Alphabetical (15 page)

‘For better or for worse' is a double phrase in which each half is linked by the initial ‘f' in ‘for'.

And there's a far, far better thing . . .

Ff
IS FOR FONTS

O
NE OF THE
pecularities of writing is that you don't usually arrive at thinking about the design of letters until long after you have learned the letters themselves. Most of us learn the letters at school when we are shown a letter as if it is a part of nature: this is a dog, this is a tree, this is the letter ‘B'. But of course, the letter ‘B' comes in many shapes, sizes and colours and, whether it is handwritten, printed or produced electronically, it shows the mind of its creator. It has been designed. We discover this in stages.

My first encounter with the idea that there was a person hiding behind and in any letters came when we were taught to write according to someone called Marion Richardson. In fact, we were told when I was about seven that we were ‘doing Marion Richardson writing'. I'd always been under the impression that my mother met Marion Richardson but since I found that she died two years before my mother started training to be a teacher, I've started to doubt it. Marion Richardson was ‘joined-up writing' and it was taught to me as strictly ‘no loops'. As with so much of schooling, this was taught as if that's the way the
world is and will always be, though I think we were aware that our parents didn't write this way. But then they belonged to a strange and foreign place called ‘before the war'.

One of the early doyennes of school handwriting was Margaret Bridges, wife of the poet Robert Bridges. Her letters were tall, thin, curly and loopy, much influenced by William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. Competing with this in the world of teacher training was the italic style popularized by ‘Dryad Writing Cards'. The third competitor in this was ‘print' or not-joined-up writing, first developed in 1919 by the Director of Education for Camarthenshire, David Thomas, in a book called
Handwriting Reform
. From then on, the nation learned how to write according to which side your teacher had taken in these handwriting wars.

Marion Richardson kicked off by weighing in against the ‘print' style, which, I have to say, I often use, particularly if I want to do that extreme thing of wanting to read my own writing. She was also against those who made a fetish out of not lifting the pen off the page when doing joined-up writing. She said that a ‘pen-lift' wasn't a loss of time – an observation which reveals what really lay at the root of all this agitation about handwriting. For most people, learning to write clearly and quickly would enable them to join the huge army of clerks keeping British industry and the British Empire going. Time is money, speed saves both.

‘Very quick writers,' wrote Marion Richardson, ‘nearly always write in a series of short spurts, and such writing is usually crisper and stronger than the more flowing hand. There is no point in trailing your pen to the end of a word just for the sake of doing so.'

Her first teaching aids, the Dudley Writing Cards of 1928, look pretty italic to me, and when the
Evening News
wrote
about them, they thought the same: ‘Zig-Zag Writing, woman invents New System – no Rounded Letters'. They all liked and believed in the idea that a zigzag was the easiest and quickest way to write.

By 1935, Marion Richardson had created the script that I learned in her
Writing and Writing Pattern
s books: no loops, no zigzags, nothing looking like ‘print' apart from the letters with tails: ‘g', ‘p', ‘q' and ‘y'. She had turned from being doctrinaire about zigzags to being doctrinaire about no zigzags. What turned her? Observation of very young children. She discovered that they found it very hard to master the zigzag, broad-nib, italic approach to writing. To learn how to do Marion Richardson-style writing, teachers took us on a journey of drawing the letters one by one, joined to each other, and on what turned out to be an exotic expedition of drawing patterns. You can see these in her writing guides. At school, if you finished these patterns ‘early', you were allowed to colour them in with different-coloured crayons. Is it mean to say that Marion Richardson's own writing wasn't Marion Richardson writing? Well, it wasn't but then she wasn't taught to write according to Marion Richardson principles. Neither were my parents.

My father's writing was small, neat and illegible. I was ten before I could read it. Meanwhile, at teacher training college in the late 1940s my mother had learned Marion Richardson Mark I – the italic. She had several pens, all of which were broad, and if you asked her, she would show us how she could write ‘thick-thin', varying the up and down strokes, one way thick, the other way thin. This was the style of writing that she taught and even proselytized. I got to feel that italic writing was like tomatoes. It was good for you. And another thing: because she and my father were very ideological people, always doing things from the body of principle and dogma of the Communist Party, there
was a time when I thought that italic writing was Communist. It's not.

At the age of seven, I changed schools where they said that we wouldn't do Marion Richardson, we would do ‘cursive', and they said wherever we did ‘straight up and down' we would do loops. Loops were now OK. Clearly, they fought for the other side in the writing wars and were harking back to Margaret Bridges. This was a brand-new school, and I think the teachers had brand-new-school anxiety which expressed itself in a distressed way of making sure that we got everything right, over and over again. We did handwriting lessons, drawing the letters time after time on a mysterious paper where the lines were doubled up so that you got the tails of your gs, ps, qs and ys exactly right.

This was before the days of smooth-flowing ballpoint pens. The biro was making headway but it was blobby and banned from schools anyway. I've forgotten exactly why biros were banned other than that schools start off banning any new technology to do with writing. So, we had to use what we called ‘dip pens' with a wooden shaft, a replaceable metal nib which took on board the ink which sat in an inkwell in the corner of our desks. I was an utterly hopeless dip-pen technician, always taking on too much ink and holding my pen at the wrong angle. Far from being liberated by the arrival of loopy letters, what happened was that the loops nearly all turned out as solid crescents and ellipses.

My parents tried to be helpful and bought me a brown-green mottled fountain pen called a Conway Stuart. In fact, I was so proud of it that I didn't call it a pen, I always called it ‘my Conway Stuart'. Fountain pens at that time had a narrow rubber balloon inside, which you filled with ink by first pulling out a little lever on the side, sticking the nib into the ink, then pushing
the lever slowly back. This was a help and I found writing easier.

Much more interesting than writing was the fact that both kinds of pens were good for other things. The dip pens were excellent for throwing at the floor in the brand-new school where they stuck in the lino like arrows. The fountain pens were ideal for squirting. The same lever you used for filling the pen could be used to squirt a jet of ink over someone. We were issued with rectangles of blotting paper, highly absorbent pink paper. Instead of writing, you could tear off bits of blotting paper, put them in your mouth, roll up the paper into a blobby ball and then, using your ruler, you could flick it at the wall. Writing on blotting paper, instead of using it for blotting, was also a good way to spend valuable school time, as it was extremely hard to form your letters or look coherent.

I tell this because the making of letters always involves a technology, a set of tools, and these become in one's mind inseparable from the writing itself. When a teacher said, ‘Write a story' or your parents said, ‘Write a thank-you letter,' you, as a child, would not only be thinking of the language of writing and the shape of the letters, you would also be thinking of this elaborate, fiddly technology of pens and ink and blotting paper. From the time of my Conway Stuart, until the end of university, almost every teacher complained about my handwriting. Looking back at it, I would say that it's not illegible, just very irregular. I couldn't make the writing even, I couldn't make any given letter the same size and the same shape each time I used it.

I had objections too. The cursive capital ‘T' we were taught was, I thought, wrong. My moral standpoint on the matter was that the whole point about a real capital ‘T' is that the upstroke hits the cross-stroke right bang in the middle. Our cursive ‘T' started off with a tiny upstroke, went horizontal and then turned down on the right-hand end-point of the horizontal. That wasn't
a ‘T', that was a 7. Ridiculous. And the ‘Q'. Even More Ridiculous. It was a 2. They said it was a swan. I didn't like what seemed to me an unduly frilly ‘r' and I could never stick to the same way of doing an ‘s' and, nearly sixty years later, still don't. As I have an ‘s' in my surname, this means that halfway through ‘Rosen', my signature varies. My favourite letter was the cursive ‘E'. I loved the double curl of it, and the fact that it ended up looking like a mirror of 3.

(A word on the word ‘cursive': it sounds like a description of sweary language: ‘We enjoyed Billy Connolly but he was a bit cursive . . .' In fact, it means runny. It's an eighteenth-century import from the French ‘cursif', which ultimately goes back to the Latin ‘currere', meaning to run or to hurry. (When we say that something has ‘run its course', we are saying it has ‘run its run'.) So cursive writing flows and runs. Technically and pedantically, Marion Richardson writing was also cursive.)

Though I have portrayed my mother as a Script Stalinist, she didn't ever criticize my writing, she didn't ever try to convert me to her Communist italic. My brother, on the other hand, apprenticed himself to her, bought the pens (which were dark green) and became a superb writer of flowing italic, which he drew in indelible deep black ink. Ooooh, it looked so professional.

This is all part of a personal psychology of letters. How you make the letters yourself is part of how you read and write, how you prefer one typeface over another, and ultimately part of who you are. In a classically Freudian way, my writing resembles – some would say, competes – with my father's. Do the letters say to my mother, ‘Look at me, I write like your husband'?

Typefaces have their own psychology too. The first one I was asked to ‘decode', as some modern literacy experts say, was the
writing of the Beacon Readers. ‘Here is Old Lob. Here is Farmer Giles. Here is Mrs Cuddy the Cow. Here is Rover the dog.' I promise you that comes from memory. And I can remember the typeface: a thick serif lettering, fairly large on the page. Of course, children will try to make meaning out of writing and symbols all around them, so for me this also meant trying to read the curly red lettering of Kellogg's; the old classic lettering of Golden Syrup; the titles of books and authors' names on my parents' shelves. There were letters on toys, on government-issue ration books, on train stations – even on trains; there were names on cars, on houses, on shops, on roads. All different, all needing ‘decoding'. Thirteen years of schooling immersed us in the typefaces of textbooks.

Then they invented Letraset.

Into the world of school magazines, university papers, political leaflets, and underground rags, came sheets of letters which could be lifted off and on to a page by rubbing the backs of the sheets with the corner of a ruler or your nail. The font broke out of centuries-old print shops and into students' flats. As you wrote a heading, you designed it. Everyone knew Helvetica and Gill Sans. What had been a grumpy interview at a print shop with a man in overalls was now a matter of kneeling on the floor of your room, getting into heated arguments about what a particular typeface ‘says about us'. The choice was overwhelming. We could fill a single page with five different typefaces in five different point sizes. For the first time, we could choose what kind of print was us. Am I a Times person? Or a Playbill? Are we Cooper Black people? Are these ideas Futura?

I think this changed how most of us thought of the alphabet. Up till then, it was only printers and designers who could move fluidly over the world's print-making judgements and decisions about what letters could or should look like. Now it was within
the reach of almost everyone. Only occasionally had we got near to the idea that professional letters could be made. On Baker Street station, just up from the men's toilets near the trains to King's Cross, stood the great lettering machine. On a clock-like dial, you chose a letter, pulled a lever, chose another, pulled again, till you had spelled out your name, or a label. Then you pulled another lever and a thin alloy strip appeared with ‘Michael Wayne Rosen' or ‘My Room' pressed into it. And there was nothing to stop you writing ‘Bum' and bringing it into school. But with Letraset, you could do all this and more. You could now own the alphabet itself. No machine, no man in overalls, no teacher, no book told you what the alphabet looked like.

And that's how it's been ever since. Though now, those hours of thumbnail rubbing seem like the Stone Age. At the top of the screen, as I'm typing this, there is, as you almost certainly know, a small panel with a couple of arrows. I click on it and there are over a hundred fonts. Click on the panel next to it, and it can be regular, oblique, italic, bold. Click on the next panel and it can be tiny or huge. Yet, when I write in Twitter or Facebook or any other chatroom, the design of my alphabet is chosen for me. But when writing a poem, a diary, a blog, a powerpoint presentation, a report – I choose. I could, if I knew how, even design my own.