Scribes  and writing instruments

SCRIBES & MANUSCRIPTS

The word ‘scribe’ comes from the Latin scribere, “to write”. Anyone who writes a piece of work by hand is a scribe; from the Sumerian pressing his wedge shaped stick into a clay tablet, to the Egyptian painting hieroglyphs on a tomb wall, to the medieval monk scratching away with a swan’s quill, to today’s letterer of important governmental and societal proclamations, and the one-off card maker among us.

Scribes have probably engineered many of the subtle changes in the appearance of our lettering down the ages. It must have been tempting for any scribe to alter the shapes he was making to relieve the tedium of his work and subsequently to develop a new letter-form. The repetitiveness of the work they did, day after day, allows time for the concentration to wander and many mistakes were put down to the patron demon of scribes, Titivillus. It was said he needed to fill his sack with manuscript errors each day and then haul them off the devil, where they were recorded against the name of the scribe and pronounced on Judgement Day.

The word ‘text’ comes from the Latin ‘textere’, “to weave”. The appearance of a page of lettering has a texture which can be likened to woven cloth. Try taking a look at the density of letters on pages of text and how that density alters with the size and spacing of the letters and words. The black letter style, in particular, has the appearance of a weave, with the densely written lettering forming the illusion of threads running through the page.

WRITING INSTRUMENTS

The Latin, ‘penna’, meaning feather, gives us the word ‘pen’. The capillary action of the feather holds the ink and the point of the quill can be cut to a sharp point or a squared end. The quill was the principle writing instrument until the 19th century, when the steel nib took over.

Quills, reeds, bamboo, anything hollow can be used as a pen as the capillary action will draw the ink up into it. This is still the basis of the modern pen, whether the ink is contained in a tube or held in a spongey material, as with felt pens.

Pointed reed pens dipped in ink were used by the Romans to write on papyrus, particularly for permanent records. Temporary work was executed on a wax tablet, scraped with a pointed bone or metal styli.

The Greeks incised lettering in stone and plaster using chisels and mallets. The letters would have been marked out first using a reed brush, or similar, and then carved. The Romans took this method up and used flat brushes cut with a broad edge nib to write on any smooth surface and from the shapes this broad edge left we can see the origin of the elegant, incised letters to be found on their monuments.

One of the best known modern pens is probably the Biro, an idea that evolved in the late nineteenth century and developed by two men, Middleton Reynolds from Chicago and Laszlo Biro from Hungary, in the 1940’s. Fountain pens also came about in the mid nineteenth century and have survived into the modern day with very little change. Pens are now appearing that use chemically produced gels and oils, which not only have brilliant, sometimes fluorescent, colour, but also have glitter and perfumes built into them.

With the advent of computers lettering of all shapes, designs and colours can be produced without ever once drawing that shape with your hand. Sign writers are giving way to plastic shapes produced en masse by computerised machines and even the words and images on this page were produced on a word processor. Who knows what the future may bring?

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Calligraphy Books from Amazon.com