CHAPTER ONE
1 I have used the following books for my research on cuneiform: Jean-Jacques Glassner, The Invention of Cuneiform (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Steven Roger Fischer, The History of Writing (London: Reaktion Books, 2001); C. F. B. Walker, Reading the Past:Cuneiform (London: British Museum Press, 1987); Barry B. Powell, Writing: Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); Leila Avrin, Scripts, Scribes and Books: The Book Arts from Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York: American Library Association, 1991); James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (New York: Pantheon, 2011); and Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World(New York: HarperCollins, 2005). Good summaries of proto-writing, and debates on what counts as writing and what does not, can be found in Denise Schmandt-Besserat’s well-regarded but contested theory in How Writing Came About (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010); in Powell, Writing; and in Gleick, The Information.
CHAPTER TWO
1 For further reading on ancient Egyptian writing, see Powell, Writing, and Fischer.
2 Both quotes from J. T. Hooker, Reading the Past: Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to the Alphabet (London: British Museum Press, 1990), 101.
3 Powell, 11.
4 Ibid., 15.
5 Ibid., 15.
CHAPTER THREE
1 Phaedrus by Plato. Translated by Benjamin Jewett, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.1b.txt.
2 Ibid.
3 For a discussion of speech versus writing, see Roland Barthes, “From Speech to Writing,” in Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962–1980, translated by Linda Coverdale (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 3–8.
4 Walter Ong, “Some Psychodynamics of Orality,” in Perspectives on Literacy, edited by Eugene R. Kintgen, Barry M. Kroll, and Mike Rose (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 30.
5 King James Bible.
6 Avrin, 145.
7 Stephanie Pappas, “Pompeii ‘Wall Posts’ Reveal Ancient Social Networks,” Live Science, January 10, 2013, http://www.livescience.com/26164-pompeii-wall-graffiti-social-networks.html.
8 Avrim, 111.
9 http://news.discovery.com/history/archaeology/curse-ancient-roman-lead-scroll-120821.htm.
10 http://news.discovery.com/history/archaeology/curse-ancient-roman-lead-scroll-120821.htm.
11 Martial, Epigrams 4.89, Martial Epigrams: Volume 1, translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 1993.
CHAPTER FOUR
1 Many Greek and Roman works were not copied in the West during the medieval era, given their non-Christian content, but they were preserved by Byzantines and Muslims in the Near East.
2 As quoted in Alberto Manguel, The History of Reading (New York: Penguin, 1996), 45.
3 Theophilus, De diversis artibus (The Various Arts), edited by C. R. Dodwell (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987).
4 As quoted in Manguel, 50.
5 Saint Augustine, “Concerning the Trinity,” xv, 10:19, in Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, edited by Whitney J. Oates (New York: Random House, 1948).
6 Mary Carruthers, Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 132.
7 Quoted in Colin Dickey, “Living In the Margins,” Lapham’s Quarterly, http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/living-margins.
8 Christopher de Hamel, Medieval Craftsmen: Scribes and Illuminators (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 7.
9 Albertine Gaur, A History of Calligraphy (New York: Cross River Press, 1994), 77.
10 C. R. Dodwell, The Pictorial Arts of the West, 800–1200, Vol. 7 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 246.
CHAPTER FIVE
1 Juan-Jose Marcos, “Fonts for Latin Paleography,” June 2014, http://guindo.pntic.mec.es/jmag0042/LATIN_PALEOGRAPHY.pdf.
2 This summary of medieval scripts, particularly post–Roman rustic, is necessarily schematic and incomplete, as there were a dizzying number of hands used. Nor were book hands, what I discuss here, the only kind of writing: There were also innumerable chancery hands, or scripts used for writing anything that was not a manuscript, developed during this 1,500-year period. The texts I used for this chapter, which include in-depth discussions of medieval scripts, include Avrin, Scripts, Scribes and Books; De Hamel, Scribes and Illuminators; Michelle P. Brown, The British Library Guide to Writing and Scripts: History and Techniques (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998); Bernhard Bischoff, Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, translated by Dáibhi ó Cróinín and David Ganz (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Stanley Morison, Politics and Script: Aspects of Authority and Freedom in the Development of Graeco-Latin Script from the Sixth-Century BC (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Albertine Gaur, A History of Calligraphy (New York: Cross River, 1994).
3 Jill Kraye, Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), page 60.
4 Bracciolini, a scribe who rose in ranks to become papal secretary and is discussed later in this chapter, is the subject of Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).
5 Morison, Politics and Script, page 326–7.
CHAPTER SIX
1 Johannes Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes: De laude scriptorum (Vancouver, BC: Alcuin Society, 1977).
2 As quoted in Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators (New York: Penguin, 2011).
3 As quoted in Syon Abbey and Its Books: Reading, Writing and Religion, c. 1400–1700, edited by E. A. Jones and Alexandra Walsham (Suffolk, Martlesham, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2010), 110.
4 As quoted in A.S. Osley, Scribes and Sources: Handbook of the Chancery Hand in the 16th Century (Boston: D.R. Godine, 1980), 17.
5 The Complete Work of Charles Dickens: The Pickwick Papers, Vol. 11. (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2009), 435.
6 Martin Billingsley, The Pens Excellencie (1618).
7 Literacy rates are very hard to confirm, and scholars debate which methods should be used and how to estimate rates. For the best discussion of this debate for Colonial literacy as well as reading and writing instruction in eighteenth-century America, see E. Jennifer Monaghan, Learning to Read and Writing in Colonial America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005).
8 Tamara Plakins Thornton, Handwriting in America: A Cultural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 8.
9 Ibid., 9.
10 Monaghan, 281.
11 David McCollough, John Adams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).
12 Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an Opium Eater (New York: Penguin, 2003), 80.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1 See Thornton for a fuller discussion of Spencer and his legacy.
2 H. C. Spencer and Platt Rogers Spencer, Spencerian Key to Practical Penmanship: Prepared for the “Spencerian Authors” (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).
3 As quoted in Thornton, 49.
4 Theory of the Spencerian System of Practical Penmanship in Nine Easy Lessons. Originally published in 1874; reprinted by Mott Media.
5 Kitty Burns Florey, Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting (New York: Melville House, 2008), 71.
6 Thornton, 66.
7 Cincinnati Public Schools: Eighty-fifth Annual Report (Cincinnati, 1915), 71.
8 The Palmer Method of Business Writing, http://palmermethod.com.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Thornton, 158.
15 Thornton, 152.
16 Angel Kwokel-Folland, Engendering Business: Men and Women in the Corporate Office, 1870–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 30.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1 Bruce Bliven Jr. The Wonderful Writing Machine (New York: Random House, 1954), 42.
2 Ibid.
3 Mark Twain, “First Writing Machine,” in The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories (New York: Oxford, 1996).
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Mark Seltzer, Henry James and the Art of Power (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 202.
7 Pamela Thurschwell, “Henry James and Theodora Bosanquet: on the typewriter, In the Cage and the Ouija Board,” in Textual Practice 13, no. 1 (1999), 6.
8 Seltzer, 201.
9 Thruschwell et al., 13.
10 Seltzer, 201.
11 Bliven, 102.
12 Ibid., 134.
13 Ibid., 139.
14 Thornton, 178.
15 “Of Lead Pencils,” New York Times, August 22, 1938, page 12.
16 Bliven, 127.
17 Ibid., 128.
CHAPTER NINE
1 George Boys-Stones, Jas Elsner, Antonella Ghersetti, Robert Hoyland, Ian Repath, Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul: Polemon’s Physiognomy from Classical Antiquity to Medieval Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 591.
2 Joe Nickell, Detecting Forgery: Forensic Investigation of Documents (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2005), 17.
3 Ibid., 18.
4 Camillo Baldi, A Method to Recognize the Nature and Quality of a Writer from His Letters (1662), translated by Robert Backman in Camillo Baldi, His Life and Works (Greenfield, MA: Handwriting Analysis Research Library, 1994), 36.
5 As quoted in Thornton, 77.
6 Ibid., 79.
7 Ibid., 87.
8 Ibid., 88.
9 Isaac D’Israeli, Curiosities of Literature (London, 1838). Accessed via Google Books.
10 Ibid.
11 For more on the history of graphology, see Joe Nickell, “A Brief History of Graphology,” in The Write Stuff: Evaluations of Graphology, the Study of Handwriting Analysis, edited by Barry Beyerstein and Dale F. Beyerstein (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1992).
12 Shaike Landau, “Michon, and the Birth of Scientific Graphology,” http://www.britishgraphology.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/MichonAndTheBirthOfScientificGraphology.pdf.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 See Nickell, 25–26.
16 As quoted in Thornton, 94.
17 Arthur Storey A Manual of Graphology or the Study of Handwriting (London: William Rider & Son, 1922), 18.
18 Ibid., 10.
19 European Code of Dentology, http://adeg-europe.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/European-Code-of-Deontology.pdf.
20 “A French Love Affair … with Graphology,” BBC News Magazine, April 29, 2013, http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22198554.
21 Ibid.
22 Andrea McNichol with Jeffrey A. Nelson, Handwriting Analysis: Putting It to Work for You (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994).
CHAPTER TEN
1 Jennifer L. Mnookin, “Scripting Expertise: The History of Handwriting Identification Evidence and the Judicial Construction of Reliability,” Virginia Law Review 87, no. 8, Symposium: New Perspectives on Evidence (Dec. 2001), 1723–1845. 1738.
2 Ibid., 1742.
3 Ibid., 1743.
4 Darren Wershler-Henry, Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of the Typewriter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 178.
5 Ibid., 179.
6 Mnookin, 1765.
7 My discussion of the British and American legal history of handwriting as evidence relies on Jennifer Mnookin’s “Scripting Evidence.”
8 Mnookin, 1766.
9 As quoted in Mnookin, 1776.
10 Ibid., 1777.
11 Ibid., 1784.
12 Ibid., 1811.
13 Ibid., 1812.
14 Ibid., 1813.
15 For further reading on stylometrics, see Jeffrey Kahan, “ ‘I Tell You What Mine Author Says’: A Brief History of Stylometrics,” ELH 82, no. 3 (Fall 2015), 815–44.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
1 Sections of this chapter were previously published in the Atlantic.
2 http://menus.nypl.org/about.
3 http://sceti.library.upenn.edu/Transcribathon/.
4 https://transcription.si.edu.
CHAPTER TWELVE
1 Gaur, 19.
2 Edward Johnston, Writing & Illuminating & Lettering (London: Pitman, 1965).
3 Sidney Cockerell (1945), “Tributes to Edward Johnston” in Lessons in Formal Writing, edited by H. Child and J. Howes (London: Lund Humphries, 1986), 21–30.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
1 Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (New York: Harper, 2008), 13.
2 Wolf, 18–19.
3 As quoted in Wolf, 18.
4 J. D. Gould, “Experiments on Composing Letters: Some Facts, Some Myths, and Some Observations.” In L. W. Gregg & E. R. Steinberg (Eds.), Cognitive Processes in Writing (pp. 97–128). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
5 Ron Kellogg, The Psychology of Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
6 https://research.collegeboard.org/sites/default/files/publications/2012/7/researchnote-2007-32-sat-writing-research-psychometrics.pdf.
CONCLUSION
1 Common Core English Language Arts Standards, Writing, Grade 4, http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/W/4/.
2 Advertisement for Holy Cross, South Portland, Maine.