Spencerian script, letter by letter

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]

The Key measures every letter in spaces. One space of height is the height of a small i,^[15] which in the medium hand is one-ninth of an inch.^[16] One space of width is the gap between the two slanting downstrokes of a small u.^[17] The extended loop, the tall stroke of the loop letters, is three spaces high and half a space wide.^[18] On a page with no ruler the i is still the measure: hold an unclear letter against the i beside it and count.

Every downstroke leans at fifty-two degrees, which the Key calls the regular slant for all written letters,^[19] and the pointed ovals made where its curves join lie at thirty-four.^[20] Because the slant is fixed, the downstrokes of a careful Spencerian page run parallel, and a stroke that leans another way is likely a joining curve rather than part of a letter.

The Key teaches the small letters in families, by the strokes they share. The first family, i, u and w, is made only of straight lines and right curves.^[21] The second, n, m, x and v, brings in the left curve.^[22] In the x the crossing line is made upwards, the only straight line in the alphabet drawn that way,^[23] so a straight stroke climbing through a short letter marks an x. The r and s are a family of two, set apart by the slight extra height of their first curve:^[24] a short letter that stands a little above its neighbours is likely an r or an s, not an i or an e. The t, d, p and q are called short-extended, for their length.^[25]

The capitals are grouped the same way, and the groups read like a list of the pairs a reader mixes up. T and F share a group, and the only difference between them is the F's finish.^[26] I and J are alike except in their ending.^[27] When a capital will not settle, read the end of its last stroke, because that is where the Key puts the difference.

Shade, the Key says, is not essential to form and may be used or left out as the writer chooses;^[28] accountants who left it out did so partly so that they could more readily erase errors.^[29] Where shade is used it follows rules, and the rules help a reader. The short letters are usually left unshaded.^[30] On t and d the shade is heaviest at the top and tapers to the lower turn,^[31] while on p it runs the other way, from the ruled line to the foot of the letter.^[32] When two p's, d's or t's come together, the first is shaded and the second gets only a half shade.^[33]

The f is shaded from the middle of its downward line to the turn at its base,^[34] but the j and the long s are never shaded.^[35] On a shaded page, then, a long letter with no shade on its stem is more likely the long s than an f. On capitals built on the capital stem the shade begins halfway up the stem,^[36] swells for half the way down and fades toward the base,^[37] so the darkest part of such a capital sits low on its stem. The Key counts shading every downward line as a fault:^[38] a page where every stroke is heavy was written against its teaching.

Many leading business writers, the Key says, kept to one rule: letters as far apart as the two downstrokes of an n or u, and words twice that.^[39] A capital stands one space from the first small letter of its word,^[40] and sentences in a paragraph stand three spaces apart.^[41] So a gap about twice the width of an n is a word break, and a gap of three can mark the end of a sentence even where the full stop is faint. Signatures are the exception: where initials run together, as in many signatures, no rule of spacing applies, and the design is left to the writer's taste.^[42]

The Key gives figures a chapter of their own. It ties the accountant's convenience in reading and adding long columns to two things, proper slant and equal spacing,^[43] and asks that each figure keep its distinctive features.^[44] Its list of faults is also a list of the misreadings you will meet. A 1 begun with a curve on the left looks like a 9 or a 7.^[45] A 7 whose top is a simple horizontal curve, instead of a compound one, looks like a 9.^[46]

Several figures borrow the shapes of capitals. The 2 looks like a capital Q without its first curve,^[47] the 3 like a reversed capital E,^[48] and the top of the 7 like the top of a capital T.^[49] Height tells figures apart too. The 1 is the standard: a straight line on the regular slant, one space high.^[50] The 7, 9 and 6 may be made longer, as the writer pleases:^[51] the 6 starts a space and a half above the line,^[52] the 7 ends half a space below it,^[53] and the 9 is a space and a half long.^[54] Many writers and accountants, though, made the 6, 7 and 9 the same length as the other figures,^[55] so length helps only on the pages where it was kept. The 0 is a small pointed oval,^[56] and figures stand a third of a space apart,^[57] closer than letters. A column of figures without shading is no sign of a different hand: with a coarse pen, the Key says, shading may be left out altogether.^[58]

The Key itself complains about the writing of its day. Many whose work depends on writing, it says, often fail to attain even legibility,^[59] and masses of documents lay in the dead letter office because the writing on their covers could not be deciphered.^[60] The hand you are trying to read may be a poor Spencerian rather than a strange one.

The Key's medium hand is the basis of all its other styles,^[61] and its copy books came in four series: the Exercise, the Common School, the Business and the Ladies'.^[62] So the same alphabet turns up at several sizes and weights. Raise the joining curves and lengthen the main strokes, and you have the bold business style the Key recommends for ledger headings;^[63] lower the curves and shorten the strokes, and you have a running hand,^[64] the one it recommends for correspondence.^[65]

The Ladies' Hand is smaller. Its i is one-fifteenth of an inch, against one-ninth in the medium hand,^[66] while its capitals and loop letters rise four spaces above the line,^[67] one more than the medium hand's loops. Very small short letters under tall loops are its mark. The hand does not name the writer, though: many women, the Key says, chose a business style.^[68]

Capitals vary most. The Key calls the small letters the body of all writing and leaves the style of capitals to the writer,^[69] who has great latitude for variety,^[70] so long as the characteristics of the printed letters are kept.^[71] The Key traces the line from print itself: the step from italic small letters to script is easy and natural,^[72] and the loops of the tall letters are the joining curves meeting their straight lines.^[73] Behind every flourish there is a printed capital, so when a capital looks unfamiliar, look for the printed letter inside it.

Spencerian had a rival even in the Key. It describes a theory that taught a purely muscular movement, the action of the forearm alone,^[74] and calls that movement unnatural, difficult to acquire and ill-adapted to the construction of all classes of letters.^[75] Mary L. Dougherty's 1917 history of handwriting teaching in America names 1850 to 1890 the period of independent American systems, and 1890 to 1900 that of vertical writing.^[76] In the first, Dougherty writes, the combined arm, forearm and finger movement narrowed to the extreme arm movement, sometimes called the forearm or muscular movement,^[77] and the letter style known as the Spencerian was built on the elliptical curve, the style from which most of the modern forms were adapted.^[78]

Then came vertical writing, urged from France and Germany first on grounds of hygiene.^[79] It did not cure faults of posture or eyestrain,^[80] and it was abandoned; the reaction was to a less extreme slant than before.^[81] A hand written bolt upright may therefore come from the vertical years of the 1890s rather than from Spencerian's.