Only one hand.

[Empty_of_Clouds]

Okay, here's a less controversial topic.


Cast your mind and/or imagination back to the golden age of fountain pens. Would the average user write using only one hand? What I mean is did people explore different script types if they weren't in the business of calligraphy, or would they have stuck with the hand they were dealt learned at school/home?

I wonder if today the majority of people here and elsewhere on forums are equal parts hobbyist and pen user, such that there is a desire to explore different nibs - the usual fine/medium/broad, as well as more exotic varieties such as italics and architect grinds and so on.

In addition to this, were there nibmeisters back in the day who would alter a bought nib for the customer?


I suspect that we are much more creative in our exploration of writing styles today, even if in terms of skill we do not reach the exampled heights of our predecessors.

Thoughts?








Note for the curious: The forum is often devoid of life - other than the usual suspects in the classifieds - which has spurred me a little to try and encourage some discussion. I wish more members would throw any embarrassment aside and just ask questions, even if they sound stupid. There are a lot of areas of interest in fountain pens that get little exploration. Let's go explorin'!

[ethernautrix]

I don't know, but whatever it is, you're wrong!



Kidding.

As a quick and superficial response, I'm going to guess that the wide and instant exposure to the -new- spurs the curiosity among masses of individuals to try different hands. Add in rising literacy rates and standards of living plus more leisure time.

[ethernautrix]

Can't edit cos on the HHC (handheld computer. When will we stop calling these phones?), but I doubt "nibmeister" was a specialized occupation back in the day. Without researching at all, I'm going to surmise that nib tinkering was part of a stationer's overall job.

[Empty_of_Clouds]

I don't know, but whatever it is, you're wrong!

I get that you're kidding but really that is the default position I assume most people take to any of my posts on this forum.


Actually, I guess at the heart of my question is whether people who simply used their fountain pen as their daily writing tool would have been at all interested in spending time learning to write different scripts. Obviously there probably were some handwriting enthusiasts, but I wonder if today the balance has tipped such that we have a lot more people using fountain pens who have a broader interest than simple utility. Compared with yesterday that is.

[Deb]

My husband, who is a smidgen older than I am and was around when fountain pens were still widely used (if no longer quite the default) says he learned to write one way - with considerable difficulty and many applications of the sadistic teacher's ruler - and never considered trying a different writing style. He is unaware of any adjusting of nibs. Repair, yes, but altering nibs to write in a different way, no.

[Wuddus]

I suspect most stuck with one style of writing, and the fountain pen was simply the most widely used tool for the job. To be honest, that's my direction too. I tried dabbling with calligraphy of sorts many years ago, and I was useless. I don't have the artistic flair, nor the hand and eye coordination for it.

A fountain pen slows my writing down and makes it more legible, and an italic nib makes it look a little more attractive without really trying if I'm writing a letter. Aside from that, my writing is the same it always has been, a semi-joined non-script that's irregular and messy but mostly legible. It's just more fun producing that mess with a fountain pen instead of a ballpoint.

[Paddler]

I exclusively use the cursive hand I was taught in the '50s. Sometimes, when writing out a URL, for example, I will use block printing. I have no heat to learn italic or Spencerian. I can work on my hand to make it more legible and regular, but it remains the same hand I learned in gradeschool.

I have never seen the writing of my ancestors in any but that same hand. Aunts, uncles, grandparents all used the same cursive hand exclusively, in letters that go back as far as the mid-19th Century.

I had some day books written by our town doctor in the late 19th Century. He wrote in a Spencerian-like hand when writing his daily records. He pulled out all the stops when writing the monthly title sheets, however. He used large, flowing script with a lot of line variation there. His wife used a simpler hand, much like the one I was taught. They were using dip pens, though, and ink they called "writing fluid" manufactured by P & J Arnold of London, England.

Edited to add: In my years of restoring old fountain pens, I bought my pens at yard sales and flea markets. In examining these and trying to make them write well, I repeatedly came across the work of a nibster. His signature repair was the peening of a nib's slit, just behind the tipping. This peening works to constrict ink flow, making the pen a dry writer. The pens were made in the '30s and '40s.

[Cob]

Mabie Todd offered with all their new pens an option for the customer whereby the pen might be returned to MT together with a steel nib of the customer's favoured type. MT would try to match the nib and return the pen with the replacement fitted and adjusted &c. There was no charge, except postage for this service. I believe that some other manufacturers offered this excellent service.

Cob

[countrydirt]

I would expect most didn't have the leisure time we are afforded to play with pens. I remember watching my grandfather write a few letters with a ballpoint pen. This old rancher had amazing handwriting, despite the fact that he only really completed 3rd grade.

I also suspect that most people used a pencil to write with back in the day.

Sent from my SM-N950U using Tapatalk

[AzJon]

As has largely been mentioned, the handwriting you got in school was largely the one you used publicly. Beyond that, you might find some variation of people that can write short-hand if they were trained to take notes very quickly, such as a secretary, police officer, or journalist (before audio recordings could be made). Gregg Shorthand being a the most common American style. To that end, there were nibs that were predominantly used for this style (hence finding Gregg pens in the wild). IIRC, a Gregg nib has similar features to a fine-stub and are often hard as nails as fast writing and flex don't really go hand-in-hand, afterall.

I do not believe that "Nibmeister" was an individualized job, per se, but a skill set rolled into a jeweler's work. Fun fact: historically a "jeweler" typically referred specifically to a goldsmith, while "silversmith" referred to someone that make silver table ware such as forks, knives, spoon, bowls, etc. The job of jewelers back in the day was not solely to make pretty adornment, but to repair watches and fountain pens alike as they were really the only ones that would have the skills and tools (welding/soldering, cutting, grinding, filing, etc) for such a job. I very much doubt you will be able to find a jeweler that still offers nib repair service, but you might be able to find an old timer out there that remembers when it was done.

[manoeuver]

Good question.

I believe the pen manufacturers had nibfolk on staff tuning pens before sale and handling repairs.

I'd imagine there were a few weirdos learning alternate scrawls back in the day, maybe as many as today.

[azkid]

I will happily speculate. I think interest in pens as a hobby -- which goes beyond the pure practicality of daily writing -- seems to naturally engender interest in less common activities of pen use, whether repair, penmanship, drawing, or learning other writing styles. I think the same is true for other hobbies.

Also, people may be drawn to fountain pens as a hobby in and of itself through initial interest in art or calligraphy.

Learning a different writing style is probably significantly more common among FP hobbyists than the general public, whether now or in the past when FPs were a more common pen type.

[Marsilius]

What a great question, E_of_C.
I deal with hands from scribal hands in music manuscripts from ca. 1450-1500 (writing both music and text). There people tend to use the same script, and scholars tend to think they can differentiate between two scribes. But they also tend to mention that they can see an evolution of the handwriting of an individual scribe over time. (Individual letters or clef signs may change shape). But the main habits remain.
FWIW, That lines up with what people have said about my handwriting: even when I try to change, everyone knows it is my writing. Habits die hard.
I also use cursive in some settings and block letter in others, but people point out my similar habits in both.
There is also a new scholarly buzzword now: "self-fashioning" which is sometimes cited when discussing of examples of people trying to improve their handwriting as part of crafting their public presentation. I used to just call it practice . . .

[Empty_of_Clouds]

Interesting stuff.

Although I don't have a particularly regular hand, inasmuch as it is not that skillfully executed, I do find that I can write in passable imitation of quite a few different styles. Often this can be after only a few minutes study of the forms. Now, I have no recall if I've been taught anything beyond a kind generic Palmer type of hand, so I've always assumed that anyone can do this. Can't write with my left hand though!

[Jerome Tarshis]

I am a survivor of the Golden Age of Fountain Pens in the United States, having come to writing in the early 1940s. My parents, born in the first decade of the twentieth century, would have been more centrally located in that period.

In my experience, people learned whatever hand they learned, and Palmer was the most commonly mentioned. And they stuck with it. But that didn't mean everybody's handwriting looked the same. My parents wrote radically different-looking hands, although both hands were consistent with what one learned in school.

I was never really secure about writing joined-up letters, and although I can do it today, I have also done what is called printing and a hybrid of printing and a running roundhand. Often enough it is like an italic hand though not identical or deliberately modeled on an italic character set.

There were islands of exception in the United States. When Lloyd Reynolds was teaching italic writing at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, many people in the Pacific Northwest came to write something like an italic hand that was different from what they'd learned in elementary school. What was more, individual elementary schools, under the influence of the Arts and Crafts Movement in England, taught some kind of italic hand before and after World War II. This tended to be something of an upper middle class thing, but wasn't confined to private schools.

Although many of us submitted to being taught the prevalent hand and wrote it comfortably and well in adult life, others were what was called maladjusted in that and possibly other ways, and evolved some kind of idiosyncratic compromise with writing as it was done all around them. The situation was far better (a partisan of instruction in italic writing might say "far worse") than it is today, but things weren't 100% homogeneous.

[gbryal]

I don't know about the golden age, though I don't think any of my older relatives write similarly to each other though most of them must have learned Palmer.

But in the seventies when I learned, we were probably presented with Zaner-Bloser with the classroom materials, while being taught by people who knew Palmer, and probably unconsciously were really teaching that, and they were moving toward D'Nealian. I can barely tell the difference between the three of them anyway and I think everyone in my class developed their own style as people do. Some immediately departed, probably temporarily, to loopy letters with hearts over the letter I, some incorporated print capitals, and some switched to print forever.

I think these various hands are more for different approaches to instruction than a sort of font you adhere to forever.

[Runnin_Ute]

My parents, both now in their early 80's would have learned from different schools in the same school district. Both have very nice handwriting. Mom's has a different feel to it than dad's. She has more swoopiness to her handwriting than he does.

I learned in the early part of the 1960's. The hand? Not sure, but either Palmer or Zaner-Bloser. I just don't recall which. Over the years, mine has evolved. Beginning when I was in Junior High School in the early 70's I started doing an ALL CAP BLOCK printing after having to do some drafting in a shop class. My signature incorporated elements from my dad. My cursive gradually took on a hybrid print/cursive. It is more straight cursive now than it was say five or six years ago, but some letters or combinations still show the hybrid. H,P,Q,R,S, are more like block print. It's been so long since I used a cursive S I am going to have to re-learn it. So I make do.

Basically, I think people back in the day pretty well stuck to what they learned but maybe added a personal touch to it, and that is what we do today, isn't it? Of course, people like us often will branch out and learn a second (or third or fourth) hand as well as our primary one. That probably happened less frequently back in the "one man, one pen" days.

[azkid]

I recall learning one of those two hands mentioned above-- in the late 70s.

Now that I am practicing again I remember clearly the tracing exercises, as well as consciously modifying my "font" to work around my difficulties like 'r'.

I just remembered that my mom remarked at least once in my childhood (probably while dismayed at my handwriting): when she was taught in the late 30s, they did lots and lots and lots of drills. Like making loops and circles, lines and zigzags and whatever else. I don't remember doing any of this or if we did, very little. Not enough.

Nobody ever taught us to write with our arms vs hands or fingers, as far as I recall. I learned this was a thing exactly two weeks ago. I happen to write with hand and forearm. How this came about I cannot hope to guess.

[pajaro]

I was taught Palmer method in the 1950s in Catholic schools. When I was seven they tried to make me write right handed, as I was naturally left handed and had poor writing. I remain a left hander. I wrote the same way until my third year in college, when I changed style a bit to make my writing more easily read. I never knew anyone who tried any of the different hands. I did have to print out instructions during my IT career to be sure people clearly understood computer procedures.

After finding computer forums around 2009, I learned about fancy nibs and nibmeisters. It had not occurred to me that anyone fixed pens or modified them as a career. Since most of the IT people and non-IT people ridiculed fountain pens, I made sure to use the Parker 51 or Montblanc pens I had.; I had great contempt for people who would ridicuile someone for using fountain pens instead of ballpoints. I used both and I made sure to have them in my pocket. And a pocket protector sometimes as well. The people who championed Microsoft systems replacing mainframe systems and host based database systems made fun of fountain pen use, and they threatened the people who worked in my section who worked on host systems that Microsoft PC gurus would put them out of a job. You might well imagine I had a low opinion of the PC enthusiasts who made host system supporters and fountain pen users think they would lose their jobs with the triumph of the Microsoft monolith. Our boss, the MIS Director fueled this stuff, because he thought it made everyone produce better results. Making the ladies who worked on the older systems cry isn't my idea of a pep talk. Eventually I made sure to carry at least five Montblancs each day and a Parker 51 or two as well. I also had a Sheaffer Imperial desk set of two fountain pens as well. I resisted being run over by the smart\*$$ bulldozer.

[Sid the Cat]

My writing style seems to be in a constant state of evolution (and occasionally devolution), depending on the state of my dalliance with Secretary Hand...when it's really bad my script is almost as hard to read as its 16th-century exemplars.