Spencerian: the ornamental American hand, 1850–1925

The shaded, oval-built hand that American business colleges taught from the 1850s into the early 1900s.

Taught: 1850s to the early 1900s; business colleges and schools
Pen: Pointed steel pen
Look: 52° slant, shaded downstrokes, oval capitals
Where you meet it: Business letters, account books, ledgers

No specimen yet. A plate from a period copybook, or an openly licensed face that matches the hand, appears here once it passes our checks.

How to read it: the tells

T FCapital F is the T with one extra curve at the left, half a space long. Look for that curve before reading an F as a T.
S LCapital L follows the S until the stroke comes back to the line. Where it runs on along the line, it is an L.
H KThirteen capitals share one stem, so tell them apart by their tops, not their stems.
| |The shade sits on downstrokes, and a capital is usually shaded on one curve only. An unshaded page can still be Spencerian.

History

Platt Rogers Spencer was born in East Fishkill, New York, on 7 November 1800.[^1] His family moved west in 1810, a journey of 51 days by wagon to Jefferson, in Ashtabula County, Ohio.[^2] For the last twenty years of his life he taught his penmanship at a log-cabin seminary near his home.[^3] He founded the first Spencerian Commercial College, in Pittsburgh, in 1852,[^4] and helped build a network of forty such colleges across the United States and Canada.[^5] His students went on to found the Bryant & Stratton business schools, which carried the hand into factories, mills and warehouses.[^6]

Spencer died on 16 May 1864.[^7] The Spencerian Key to Practical Penmanship, prepared by H. C. Spencer,[^8] went to press after his death.[^9] Adopted in the 1850s as the standard hand taught across the country, Spencerian held that place until the first decade of the twentieth century.[^10]

The Key sets the slant at fifty-two degrees.[^11] A shade on a straight line starts heavy at the top and thins toward the ruled line,[^12] and a capital is usually shaded on one curve only.[^13] Not every Spencerian page is shaded: many accountants and book-keepers preferred to write without it.[^14]

Spencerian vs Palmer

Spencerian

A fixed slant of 52 degrees (Spencerian Key to Practical Penmanship, p. 11)
Shaded downstrokes, heavy at the top (Spencerian Key, plate of Medium Hand, p. 39)
Bold, ornamental capitals built on ovals (Spencerian Key, plate: Variety of Spencerian Capitals, p. 102)

Palmer method

Any slant, as long as it is the same throughout (The Palmer Method of Business Writing (1915), p. 21)
No shading at all (The Palmer Method of Business Writing (1915), p. 40)
Twelve capitals begin with the same inverted-6 stroke (The Palmer Method of Business Writing (1915), pp. 29 and 36)