Penmanship

At the Independent, Michael Bywater on pens old and new and the perils and pleasures of handwriting.

(I saw one of these Livescribe smartpens recently and rather coveted it - it would be particularly useful for doing interviews where you weren't going to quote much, but needed to be able to find the relevant bits out of a longish recorded conversation.)

"Venison pasty, pigions, Uncle Robert is dead"

From Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self:

He spaced the lines evenly, with between twenty and thirty to a page. He gave curly ornamentations to the capital letters for the name of the month at the head of each page--very occasionally forgetting it was a new month, so that he had to delete "December" and put in "January." September and October were given in particularly lush capitals, and February's F's always came out looking scratchy with its straight double up-and-down strokes. Some pages have browned to a pale toast colour with the years, but more have remained a fresh, almost chalky white; there are thin, fragile pages, and others that feel downy, almost velvety to the touch. Pepys was a fine calligrapher when he made time to write slowly, as he did for his Diary, and his pages are as beautiful as pieces of embroidery, with their neatly spaced symbols, the curly, the crotchety and the angular, interspersed with longhand for names, place and any other words that took his fancy, on one page a dozen, as many as forty on another. The longhand leaps out at you tantalizingly as you turn the pages, each word suggesting its own stories--Axe-yard, Mr. Downing, Jane, Hinchingb., Deptfd, Whitehall, Monke, Easterday, emerods, venison pasty, pigions, Uncle Robert is dead, Uncle corps, Queen, DY [Duke of York], Robes, papists, Clergy, conventicles, tumults, subsidys, Justice, Sessions, Sr WP, gentleman, yellow plume, petty coate, drawers, summer, amours--small packets of meaning surrounded by the elegant, impenetrable shorthand.

Sunday miscellany

Werner Herzog was once shot by an "insignificant bullet."

Alice's love affair with the chalkboard. (The underlying link to Anne Trubek's article on the history of handwriting is highly worthwhile.)

Amy Davidson interviews Jon Lee Anderson about current conditions in Port-au-Prince.

I just finished reading Per Pettersen's Out Stealing Horses; the ARC has been on my shelves for years now, but for some reason I never got around to reading it. It is a spectacularly good novel! Hmmm, must get and read his other books...