The Varieties and Complexities of American Handwriting and Penmanship: Library Hand

Thomas Edison, John Jackson, Melvil Dewey, and Early Vertical Writing

Born in 1847, Thomas Edison grew up at a time when writing was continuing to evolve and to change, and perhaps, therefore,  it should not be surprising that as an inventor himself, he developed his own writing style. 

In these years of his childhood, many writing styles were being borrowed from earlier times or were introduced with variations; sometimes authors or penmen were borrowing or stealing outright the work of each other. Nonetheless, many dozens of different authors and publishers were promoting their work. 

Penmen like Platt Rogers Spencer had taken hold of the imagination and spirit of many young people seeking to impress others with their careful and practiced writing. Here, Spencer celebrates his success in introducing his own style in 1856, though one might note that it is only one of many styles that he used and promoted.


It is interesting to note that Edison's boyhood penmanship does not represent the norm of a forward slanted joined script promoted by Spencer and others. Instead, Edison, at the age of 15, had a somewhat unimpressive mixed style of a backhanded cursive with some lettering. Save for the forward slant of the first line, the rest of the missive is mostly backhand.

As a growing man with an evolving writing style of his own, Edison wrote more neatly and consistently with a script that has exuberance and flair, but of no discernible origin, a vertical style, as seen here in 1866.

Employed as a telegraph clerk trying to write faster and more legibly, he kept experimenting: writing smaller, removing the excessive flourishes, and timed himself writing until his speed could no longer be increased. 


As noted on page 247 in The Medical Record, Vol. XV, No. 11, March 15, 1879, New York doctor George M. Beard, M.D., while examining writers for their ailments and style of writing, said of Edison that 

When he writes slowly and with care--from fifteen to twenty-five words a minute--Mr. Edison's handwriting is phenomenally clear and beautiful, resembling copperplate printing; not in a flowing, but in a cramped hand, the letters often being separated as in print. When he rises to forty words a minute, the writing is still more cramped and less beautiful, though yet legible; with forty-nine words a minute, his writing is quite illegible.

As Edison told Theodore Dreiser for his article "A Photographic Talk with Edison" in the February 1898 journal Success, "I had perfected a style of handwriting which would allow me to take legibly from the wire, long hand, forty-seven and even fifty-four words a minute." This style he developed was perpetuated among and imitated by other telegraph clerks.

While Edison's style remains largely unacknowledged in books on the history of penmanship, it is a vertical style unlike the forward slanted style of the time. However, it is fair to say that he neither authored a book on penmanship nor taught it in any institutions, and so he cannot be recognized as among those who influenced the penmanship of the nation's youth nor the broader public.

As an inventor, Edison did create the Edison Electric Pen in 1875.  It required the user to hold the pen itself perpendicular to the paper, in an  entirely vertical fashion because the mechanics of the device required it. But that was not a vertical writing style. Nor was the electric pen a pen, as it was used as a tool to perforate tissue, which was used as a stencil through which ink was pressed onto paper to make a print. This was but one of the technologies being tried by Melvil Dewey to reduce costs and speed the processes in the libraries.

As for Edison's vertical writing manuscript style and its influences beyond the offices of telegraph clerks, one can examine Edison's influence on library hand, or at the least, on the discussions of it. Among others from the American Library Association, Melvil Dewey attended The Lake George Conference, and on September 9, 1885, the men discussed both the speed and utility of the typewriter for its use, among other things, for cataloging, and then the librarians turned their attention to library handwriting and Edison. In conversation, Mr. Nelson mentions an article in Science in which Edison "experimented to devise the best style of penmanship for telegraph operators, selecting finally a slight back-hand, with regular round letters apart from each other, and not shaded, attaining himself by its means a speed of forty-five words a minute." Nelson, suggests it might be "suitable to cards, by reason of its clearness, and the speed claimed for it." Dewey added that he was himself "conducting a series of experiments to find out what is really the most legible in catalogue drawers for the average reader in the average circumstances." 

In 1885, what typewritten material might Dewey himself be comparing handwriting to?

Image from the Melvil Dewey papers, The Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Columbia University.

There is another strand of possible influence on Dewey and the library committee, and one could speculate that it is the real reason that they were experimenting with vertical writing themselves. 

John Jackson, the most prominent of the promoters of the vertical style in England writes a chapter on the "History of Vertical Writing and its Revival" on page 118  of his book Theory and Practice of Handwriting that “concurrent agitations dated from about the year 1870 to the year 1887 when the two forces combined (each being complementary to the other)” were responsible for the move to upright penmanship in England. This book provides considerable detail about the different people and countries in Europe studying the vertical style as a remedy to poor eyesight and bad posture among students. He also makes the argument in the beginning of this chapter on page 111 that "The History of Vertical Writing is the History of all Writing, as, up to about the middle of the 16th century such a thing as Sloping Writing was unknown." This idea we will have to set aside for a separate discussion.

As for the origins of library hand, one might conjecture that this debate over writing styles may have been known by these widely read librarians. With voracious reading habits, staff to help, and access to a plentitude of material, the growing complaints of sloping writing and the rise of vertical seems plausible. 

Yet, it must be said that Dewey's absence of mention of England or Europe at the conference, taken at face value, seems to indicate that he did not know of others working in vertical writing. England adopted the style much later than the countries Jackson mentions, but perplexingly (and assumed not to be a typo, although perhaps it could be) it is written that "In 1883 this [vertical writing] system had been introduced in thirty places in England." The New Education, Vol. II, No. 5, September 1894, page 111. This may tie into another story Jackson writes about in  The School Journal, Vol. XLVIII, No. 6,  February 10,  in which, as he says on page 146 that, "Nearly a half century ago a young English boy in one of the eastern countries saw a letter written by his uncle, who had adopted upright penmanship, and had practiced it for many years." 

On page 147 Jackson relates that the same young man who learned to write upright and became a teacher, accepted "an engagement as writing and commercial master in a large boys' school" and wanted to create "a set of vertical writing copy-books," and "the outlines were sketched, the plan settled, the books written, a specimen plate engraved, and a publisher sought." And finally,

Messrs. Sampson, Low, Marston & Co. viewed the matter favorably from the first: the agreement was drawn out and signed, the books put in hand, and the first series of headline copy-books in upright penmanship ever produced appeared in the month of November, 1886. 

Of note, these are the same publishers as those of John Jackson's books. He also does take on the story as his own, it seems, in a mention of October 1886 that is reprinted in a February 1887 advertisement for his own books, seen here below.



Too, he is described as the "originator of the system of upright penmanship" in other advertisements. So was it John Jackson who learned, perfected, and even taught upright penmanship decades before anyone else? He seems to suggest this, but one senses a hint of fiction in all these claims, too. Further research will be required to explore these origins and statements.

As for Dewey's relationships and timing, it is clear that Dewey was in communication with one or more librarians in England, and Dewey was far ahead of other Americans, yet Jackson with his publishers Messrs. Sampson, Low, Marston & Co. did make it to press their vertical writing before Dewey's library handwriting was in print.

No later than March 1887, in Library Notes, vol. 1., no. 4  Dewey began to promote "library handwriting" or "library hand" as it was also called, a vertical style, though he did indicate that it should have a slight backwards slant. Like Edison, he was interested in speed, efficiency, and legibility. One can think of the vertical style as the handwritten equivalent to the typewriter, which was rapidly evolving as a fast and efficient office machine that created its own vertical print. 

In both the original and reprinted version of the March 1887 article, Dewey explains his reasoning on what is necessary for "library alphabets and figures."

It remains to discuss main question, the forms of letters which will give the greatest legibility. Of some letters the copy-books give as many as 20 different forms from which people select the style that suits their taste, as ladies choose ribbons for their bonnets.

The rubric that all catalogers should write a uniform standard library hand, makes it necessary at once to throw out 19 of these 20 forms. At once all see that where the highest legibility is more important than all else together, we must prohibit peremptorily everything in the nature of ornament or flourish. The simpler and fewer the lines the better, as long as the distinctness of the letter is not impaired.


Looking back for a moment to Edison's own writing, one will see that a distinct difference between it and Dewey's library hand is that Edison employs what some might have considered lettering, in that each of the letters is distinct and not joined. It varies from "script" or "cursive" and is what some today call "printing." In this, too, Edison was far ahead of his time. In a paragraph from 1887, Dewey does indicate that disjoined hand is preferred.

The expanded and revised reprinted article from 1887 includes Dewey's first model of disjoined hand.



Dewey's version of disjoined hand seems much more like a typeface to be used by a typewriter or a printer than a style to be written by hand. While catalog cards are not commonly written in this fashion, one can find examples that are similar. 

In this first example, from Columbia University, where Dewey was himself the Chief Librarian beginning in 1883 (and one can assume that others followed his rules), it is fair to assume that the writer of this card attempts to write in Dewey's recommended disjoined hand, though there are some puzzling variations in some letters. 


Less convincingly an example of Dewey's disjoined hand is this example.



It is hard to know if the person doing the work on this example from Houghton was following the recommendations or not, because such lettering is ubiquitous. Yet is it possible that this is in fact a better copy of Dewey's example, excepting its slight right slope? Any empirical attempt to prove that this particular card can be traced back to Dewey's guiding principles is eroded by additional cards from the same collection. What does it tell us then, that neither of these other cards is in proper library hand? Are one or more from a time before the writing was regularized, or were these librarians untrained, or simply exhibiting the writing style of the time?


Reaching back to Dewey and his ever-changing ideas, it is interesting that his later versions of library hand seem to reintroduce a more flowing style, like that of Edison, or the kind of vertical writing that Jackson and others were promoting.

These other iterations of vertical style in the 1880s and 1890s had different motivations and a different group in mind--children in school. These new writing methods were widely promoted with great vigor and backed by what were seen as scientific studies. Writing teachers in Europe first adopted vertical writing, and it came to be popularized by John Jackson in England in the 1880s. While it is hard to find the exact date that Jackson's vertical style came to be known by those in the United States, advertisements were printed not later than 1887. Here, one can see an advertisement of it in The Educational Times from London.

The history of vertical writing for children and schools had its own, separate arc, quite apart from Edison's or Dewey's own efforts. The vertical writing that children used came first from the Europeans, then to John Jackson in England, then to Canada with Newlands and Row as early adopters, to Edwin Orlando Vaile in Chicago, who claims to be the first in the US to introduce a series of books employing this style, and then Harison in 1893 in New York City. All these men and their publishers were at the forefront of the movement in the US; and many others followed in the years 1894 - 1904.

The introduction of vertical penmanship also was layered upon the previous efforts of teachers to instruct students in writing. The evidence surrounding the use of "printing," or manuscript print in the classroom is somewhat elusive. The exact relationship between the use of script and print in the classroom seems to vary, as it is not clear whether it was more likely for teachers to insist on script first, and then printing; or, printing, and then script. In The New Education, vol. 2, no. 5, September 1894, on page 100, Ellen E. Kenyon describes in her article "Primary Language Work" teaching script in the first month, and then print in the third month.

But to return to Dewey, and his own journey, one can look to the 1898 edition of Simplified Library school rules; card catalog, accession, book numbers, shelf list, capitals, punctuation, abbreviations, library handwriting, and see there are other new letterforms and examples for librarians of both a joined hand and a disjoined hand, or, as he spelled it with simplified spelling, "joind hand" and "disjoind hand." Dewey further divides writing into  the regular and "alternativ" forms. Here, we see joind hand sentences with different letterforms.

Dewey also provides a new set of letterforms for disjoind hand.




 
In the 1898 edition, Dewey also provides an example of what a card written in library hand should look like.


Dewey was not alone in his efforts to create a better library card and catalog, for there was also C. A. Cutter. His system was used at a number of libraries, among them Boston Athenaeum, where he served as librarian, and also in nearby Redwood Library and Athenaeum in Newport, Rhode Island. His system is also the basis for that of the Library of Congress.


Apart from Dewey's work with library hand, the larger, national trend of using vertical penmanship reversed itself after roughly 1904, though some states like Utah were using  it as late as 1914. In general, though most school systems and people abandoned the vertical style and returned to a forward slanted script--either by employing the older Spencerian script or a newer Spencerian "practical penmanship," one of the many of the assorted "practical styles," the Palmer method, or another.

It is likely that neither Edison, Jackson, nor Dewey would have probably approved of the evolution of their vertical script ideals in the years after their innovations. For many writers, vertical script evolves into an awkward and difficult to read backhand style. One of the greatest penmen ever to explore with devilish humor the limits of legibility of backhand was Francis B. Courtney.

Below is a library card written in approximately 1909. This particular script is less legible since it is somewhat ornate; it is also not in Dewey's prescribed style. Is this a librarian who did not follow the rules? A person who learned vertical penmanship in the era from 1894 - 1904, and whose writing had simply deteriorated like that of others? While not overly poor, it is not what any of these earlier promoters of vertical writing had identified as ideal.



Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA

Through these examples, the evolution of writing appears somewhat regressive or circuitous. One must contemplate how a forward slanted script's angle could be nullified by the vertical and then reversed into a backhand. And how is it that such efforts for efficiency and legibility and reform could have brought about these unintended results? Is the librarian writing this script the problem, or is library hand itself poorly designed and therefore prone to become harder to write as one gets older?

Here, one can see the final comparisons of library handwriting in the years 1887 - 1916. I cannot claim that this comparison is complete, because my research continues in this area, but here are the examples printed in books that I have located.



To anyone who might reference the use of library hand, you could consider asking them, "To what year and to what style, joined or disjoined hand, do you refer?" Have you looked at a number of images of library cards, and do you think they are in library hand? 

All of this effort to find a rapid form of writing that was easy to read and that served both businesses and schools saw Palmer and even what was branded as Spencerian "practical writing" emerge from the end of the 1800s and into the early 1900s. In these decades, many different penman and their publishers printed copybooks and manuals with new writing styles.

There is also a movement that emerges, first in England and then the United States, to replace almost entirely the use of script in favor of a print style, especially in the younger grades of schools. This historical shift is addressed by Frank N. Freeman in "An Evaluation of Manuscript Writing" which appears in The Educator in 1936. 

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