Connections/Writing

My name is Wendy Stein. I work in the department of Medieval art, and I'm gonna be talking about "Writing."

When we first started learning cursive, I started being conscious of choosing how I wanted to write. I actually had a lot of trouble. The teacher was strict. You had to do your first thing

on yellow paper, and if you had it very well done on yellow paper

then you were allowed to use white. And it always took me a long time

to get off the yellow paper, and I have hated yellow ever since.

People had to learn how to write hieroglyphs just as a kid has to learn how to write anything today. And these are incredibly

tatty, handmade, casual, and informal.

You see the struggle of learning. This is true also in

this tiny fragment, which has text from Homer's Iliad. It has the same line repeated four times in horrible Greek handwriting, and you see that somebody is just struggling and that some teacher is saying, "Write it again, write it again, write it again."

By high school I chose brown ink and real fountain pens as a preference. Today, if somebody hands me

something that I need to sign and hands me a ballpoint pen, I will reject it.

I address over four hundred Christmas cards every year by hand. One of the things that I require is that the pen has a continuous flow.

That fed into my interest in manuscripts. When you study a Medieval manuscript, you can get to the level of having a sense of a scribal hand, of an individual.

The handwriting that's in the Belles Heures is quite formal, structured, kind of gothic hand

very, very regular. It's presenting prayers that are absolutely canonical. And if you look

at another manuscript, where it's Roman history, the

handwriting is more flowing, there's a different level of formality.

This Book Cover has a picture of people writing. The text is beautifully designed, with these very elaborate capitals that have extreme difference between their thick areas and their thin areas

so that the whole bottom half reads like this lively checkerboard.

I was a little bit into the questions of handwriting analysis in high school, when I thought

"Oh, maybe if I make my handwriting really small, people will think I'm a genius."

The personality and verve of the menu board writer, with those highlighted costs. Look at those numbers, you just want to buy something that's got a five in it!

I'm as obsessive about font as I am about pen and paper. So although Arial is the default font in all the computers, I will always change it to one of the serif fonts.

What a serif is, really goes back to Roman inscriptions.

At the bottom of each down stroke there's a little foot, and that little finishing of the stroke is the serif.

I prefer serifs, they have a greater formality to me. They stand up and they have a better personality.

When you look at Chinese and Japanese calligraphy, you have that effect, when you

hear a poem read by someone who can read well, where the emotional impact of the poem is doubled

because you have it expressed. The letters themselves are so alive

they seem to tell a story in their form independently of whatever is written there.

So there's the double layer that goes on. You have a formal appreciation, but there also is a straight-ahead meaning. And the one place where that doesn't obtain is in

Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup cans. It's about imagery that has become something identifiable as a logo is identifiable. The last thing it's about is vegetarian vegetable soup.

I like the intimacy of handwriting. It's

dismaying in an elderly person the way that their handwriting starts to disintegrate. All

of us can find over time how our handwriting evolves.

One's personhood is conveyed.