Cover of the Grolier Club publication of Kenneth W. Rendell’s 2022 lecture.
Seated next to a younger colleague at a conference earlier this year, I became the object of her curiosity. She was staring at the cursive handwriting in which I was taking notes and asked, with some hesitation, “Is that–script?” You would have thought I was writing in some medieval cypher, so hushed her tone, part awe and part trepidation, as if the signs had some magical power that might escape the page. She went on, as if confessing, to say she had never learned to write cursive and could not read the letterforms. I admit I was shocked. She was in her twenties, at least, and I thought for sure hers was not yet the generation in which this skill had lapsed, dropped from the curriculum as no longer necessary.
Happily, California has reinstated handwriting as a fundamental requirement in the curriculum.[1] All students educated in the state will have the opportunity to learn cursive script. The logic of this decision is motivated by multiple realizations—the need for signatures as legally binding, for one, but also, the idea that writing is an aid to learning, cognitive development, and processing information into knowledge. Those of us committed to its use are well aware of the effects of note-taking by hand. Though as the Los Angeles Times staff writer, Howard Blume points out, the research is not conclusive, the act of inscription seems to create a trace in mind and memory.[2]
While I am not a fetishist on this point, I find the autographic trace engaging for all kinds of reasons, not least of all the connection between author and marks that inheres in the written forms. As an amateur graphologist and sometimes scholar of forgeries and other related topics, I have an interest in the material properties of handwritten lines. Recently, helping organize some bookstore overstock, I came across a stray letter by a famous poet tucked into a random volume. Written more than a hundred years ago, it was carefully preserved in a plastic sleeve, its regular round hand suggesting a lucid mind and forthright character. On the one hand it was banal, a short note of little particular consequence. On the other, it was miraculous, as if the writer were suddenly present, alive, and speaking in the room.
In a 2022 Grolier Club Lecture, the extraordinary collector Kenneth Rendell declares his passion for autographic works in the title of the series he endowed, “The Power and Importance of Handwriting.”[3] Rendell began his remarks with the observation that when he became a member of the Grolier Club fifty years ago, he was aware that the majority of its members were primarily interested in collecting printed materials. Given the Club’s lineage as a society founded for and by bibliophiles, its patron saint the Renaissance collector Jean Grolier, who generously opened his library to friends, this makes sense.[4] But, over time, Rendell notes, the interest in handwritten and manuscript materials has broadened the scope of interest among the membership.
In the lecture, Rendell draws on numerous high profile autographic pieces from his own collections. They are astonishing from the first to the last, beginning with a signed copy of the Voting Rights Act (executed August 6, 1965), sponsored in part by the liberal Republican (imagine!) Congressman, Seymour Halpern. As Rendell describes, the Act was not originally part of Lyndon Johnson’s historic Civil Rights Act, but the urgency brought about by then-current events pushed the legislation forward. The signed copy Rendell acquired was a historical fluke, as such important legislation usually received for the presidential signature only on the page that would be filed in the National Archives. Halpern managed to finagle a second copy that he had LBJ, Hubert Humphrey, and the Speaker of the House (John McCormick) sign. This signed artifact is what Rendell has in his collection.
The document is exemplary of the power of writing to perform and execute. The official autographs were not merely symbolic gestures. They were the acts that made the legislation into law. That profound fact attaches significance to many of the documents that formed the core of Rendell’s lecture—such as the 1955 contract between Elvis Presley and Hill and Range Songs, Inc., also signed by his parents–to supply the company with material to be published. Elvis was twenty years old, but his signature has confidence and flair as he committed to the terms of the contract. A manuscript handwritten by Jean-Paul Sarte flows for forty-two pages without any corrections, Rendell tells us. The well-formed, evenly inscribed lines were written on graph paper with considerable space between the words, a conspicuous feature. The first Supreme Court chief justice John Jay had an elegant hand, with letters formed in the convention of the period, a cursive with a few characteristic flourishes and final swashes produced with a fine point pen. Jesse James, by contrast, writing a century later, produced a rough script that Rendell describes as “poorly formed,” evidence that the author’s “thoughts are very slowly translated into writing.”
Every document reproduced in this publication could sustain a small study of the varieties of written expression and the role of handwriting in formal and informal settings. The contrast between Beethoven’s energetic messiness and Mozart’s uninterrupted flow, the crossed-out lines in Churchill’s hand and a few scribbled notes by the Adolf Hitler—all are incredible evidence of historical moments. They connect us directly with their creation, without the mediating distance of print. Handwriting instantiates the presence of the writer, who must have been there, implement in hand when the marks were made. The sign made on an electronic keypad, for instance, is not legally binding on account of its form, but on the basis of having been made by a person who can be indexically linked to its execution. A signature is never a paraphrase or quotation, it is an actual graphic utterance.
The celebrity scale of the documents in Rendell’s collection, and in this published version of his lecture, provides a constant frisson. We are brushing up against lived history, spending a few moments in the (absent) presence of John F. Kennedy, General Patton, Albert Speer, Ernest Shackleton. Harry Truman, and Ian Fleming. Within the length of a single lecture Rendell’s remarks were subject to time constraints, especially given his breadth of knowledge in the field. He efficiently situated the artifacts in their circumstances, provided some interpretative frameworks, and offered insights into the significance of the documents. But in this text he did not have time to develop more general issues with regard to the topic of handwriting itself, particularly the reasons why the autographic charisma of each object is so compelling. Still, the treasures in this celebrity gallery have an all-star quality and the rich anecdotes of historical events and persons provide a glimpse of much larger concerns.
A theoretical framework and discussion of handwriting might engage with the philosopher and art historian Nelson Goodman’s important distinction between allographic and autographic modes of notation.[5] The former allows for remediation, as from one type font to another, but the autographic mode contains information that will be lost if a copy is produced. Nelson was using the distinction in part to address issues of authenticity pertinent to forgery. Handwriting embodies information in material in ways that cannot be translated as code, only understood and interpreted as material expressions. He suggested, for instance, that a musical score can be copied and the piece of music will remain authentic as a composition, but that a copied painting is a different work from the original. Though an autograph is considered an allographic expression in Goodman’s frameworks, in the case of music he considers the work to be independent of the notational form. Many might quibble with this, of course. For though a handwritten document may be read for its contents and meaning, its fuller value cannot be reduced to its text. The body remains, present in the gestures of the hand, organization of the trained eye, and expression of the author’s personality as surely as do the gait, voice, or facial expressions of an individual. That level of specificity registers in material with so much richness that it cannot be exhausted or reduced to a single value or interpretation any more than any other aspect of a human being’s identity.
Among his other professional accomplishments, Rendell is an expert in forgery, as his major reference book on the subject, Forging History (1994) and classes at Columbia University attest. He has been involved in assessing and exposing some of the most famous forgeries of the last half-century, including the renowned scandal of the so-called Hitler Diaries as well as the work of Mark Hofmann. The Diaries were found under suspicious circumstances in 1983, supposedly rescued from the wreck of a transport plane carrying boxes including Adolf Hitler’s personal documents.[6] Sold to the German news magazine, Stern, for several million dollars, they were the work of Konrad Kujau. The documents were originally authenticated by various experts, a fact that said more about the desire of various interested parties to believe in their existence than the skill of the rather amateur forger.
Rendell’s methods were highly rigorous and he is credited with developing a systematic set of forensic techniques. These proved useful in exposing the work of the gifted Hofmann. A member of the Church of Latter Day Saints, Hofmann forged documents related to its history that would have threatened its core beliefs and founding myths had they been leaked. Selling them to Church leaders who wanted to keep them secret, Hofmann enacted a personal vendetta against them. Hofmann produced forgeries of many other figures, including Emily Dickinson, a previously “unknown” poem of whose he “discovered” and sold. Hofmann’s level of skill was superb, way beyond that of the clumsy Kujau (who used contemporary materials, inks, plastics, and poured tea over his pages to age them before battering them to create signs of distress and wear), and many of his forged signatures may still be in collections. Not only did he develop a highly sophisticated understanding of aging processes (rates of change in various substances), but he created credible provenance tales. In one instance, he had inserted a forged document into an antique bible that he had shipped to him so he could “find” it in front of his unsuspecting wife with a sort of “Look, dear, there is something funny about the bulge in this binding” story.
Rendell made a gift of many thousands of forged documents to the Grolier Club, a stash of materials that will serve useful for research for generations. Other important resources for such investigations are the textbooks and manuals for detection that show how conceptions of authenticity have changed over the years. In the 19th century, legal disputes about the authenticity of signatures were largely based simply on observation, with comparison to a control sample only introduced into legal proceedings as a later date. Then, with the realization that a visual pattern could be traced or imitated, the forensic teams developed methods of recording the muscle actions of a writer with the conviction that these were harder to fake or replicate than a graphic signature. Other important considerations include provenance histories, circumstances of discovery, and material qualities as well as linguistic contents. Like any intellectual field, handwriting studies have a history, including the techniques of graphology, still used in various business practices and psychological analyses.
Forgery is an inexhaustibly interesting topic, both in its production and reception, since these rely on elaborate constructs of belief about what constitutes authenticity and methods of assessment. Work by my colleague, Jean-François Blanchette, Burdens of Proof: Cryptographic Culture and Evidence Law in the Age of Electronic Documents (2012), connects the realms of traditional authentification with digital practices.[7] This and other contemporary work demonstrates the ways in which even the idea of what is genuine changes over time as do modes of deception. But that, as Kipling reminds us, is a story for another time.
[1] Howard Blume, “Learning cursive in school, long scorned as obsolete, is now the law in California,” Los Angeles Times, January 8, 2024. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-01-08/topsy-curvy-cursive-writing-returns-to-the-list-of-priorities-in-california-schools
[2] Blume, ibid.
[3] Kenneth Rendell, “The Power and Importance of Handwriting.” The Grolier Club
https://www.grolierclub.org/
[5] Nelson Goodman, The Languages of Art: An Approach to the Theory of Symbols (Bobbs-Merill, 1968, revised 1976 and published by Hackett).
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_Diaries#Gerd_Heidemann
[7] Jean-François Blanchette, Burdens of Proof: Cryptographic Culture and Evidence Law in the Age of Electronic Documents (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
Unfortunatly my old hand produces an unreadable scrawl.
Good piece! I remember a teenage student shyly asking me if I would read a document for him while i was at the Museum of African American History in DC... he said he hadn’t learned cursive and that’s when i realized he couldn’t read any of the historical documents on view. he felt sad about it and I did too. Glad California passed that law so that cursive will be taught to all students!