Kitty Burns Florey - Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting

This is a book every writer would love, a curio cabinet on the art and act of writing.

Amy Tan, author of Saving Fish from Drowning

A winsome mix of memoir and call to arms An entertaining history.

Chicago Tribune, Editors Choice

A witty and readable (and fetchingly illustrated and glossed) excursion through the history of handwriting.

Cullen Murphy, The Wall Street Journal

Highly enjoyable Witty and often endearingly autobiographical.

Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

A charming, illustrated eulogy to a craft thats fast losing its place in the modern world.

Financial Times

Floreys argument is nostalgic yet pragmatic. It seems wrong, she says, when something beautiful, useful, and historically important vanishes. Charmingly composed and handsomely presented, Script and Scribble just might provoke a handwriting revival.

The Boston Globe

[A] pithy account of the history of handwriting Florey makes a solid case for handwriting as a social indicator, and her affection for its art is thoughtful and aesthetically informed.

Albert Mobilio, Bookforum

Kitty Burns Floreys charming history of the rise and fall of handwriting is a loving and polished tribute to a modest but deeply civilizing skill that can make our words not only intelligible to others but, like this book, sweet and beautiful.

David Skinner, author of The Story of Aint: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published

Florey lovingly traces the history of handwriting, from its ancient birth to its imminent demise.

Sam Anderson, New York

What in Gods name has happened to penmanship? Its easy to blame the computer, but, as Kitty Burns Florey demonstrates in her thoughtful, witty, and sensible book, the story goes far deeper than that. It touches on the way we think, the way we write, and the way we lead our lives. Read Script & Scribble and be enlightened.

Ben Yagoda, author of When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better And/Or Worse

Part memoir, part meticulously researched primer, [this] captivating history of handwriting is a lovely ode to a nearly lost art.

ReadyMade

Frank and engaging.

Rain Taxi

ALSO BY KITTY BURNS FLOREY

SISTER BERNADETTE S BARKING DOG

SOLOS

SOUVENIR OF COLD SPRINGS

FIVE QUESTIONS

VIGIL FOR A STRANGER

DUET

REAL LIFE

THE GARDEN PATH

CHEZ CORDELIA

FAMILY MATTERS

2009 KITTY BURNS FLOREY

FIRST MELVILLE HOUSE PRINTING OF
THE PAPERBACK EDITION: SEPTEMBER 2013

MELVILLE HOUSE PUBLISHING
145 PLYMOUTH STREET
BROOKLYN, NY 11201
AND
8 BLACKSTOCK MEWS
ISLINGTON
LONDON N4 2BT

MHPBOOKS.COM FACEBOOK.COM/MHPBOOKS @MELVILLEHOUSE

978-1-61219-305-2 (ebook)

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED
THE HARDCOVER EDITION OF THIS BOOK AS FOLLOWS:

FLOREY, KITTY BURNS.
SCRIPT AND SCRIBBLE : THE RISE AND FALL OF HANDWRITING / KITTY BURNS FLOREY.
P. CM.
ISBN: 978-1-933633-67-1
1. PENMANSHIP. 2. PENMANSHIP, AMERICAN HISTORY
3. WRITING MATERIALS AND INSTRUMENTS HISTORY.
4. GRAPHOLOGY. I. TITLE.
Z43.F58 2008
652.1DC22

2008026964

v3.1

For Eileen and Rosamond

A true source of human happiness
lies in taking a genuine
interest in all the details of daily life
and elevating them by art.
WILLIAM MORRIS

Since I first picked up a pen, I have been under the spell of handwriting. Ive experimented endlessly with different scripts: straight up, right-slanting, left-slanting, print-like, florid, spare, minimalist, maximalist, round, spiky, highly legible, insouciantly scrawled. I cant make a list or write a check without scrutinizing my rushed, ugly Fs and illegible rs and wishing Id taken more time or had a better artistic sense. When I doodle, I often doodle handwriting styles.

Recent doodle retrieved from wastebasket

I suspect that, for many, this preoccupation might seem bizarre, even slightly mad. Theres a widespread belief that, in a digital world, forming letters on paper with a pen is pointless and obsolete, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is right up there with folks who still have fallout shelters in their back yards. But Im part of the last generation for whom handwriting was taught as a vital skill. All through school, it was an important part of our lives: you had good handwriting, or you had bad handwritingat some level, the way you wrote was a part of you, and was judged. That identification with my own script has never left me.

When I look back at learning to write, I can still feel the excitement of it. Little kids printed. Big kids wrote in longhand.

I learned to write longhandcursivein third grade at St. John the Baptist Academy in Syracuse, New York. Above the blackboard there was a frieze showing the idealized script we were all aiming at, in both upper and lower case, and lurking in each students beat-up old wooden desk was a Palmer Method workbook.

Every day, during handwriting practice, we took out our workbooks, sat up straight at our desks, and grabbed our pencils. Sister Victorine swished around the room in her long black habit, looking over our shoulders with her eagle eye and beating time like an orchestra conductorone two, one two, up down, up downa brisk martial rhythm that we labored to match with the strokes of our pencils.

From Sister Victorines class

Form, size, slant, spacing: those were the elements of the Palmer Method. At the end of the session, if you managed to keep them all in mind while you sat straight but also stayed relaxed, and if you concentrated on what you were doing instead of wishing you were out in the school yard playing Red Rover, you had pages of perfect ovals, upstrokes, and downstrokes, and by the end of third grade, these would have come together into some species of legible penmanship.

Sister Victorine was a tall, stately nun with mild blue eyes, round gun-metal glasses, and a black thumbnail on her right hand. The black thumb mesmerized me. I asked my parents where you got such a thing. My father said, Maybe she hit her thumb with a hammer. My mother winced absently and said, Oh dear. They clearly werent as compelled by it as I was. While I watched Sister Victorine write flawless cursive homilies on the blackboardPride goes before a fall, Haste makes waste