Got an email from a friend in Guyana in South America who sent me the names of some books on Penmanship and asked why I didn’t have a Category for that.

After thinking about it for a minute or two I replied “Because I’m stupid and never thought about it.” or words to that effect. I took the titles he sent and started searching through some of the sources I use and without a lot of effort found about 50 of them. I collected them, did some cleanup work on them and got them posted.

We take for granted that we can shoot something to the printer, send a text or just email someone. In a world trying to rebuild at a pre-electrical level none of those, obviously, will be available. That means messages, notes, mail, documents and pretty much any written communication will be done by hand. Surprisingly a significant number of students these days cannot read or write cursive. I actually had an employee at the company where I used to work bring a note to me that I had left with some computer instructions and say she couldn’t read it. It was in cursive. Seriously.

Anyone who has ever done any writing using block letters knows that it is really slow compared to cursive and actually fatiguing after a bit. Someone practiced in cursive can write very rapidly and clearly (excluding Physicians of course) and with far less fatigue than block printing. Cursive has been in use for thousands of years and methods of writing where each letter flows into the next makes writing far more practical than any form of block writing. Cursive writing has been taught in U.S. schools almost since the country’s founding and I suspect most countries have taught it even longer.

Surprisingly cursive writing from a couple hundred years ago is still readable to most folks since alphabets have not changed significantly in quite a while. So while spelling changes and word meaning and grammar do change the actual process of cursive writing has not to any great degree.

A few of the books have sections on trimming quill pens since they have been in use for a long, long time and are still used by some hobbyists, calligraphers and artists. Making a quill pen and properly trimming one as it is used is a real lost art. Few if any people still know it. Fortunately there are several sections in these books that cover the subject.

So enjoy and Thanks you Damon for alerting me to this missing but vital Category.

The Librarian