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4 books match the query 'Handwriting'

cover of Handwriting in Early America: A Media History

Handwriting in Early America

A Media History

Edited by Mark Alan Mattes, Foreword by Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Afterword by Christopher Hager

University of Massachusetts Press, 2023

As digital communication has become dominant, commentators have declared that handwriting is a thing of the past, a relic of an earlier age. This volume of original essays makes it clear that anxiety around handwriting has existed for centuries and explores writing practices from a variety of interdisciplinary fields, including manuscript studies, Native American studies, media history, African American studies, book history, bibliography, textual studies, and archive theory.

By examining how a culturally diverse set of people grappled with handwriting in their own time and weathered shifting relationships to it, Handwriting in Early America uncovers perspectives that are multiethnic and multiracial, transatlantic and hemispheric, colonial and Indigenous, multilingual and illiterate.  Essays describe a future of handwriting as envisioned by practitioners, teachers, and even government officials of this time, revealing the tension between the anxiety of loss and the need to allow for variations going forward.

Contributors include James Berkey, Blake Bronson-Bartlett, John J. Garcia, Christopher Hager, Desirée Henderson, Frank Kelderman, Michelle Levy, Lisa Maruca, Christen Mucher, Alan Niles, Seth Perlow, Carla L. Peterson, Sarah Robbins, Patricia Jane Roylance, Karen Sánchez-Eppler, and Danielle Skeehan.

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cover of Handwriting of the Twentieth Century

Handwriting of the Twentieth Century

Rosemary Sassoon

Intellect Books, 2007

As letter-writing has fallen by the wayside, the art of lavish yet legible handwriting is no longer being taught to schoolchildren or employed in daily life—much to the dismay of those who receive hastily scrawled love notes or try to decipher a doctor’s prescription. In an age when script manuals for students are disappearing at a rapid rate and writing samples are ephemeral, Rosemary Sassoon’s Handwriting of the Twentieth Century provides the first historical record of teaching the skill of writing in the last 100 years.

In addition to illustrating the techniques used by handwriting instructors and documenting the ever-changing views of script stylists, this volume probes the development and manufacture of writing equipment as well as useful examples for today’s teachers of writing. Handwriting of the Twentieth Century is a delightful, comprehensive account of our constant quest for fluent and clear handwritten script.
 
“...excellent and comprehensive illustrated book—which takes us through not only what happened in the United Kingdom, but brings in information about other English speaking countries such as America and Australia as well as European scripts, providing samples and explanations that are valuable as a reference. . . . The book's well-written Epilogue merits a section being printed—It couldn't be put better by a graphologist!”—Elaine Quigley, Graphologist
 
 
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cover of Marion Richardson: Her Life and Her Contribution to Handwriting

Marion Richardson

Her Life and Her Contribution to Handwriting

Rosemary Sassoon

Intellect Books, 2012

In Marion Richardson: Her Life and Contribution to Handwriting, Rosemary Sassoon looks at Richardson’s life and work through the artist and educator’s own writings as well as letters and personal recollections from those who knew and worked with her. The driving force behind a momentous shift in the way art is taught to children, Richardson is perhaps best known for her groundbreaking contribution to penmanship, devising two schemes based on her observations of the natural movements of young children’s hands. The result of extensive original archival research, this book includes many illustrations that depict Richardson’s inventive approach.
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cover of Public Lettering: Script, Power, and Culture

Public Lettering

Script, Power, and Culture

Armando Petrucci

University of Chicago Press, 1993

Public lettering in all its forms—official inscriptions on
buildings, commercial graphics, signs, epitaphs on tombstones,
graffiti—is a fixture of urban life. In Public
Lettering, Armando Petrucci reconstructs the history of
public writing in the West and traces its social functions
from the eleventh century through the modern period.

Taking the city of Rome as a case study, Petrucci begins
with a consideration of the first civic inscriptions after
ancient times. Substantial chapters on the uses of public
writing in the industrial revolution and the early twentieth
century prepare the way for his provocative discussions of
public lettering in the the contexts of fascism, post-war
radicalism, and the student revolutions of 1968 and 1977.

Throughout, Petrucci is concerned with the relations
between the functions and styles of letters and the places
where they appear. Writing, he argues, is one of the
instruments of public power; display lettering is often the
image and mirror of power itself, making the social use of
written forms a type of conquest. Because of Rome's role as
a “World-City,” Petrucci's interdisciplinary study has
wide-ranging implications for our understanding of the social
function of graphic design.
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