Library Hand, the Fastidiously Neat Penmanship Style Made for Card Catalogs | Hacker News Reader

Library Hand, the Fastidiously Neat Penmanship Style Made for Card Catalogs

atlasobscura.com

211 pointsdiodorus48 comments

There's also "architect handwriting" [0], designed to reduce potentially dangerous misunderstandings involving buying the wrong part. It used to be a required course in a lot of architecture schools before computers starting doing it all. It's cool that there's not just one, but multiple "profession-specific handwriting".

[0]: https://artdepartmental.com/2009/10/12/learning-architectura...

We learned a similar style in my high school drafting courses. Before we got to use the CAD software on the computers, we had to do two years of drafting by hand, including learning to write in this style.

Junior and Senior year we did the CAD stuff.

I owe my legible handwriting to the drafting courses I took in high school. Before we were allowed to draw anything, we had to get a perfect score on one lettering assignment. It involved filling an A-size sheet (9" x 12"?) with many lines of alphabet and prose.

You'd finish, walk it up to the teacher, and he'd look it over. He'd give lots of praise, find one tiny little mistake, then mark it a '9' (10 needed) and cheerfully hand it back, "Almost there!"

It was weeks of this before the actual drawing started for some students. And they'd be expected to catch up to everyone else.

That scoring approach sounds just about the same way my teacher scored. If two lines didn't connect perfectly but had a micron long tail sticking out he'd catch it.

Boeing has their own font for use in mechanical drafting (probably long gone now due to CAD software). The point was to avoid misunderstandings, and to make it legible even after being badly microfilmed. They were very particular that it be done correctly, too.

I wasn't aware of a course in it, one was just shown an example and told to do it that way.

Then there's also "Technical lettering" that was (is?) used in all kinds of engineering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_lettering

We learned that in primary school back in the 90s.

EDIT: I'm also surprised that in the "architectural lettering" example you provided, it's 'o' that's crossed, as opposed to '0'.

That's pretty close to what we were taught in my high school mechanical drafting class back in the late 80's. I remember being told that it was designed (e.g. big openings on the A) to survive being reduced to microfilm and back.

Neither o nor 0 is crossed in the architectural lettering - that's the letter Ø. There's a few other non-modern-English letters in that initial alphabet line as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98

the crossed O there is a distinct letter.

neither lettering formats take distinction of O and 0 into account.

Chancery cursive was used for English government records. It's a speed form, not a decorative one. There are computer fonts for it, but they seldom capture the original look.

Isn't that the diameter symbol, and not o, O, or 0?

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2300/index.htm

From its position among the regional accented letters, I'd assume it's the Danish/Norwegian Ø

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/00d8/index.htm

Yes, it turns out it isn't #\O. I missed the real #\O at the beginning of the same line.

The Basque language has a characteristic style of lettering that dates back to the Middle Ages. So now I wonder how Basque architects write...

http://www.nabasque.org/fonts.html

I've seen some of the Charles Rennie Mackintosh architectural plans (for the Glasgow School of Art), and he made his own stylistically distinct variant: https://www.myfonts.com/person/Charles_Rennie_Mackintosh/

I don't know if there's actually a strong resemblance or if it's all in my mind, but I'm reminded of Dijkstra's handwriting.

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1001.PDF

Here's the Dijkstra font you can download and use: http://www.fontpalace.com/font-details/Dijkstra/

With a bit of kerning help this font is fantastic.

Library hand is beautiful to read, and in theory I'd love to have such nice handwriting. But in practice, I value writing speed over all other factors, and I'm usually the only one who needs to be able to read my writing. As long as it's legible to me, it's good enough.

If speed is your main concern, have you considered using a shorthand?

Shorthand is one of those magical things that seems nice to know but looks like learning a different language.

It's not actually that bad. If you're half-decent with memorizing, it's just a new set of symbols. The speed comes from ease of writing (just like in this article).

I started with Ford Shorthand (.Com). It took me a few one hour sessions across 3 days to memorize the glyphs. 6 months of practice later, I was writing much faster and more freely--now it didn't matter where I left my notes. I now have a very hard time not automatically switching to this simple shorthand when I'm writing fast. It's just much more efficient.

I also know how to write Gregg at a basic level but Ford was way better for a beginner.

My late mother was a executive secretary (old terms) in a corporate chemical engineering department [1].

She could type tables and such like a demon ... on a Royal manual typewriter, no less.

She also could knock out quite decent Gregg shorthand, and I took a stab at learning it from a textbook I picked up used somewhere.

I'd pick her brains for help when the book left me hanging. I achieved a decent proficiency for a moderate effort off-hours attempt at self-instruction.

It certainly required some patience and effort but I found it fairly natural and well conceived, elegant even. Someday maybe I'll pick it up again. In fifteen years it will seem like alchemy to the young'uns of the future.

> As long as it's legible to me, it's good enough.

Reminds me of when I was a neuro tech, and one of the neurologists in the department had the worst handwriting I've ever seen. Usually we could nut out what the referrals said, but one of them was so bad that we had to knock on his door and ask for clarification. He couldn't read it himself and ended up saying "well, I know the patient, and what they need is...". Absolutely lovely bloke, but "doctor's handwriting" to the extreme...

Thanks to arthritis and some nerve damage, unless I write very slowly, even I can't read my writing anymore. It's very annoying.

Interesting; is there a font based on this style?

I'm aware of a the cursive version having a font, but I've never been able to find a print version (though I haven't applied much effort to the task).

http://www.yuoiea.com/uoiea/index.php?id=255

Here's one based on a scan of "A Library Primer". https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/libhanddis

It's not directly based on this style, but some of the samples in the article reminded me of AMS Euler.

Whereas I can barely read my own name if I write it #digitalchild

It seems remarkable that they couldn't justify the training time for a type writer, but that learning a penmanship style was reasonable.

While there is a sunk cost fallacy, your sunk costs do determine future costs. If you've already sunk a thousand hours into penmanship so that it will only take you another ten to learn a new style, it's a better investment than spending a hundred on learning to type proficiently.

As I understood, library hand would be something taught in a librarian course. It could be used at any library that an aspiring librarian would end up working at, but only a handful of libraries would be implementing a typewriter system for the library cards.

Remember these were for library cards and other short content. There are fixed time costs of loading and unloading from a typewriter which may negate some/most of the speed advantage, and using a typewriter may also bend the cardstock over time. And finally, typewriters were expensive machines.

Those are all perfectly valid reasons, but the article cited the training time to use a type writer.

I don't know about the practical reasons but "learn to write like letterpress printing" is a pretty dehumanizing instruction. Which was apparently accepted.

if you think aligning text on a small card lines on typewriter is easy, then you are rigth. But it is not. Specially if they had several models.

Check out your local library's budget for things other than books.

Right, but the article didn't say "They couldn't afford a typewriter", it said it would take too long to train them to use it. It's surprising to me that it would take longer to train a person to use a typewriter than it would to learn to write in this type-like style.

Time and willingness. The people you train to use a typewriter aren't just learning to type but how to provide limited service and maintenance to the machine, which, besides being another responsibility to take on, didn't fit with some people's idea of what a librarian should be doing.

Perhaps you know of a machine like this in your own life, but some typewriters spent as much time broken (ie- no one present knew how to fix, even if it was a simple jam) as they did being usable. And since you could only train one person per machine at a time, either you'd have to send people off for classes (not guaranteed to be on the same model) or limit access to them based on who was willing to become the local typist.

Penmanship is fairly social and a skill many would have already had and prided themselves on. 'Make your letters this way' is a simpler request then than 'learn how use without breaking this expensive and delicate contraption that's more trouble than it's worth'.

Fonts that confuse 0 and O, 1 and l, are particularly loathsome.

As a programmer and a pedant I agree, though the distinction may have not been important in practice in library context.

Back in the old days, it was pretty standard that the letter "i" was distinguished with serifs, but (and I found this perplexing) there was a lot of argument whether zero or "O" should have a slash. It was rather critical in the old, old days of filling out keypunch sheets.

I started adding serifs to my writing back in engineering school to help me decipher my own equations. I some moments where I couldn't figure out if I had written "+t" or "t+", or "is that a 2 or a z?!", and realized I had to create a script for myself and slow down a bit when writing.

Particularly troublesome characters that I remember were:

t vs +

u vs v

2 vs z

s vs 5

i (imaginary vs subscript marker)

g vs q (might seem silly, but prior to that, my handwriting didn't distinguish between them much)

o/O vs 0 (zero gets a slash, but never had situations where I was dealing with upper and lowercase o at the same time)

d vs ∂

That was fascinating!

If only everyone would write in monotype.

I am no expert but my recollection is that European handwriting had a large degree of standardization for long periods. Perhaps we have an expert here who could tell us more.

https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/manuscriptsandspecialcollection...

Not an expert, but I spent a lot of time looking at spanish 17th century notary books ;-)

I guess handwriting in pre-press texts (incunables) is "designed" to be easy to copy. If you look at the textura (gothic) script it is based on the same pen movement with a flat pen. You cannot improvise too much with that kind of pen.

This looks a feature to me, because the cost of writing on vellum, mistakes were very expensive.

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