Jinhao 9019 "EF" nib running Birmingham Railroad Spike

Stipula Adagio "F" nib running Birmingham Violet Sea Snail

Sailor Profit "B" nib running Van Dieman's Night - Shooting Star

 

 

 

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I mention literacy because of history, and how it is remembered. If it is only by those who write in a "proper" hand, well then there is an inherent bias in that, because those who did were of a significantly different social-economical class than those who wrote simpler, or in symbols or marks. They were born into a different world, and see it though a specific lens. If the story of the world is left only to what is recorded in Spencerian, Palmer, or whatever script was fashionable at the time, we miss a huge chunk of what actually is happening in the world then. A world that can be found by looking at it little differently, documented often times still by hand even if semi or fully illiterate, just not the "proper" hand, or organized so finely in a designated archive.

 

History, in general, is so much broader and requires so many more resources than just the written record. (my graduate school training is in social-historical material history, so I'm all over gathering non-written sources for a broader history). And while I definitely appreciate the fine writing of a well-trained clerk or merchant, I have a fondness for common letters written by non-elites. I am interested in the handwriting of those people who managed to make it through school scraping by with whatever the teacher taught them, and what they could pick up along the way. So few of the letters I read from the 19th-century actually match a formal copy book.

 

By the mid-19th-century, commercial or business colleges began to spring up, the first being Duff's Mercantile College in Pittsburgh. (still around as the Everest Institute's Pittsburgh campus) In was in these institutions that the formal scripts were most emphasized, and refined to the fine script of the law clerk in the OP's post. These commercial colleges competed for writing masters, and many developed their own script for their college. (e.g., Zane Bloser, Palmer, etc... were all commercial colleges as well as a place to learn their school of penmanship) It was really only men who could afford to attend one of these "colleges" to learn the arts of bookkeeping, correspondence and, of course, "muscular business writing" who developed these scripts. Unless, of course, you were a finely-educated young lady. The paths to fine penmanship were generally different for men and women for much of the 19th-century.

 

So, yes, fine penmanship was not, generally, the possession of the poor, struggling and illiterate. Most people who did know how to write, just struggled along with what hand they came to in their schooling. Most looked much more like that 1846 page in my examples above, than any of the fancy ones.

 

Everyone deserves to have their stories heard in History, whether they could write, or not. I don't think anyone here would suggest otherwise. The OP's comment that those "who wrote as part of their work wrote like this back then and pens, ink, and paper were commonly available" while not 100% true, was significantly more true than not for that limited set of of the public defined. And regardless of what people did, it's always fun to find examples of penmanship, fine, mediocre or horrendous, that illuminate the past.

 

“When the historians of education do equal and exact justice to all who have contributed toward educational progress, they will devote several pages to those revolutionists who invented steel pens and blackboards.” V.T. Thayer, 1928

Check out my Steel Pen Blog

"No one is exempt from talking nonsense; the mistake is to do it solemnly."

-Montaigne

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There’s a throwaway line in Trollope about an upper-class gent’s scrawl: penmanship was an attainment for clerks or an amusement for women; nothing that a gentleman would bother with.

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There’s a throwaway line in Trollope about an upper-class gent’s scrawl: penmanship was an attainment for clerks or an amusement for women; nothing that a gentleman would bother with.

 

Jane Austen makes several remarks in her books about the atrocious scrawl of men, while women may have a "small, neat, hand."

 

I read a book on American penmanship that I remember saying by the 19th-century, this was less of a division in the US than it still was in the UK. Penmanship was widely taught here and a clear, strong hand was all of a piece with the Victorian-American ideal of manly strength and virtues. Perhaps not quite a clerk's hand, but a readable one nonetheless was desirable.

 

Now I need to go find that book again.

 

“When the historians of education do equal and exact justice to all who have contributed toward educational progress, they will devote several pages to those revolutionists who invented steel pens and blackboards.” V.T. Thayer, 1928

Check out my Steel Pen Blog

"No one is exempt from talking nonsense; the mistake is to do it solemnly."

-Montaigne

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