On the Gift of Longhand

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From The Millions:

My 99-year-old great-aunt Nina gave me her husband’s fountain pen when I was visiting her in Greece this summer. A widow for 20 years, and despairing with what feels to her like a punishing longevity, she is divesting herself of important keepsakes, as if to expedite her reunion with her dead husband Kostakis. Nina wanted to give Kostakis’s pen to me because I am, as she puts it, the only Lazaridis left.

I told Nina that, beyond the honor of being entrusted with the pen, I would take pride in using it in my work. What mattered most to her was that I accept it as an emblem. Together with his pocket watch, which she also gave me, it was my uncle’s trademark, as much symbols for him as the orb and scepter of a monarch.

I’m a longtime longhand writer. I’m old enough to remember writing by hand when it was the only choice. Then I fell to the seductions of these newfangled things called laptops, like so many others. I was delighted by the convenience and by the final-draft look of even the messiest prose. But I switched back to longhand several years ago, and now it’s the only way I write my drafts. When I returned to pen and paper, I did so with the zeal of a convert. Not content to have just one or two good pens, I’ve amassed a small collection of mostly fountain pens. I’m catholic in my tastes, and cherish my Paper Mate Ink Joy, Pilot G-1, and Pilot Varsity, along with two ‘40s-era Parker 51s, one of which belonged to my father. But it’s the fountain pens I really prefer to use when writing first drafts.

Writing with a fountain pen is longhand taken to the next level. You can’t just pluck off the cap and go. Before you can write even the first letter, you have to unscrew the top of your ink bottle, unscrew the end of the barrel on the pen, fiddle with each pen’s particular filling mechanism, blot the ink on the blotting paper. And once you actually begin to write, you have to pay attention to the wet ink—especially if you’re a lefty like me—and take note of its gradually fading color as a signal that you are about to run completely dry and need to start the filling process all over again.

When you write with a fountain pen, you experience writing as a truly physical activity, one that affects all your senses. There’s the sort of chalky, silty smell of the ink; the scratch of the pen dragging across the page; the feel of the barrel and the cap you screw on at every pause in writing lest the ink dry faster; the glint of the wet ink that goes to matte while you examine your words. The only sense you don’t experience with a fountain pen is taste—at least I’d hope not. Having to attend to all these sensations, I think you can come close to the sort of improved mental processing neurologists ascribe to walking. And you can do it without even leaving your desk.

The pen Nina gave me is a Sheaffer Snorkel pen. Kostakis kept it on his desk in its original case, which announces it as “Sheaffer’s new Snorkel pen.” New in 1952. I’m used to the various filling mechanisms of a range of fountain pens, from eyedropper to squeeze chamber to disposable cartridge. But I’d never seen anything like the Snorkel, whose mechanism works like a miniature version of its name that pushes out from beneath the nib as you turn the knob built into the pen’s back end. You dip only the snorkel into the ink, let it suck up the liquid for a few seconds, and then retract it. The theory is that the nib itself stays dry and your fingers never risk the ink stains that I, for one, regularly accumulate during a day of longhand writing. Apparently, when the pens were first introduced, school children discovered how to use the Snorkel in reverse and shoot jets of ink out at each other. The mechanism was quickly redesigned. I know from the graffiti carved into door jambs of my family’s ancestral home that my uncle Kostakis was unruly as a child. But I’m pretty sure he didn’t try to shoot ink from his pen in 1952 as a 40-year-old man.

Link to the rest at The Millions

PG has found that he is increasingly more clumsy writing with any sort of pen in longhand.

He’ll take the random note now and then, but he had to hand-write a check a couple of weeks ago, a task he wanted to do correctly, and it was a real chore. The result looked like it had been written by a ten-year-old.

Generally, he deposits any checks he receives electronically and pays all his bills the same way.

PG thinks he has mentioned this before, but one of the wisest things his mother did when he was in what would today be called middle school was to make him take a typing class. For reasons unknown, he took to typing right away and was the fastest typist in his (small) class.

Thereafter, when everyone else was turning in hand-written assignments, PG’s were typewritten. This fact alone probably improved his grades.

Of course in the prehistoric age of typewriters, if you made a mistake, it was a pain to correct it. For those youthful visitors to TPV, PG will describe the process.

  1. Ideally, you would catch your mistake pretty quickly, which wasn’t that difficult if your eyes were on the paper you were typing because your fingers already knew where every key was. (Hunting and pecking has always been low-tech.)
  2. In that case, when you made an error, you stopped typing, rolled the paper up a bit in the typewriter, then painted over the mistake with a long-forgotten liquid called White-Out, blow on the liquid until it dried out, then rolled your paper down to the line you had erred on, used the backspace key so the typewriter carriage was in the proper position for you to type the correction, then went on your merry typing way.
  3. Yes, anyone reading the paper could see the White-Out, but teachers wouldn’t reduce your grade for the project because a typed paper was a zillion times easier to read than a handwritten one, even if the girl who had the best handwriting in the class had written it. (In PG’s youthful world, girls always had better handwriting than boys. Sexism had not yet been invented.)

The next step forward with typewriters was the IBM Selectric with which you couldn’t jam up the keys like was easy to do with all previous typewriters, manual or electric. The Selectric was nice, but you still had to do the White-Out thing if you made a typo.

Then came the Correcting Selectric. This sped up the correction process substantially because you didn’t have to wait for White-Out to dry. The Correcting Selectric had two ribbons instead of one. The first ribbon was the black one which had always done the typing since dinosaurs roamed the earth. The second ribbon was a white one which you could use to correct a typo.

The way the white ribbon worked is that you would back up to the place where you had made the typo, then you pressed a key that engaged the white ribbon and retyped your typo. The result was that you had a white-colored typo instead of a black typo. Then, you backed up to the beginning of your covered-up typo and typed over the error with your correction. No White-Out or blowing the White-Out dry was necessary.

One final digression.

Legal secretaries were one or more steps above all sorts of other secretaries. (Secretaries did the typing, except for PG who often did his own typing for anything more than an easy-to-dictate letter.)

The reason that legal secretaries were super-human was because most attorneys would not allow any corrections on a will and, sometimes, on other sorts of documents as well. If a secretary was typing a will and made an error in the last paragraph on a page, the entire page would need to be re-typed.

The reason for this ancient imperative was that a typed correction to a will might give rise to a question in the mind of one or more of the heirs that someone with evil intent had changed Uncle Harry’s will after he signed it, most likely after the old bachelor had died.

As the result of such this evil act, Uncle Harry’s twenty-acre parcel of land, filled with rocks and copperheads and unlikely every to grow anything useful was bequeathed to evil cousin Lukas instead of virtuous cousin Lucille.

Hence, the no-corrections-of-wills rule was applied in a great many law offices.

One day, a dedicated word processor appeared, followed a couple of years later by a personal computer and the market for White-Out shrank into a faint shadow of its former self (although you can still purchase it on Amazon.)

8 thoughts on “On the Gift of Longhand”

  1. These stories always tempt me to gift the writer with fifty pounds of clay and a sharp stick to enhance their experience…

    Nobody cares how you write your story. Nobody will see your beautiful longhand version. They’ll only see the printed work (in ink on paper, or on a screen) – one that somebody had to take the trouble to type from your wonderful original version, and that a copy editor had to check once again.

    (Note that this does apply to calligraphers, whose work we see in all of its artistic and usually beautiful glory. Particularly those who work with brush and ink.)

    Side note: PG, perhaps you went straight to the Correcting Selectric, but Whiteout came in another form than the bottle – small strips of film that you inserted in front of your typo and hit the offending key. Saved me many times in my college years with a Corona manual – I all too often forgot to shake the Whiteout bottle vigorously before applying it. That ruined the page with a soggy mess.

    • By the way, the “captcha” is very annoying for those of us with older eyes – took me three times to find all of the buses in the little thumbnails. (And twice for this one with cars!)

    • I remember the White-Out strips as well.

      Thanks for mentioning your problems with the Captcha. I just put it up today because I was getting a lot of spam comments that I had to manually delete every day, but I think I’ll take it down to see if I can make it less of a hassle to deal with.

      I want people to comment. That’s the best part of TPV.

    • I largely agree. I can imagine a discussion of how the draft-and-revision process differs depending on the format used, but these discussions in practice are aesthetic preferences at best, and fuzzy nostalgia at worst. Certainly as a reader I don’t care one whit about this stuff.

      This is related to the hand-wringing that The Kidz can’t do cursive. My kids (now teenagers) were given a couple of days on cursive, mostly so they would recognize what it is. When the one kid went to sixth grade camp, relatives were encouraged to send letters. My mother, who has a beautiful hand, dutifully complied. The kid had to get an adult to read it to her. But so what? The time not devoted to teaching cursive was instead given over to “keyboarding,” which is what they call typing nowadays. Any kid paying attention will come out of elementary school an at least reasonably proficient typist. This is a vastly more useful skill.

      My initial response to complaints about cursive not being taught was to post an example of Elizabethan secretarial hand, challenge the complainer to decipher it, and when they couldn’t, to explain how this was different from not being able to read cursive. The best answer is that cursive is just barely a thing still, but this is not a great argument, as “just barely a thing” is generous. But I have found a more effective response is to ask what they want removed from the curriculum to free up time for cursive: please be specific. That one stumps them, and they wander off grumbling under their breath.

      • Just try being left-handed and forced to learn cursed — oops, I mean cursive — writing with the off-hand using 1960s-tech cheap pens.

        Despite my ability to solder circuit boards freehand, my scrawl with either hand is illegible to doctors and pharmacists. In any language, and even without considering the effects of Getting Old (I had to reverify my ballot signature this year…).

        The less said about Samuel Pepys and “the elegance of longhand,” the better.

  2. Just reread that. It does NOT apply to calligraphers. Deep sigh…

    Okay, fire hydrants are a bit easier to see – but going through it three times as it presented new ones…

    (I really don’t mean to sound like a whiner, PG – but these eyes get older every day.)

    • Don’t worry about your eyes, W.O.

      Everybody’s eyes are getting older each day. The majority of the population doesn’t perceive it.

  3. Look up the studies done on memory retention with handwriting vs typing. Typing’s useful for some things. Writing by hand is useful for others. Reductive “of course it’s better because it’s new” thinking collapses the world into a false black/white dichotomy.

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