An Elegant Hand: The Golden Age of American Penmanship and Calligraphy

Citation

Glasgow, E. (2003), "An Elegant Hand: The Golden Age of American Penmanship and Calligraphy", Library Review, Vol. 52 No. 1, pp. 43-43. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530310457022

The history of US literary culture is perhaps unduly dominated by notions of both a pale dilution of a New World version of the imported European heritage, and almost frantic efforts to create for the USA its own endemic culture, of the “frontier” and a robust sort of pioneering masculinity. That was, of course, particularly true of the nineteenth century: before the USA had been enabled to evolve its own distinctive kinds of native literature.

We may tend, therefore, to discount much of the US literature of the nineteenth century, as being bucolic, impolite, even boorish. This book, at any rate, arrives as very welcome corrective of the popular notion that the US literature of the nineteenth century lacked the backing of a sensitive and accomplished culture of both penmanship and calligraphy. Its lavishly illustrated pages – 307 of them in all – reliably narrate the story of US calligraphy into the twentieth century, with detailed and exhaustive chapters on such pioneers of the art as Platt Rogers Spencer, George A. Gaskell, Louis Madarasz, William E. Dennis, Austin Norman Palmer, Francis B. Courtney, and William C. Henning. The last of these was the author’s father. William E. Henning (1911‐1996) was essentially a learned and devoted artist and bookman, who within his lifetime was widely known and appreciated in the USA. This is essentially his posthumous memorial: vividly illustrating an astonishing diversity of styles, depicting birds, ornamentation, even German text and old English. There is a total of over 400 illustrations, and a good index.

The work is beautifully printed and produced, making it undoubtedly a masterpiece of scholarly compilation, essential for any student of its unusual and vivid subject. It is edited by Paul Melzer, a dealer in rare books who lives in southern California. The story of how, in the summer of 1997, he picked up the posthumous manuscript from William E. Henning’s widow is fascinating in itself. Obviously, like so many other specialized authors, William E. Henning, having worked on his book for well over 20 years, eventually discovered how hard it was in the USA to find a suitable publisher. However, we do have it published now: a fitting tribute to an ambitious US student of the “fine art” of calligraphy, giving at last to it something of pre‐eminence, even in the USA, that once it held in the culture and the society of western Europe.