One cursive that delighted me lately is a combination of lovely and mildly neurotic on the jacket for Enough About Love (clever visual pun with the "O"s, too).
I neglected to note the jacket designer when I shot the photo of and trips to a number of stores and internet sites yield no credit. Help! Is anybody out there a more diligent reporter? In an unusual turn of events, I can find the name of the book's interior design (Simon Sullivan) but not of the jacket design.
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My most recent favorite memoir, Running the Books, contains some wonderful notes about hand-writing. Here are a few scraps of lines about notes hand-written by inmates in Boston's House of Correction in South Bay:
"I unfolded the note. In razor-sharp cursive, in a script known as the "Felon's Claw"—which I suspect belonged to Whiz . . . "
"It seemed brutal to trash a letter than someone had taken the time to handwrite. And there was part of me that thought, Who knows, maybe these letters will be important to someone in the future? I majored in history and literature, and wrote newspaper obituaries. I spent many hours looking at letters and artifacts that some oddball had decided not to throw out. There is no history, no memory, without this."
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"Taking the time to handwrite" is becoming more special, not to mention specialized.
I wonder: is the felon's claw close to the lover's scrawl?
2 comments:
I was taught cursive in 3rd grade using a fountain pen. It was only after 5th grade that we advanced to ballpoint!
I believe the lover's scrawl is a close relative to the sad breakup poetry cursive, aka The Sadsack Scribble.
In the 5th grade, did you miss the thick and thin lines?
As for The Sadsack Scribble, I think you're on to something. A new hand-drawn face?
A while back, I realized that real writers always have something to say, whereas wannabes merely scribble sadly when love and life go awry.
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