Luna del'Corvo

Handwriting Day: Do you still write by hand? Can you write (and read) cursive? Do you think cursive should be taught in schools?

Yes, Yes, and OMG, Yes!!!!

It infuriates me that the defense of cursive has become an 'ok, boomer' topic, when there is solid science indicating considerable benefits to learning cursive. I'm also a huge calligraphy geek, AND a fountain pen nerd (I need to get some pen porn up in here....), so handwriting and cursive are incredibly important to me. As a historian, it's so blindingly obvious how important it is to be able to read cursive - there are already tons of forms of script that we must employ experts to read—one word: Sütterlin.

If you're not familiar with it (or if you didn't have half a dozen generations' worth of German ancestors and their ephemera milling about), Sütterlin was the last iteration of a class of scripts known collectively as Kurrent, which evolved alongside German blackletter in about the 16th C. Sütterlin was developed as a 'modern' form of Kurrent around 1911, and used widely in Germany, or then, Prussia. Up into the 1940s, it was taught as the sole form of written script in German schools. It was briefly banned by the Nazis, and while enjoyed a brief resurgence after the war, it never came back into prominence. Now very few people are left who can read it without special training. All the letters, postcards, diaries, and journals written in that period by an entire nation, including those that lived through and documented both World Wars - unreadable to most.

Already, people interested in things like history or genealogy struggle to read census records and other documents written in cursive. The current political climate already threatens to destroy any meaningful past. Much of that past is recorded in cursive. To me, it almost seems like knowing cursive is, if you will pardon the unintended and klunky rhyme, almost subversive...

I've been tinkering with my pens again... Below are two of the many fixer-upper pens I've had lying about. I sent a bunch off to Pay-It-Forward on Fountain Pen Network, and finally sat down and spent some time repairing a couple of the ones I kept. Neither are top-shelf pens, but both are lovely writers, and will doubtless get lots of use. I've done a few of these before, but nevertheless, I'm terrible tickled with the results! Here they are (the photos don't' do them justice, I may post better ones tomorrow, when I can snap them in daylight, which always works better with my camera.... Anywho, click to enlarge!

A lovely little Green Mabie Todd 'Swan' sporting a 14K medium nib with just a hint of flex. This is a sweet little pen, but one of the cap bands is loose, and there is a crack/hole in the end of the barrel. I don't know if it's worth sending to one of the pen-meisters to patch, as it doesn't seem to really affect the pen itself.
Remington is a pretty off-off-brand, maybe third tier at best. However, this baby has a buttery smooth fine (and I don't like fine nibs as a rule to begin with!) and a really gorgeous black & copper tortoise-shell body. The clip, band and lever are silver, doubtless a finish over brass or base metal, but they are in really good shape. This one is totally a keeper! The fine nib will be perfect for notes in books, grading papers, etc. where a bigger nib gets clunky.

(X-posted to myfountainpens.)