Thomas Edison, John Jackson, Melvil Dewey, and Early Vertical Writing
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.
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 much more of a round hand, vertical style, as seen here in 1866.
Employed as a telegraph clerk trying to write faster and more legibly, Edison developed a rounded manuscript print style. He kept experimenting: writing smaller, removing the excessive flourishes, and timed himself writing until his speed could no longer be increased. 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 clearly is upright, unlike the 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 nation's youth nor the broader public.
By contrast, one can point to another iteration of a vertical style in the 1880s and 1890s. This one was widely promoted with great vigor and was backed by what were seen as scientific studies. Writing teachers in Europe first adopted it, and later 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, as it came from the Europeans and John Jackson extended into Canada with Newlands and Row as early adopters; Vaile and Harison were at the forefront of the movement in the US; and many others followed in the years 1894 - 1904. Afterwards, the trend reversed itself and most 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.
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, and these in turn were used as stencils 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. Melvil Dewey attended a conference in 1886 during which a Mr. Nelson was part of a conversation with Dewey and others, and Mr. Nelson did in fact mention an article in which Edison described his own writing as being "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."
Dewey read widely, and it was probable that he also knew of the move towards a vertical script in England being promoted by John Jackson or had read about it in advertisements in the US. No later than 1887, Dewey began to promote "library hand," a vertical style, though he did indicate that it should have a slight backwards slant. Soon after, he moved to make it the official style to be used by all librarians. 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.
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 note from 1877, Dewey does indicated that disjoined hand is preferred, and no later than 1898, there are 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."
In the 1898 edition of Simplified Library school rules; card catalog, accession, book numbers, shelf list, capitals, punctuation, abbreviations, library handwriting, Dewey provides an example of what a card should look like.
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.
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?
Oh, progress!
Despair not. What vanishes, returns again. Only a few decades later a variation of vertical print script sweeps through England, comes to America, and overtakes again the schools.
