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Primitive man must have noticed when he first dragged a branch across mud or sand that it
made a mark, and that is almost certainly where the earliest form of writing began.
Writing, the means of communicating a message by marks.
Man could already communicate with gestures and with sounds, with a primitive form of
speech, but making marks would help him remember and record things. Unlike the animals that
surrounded him, he had a mind capable of creating, inquiring and experimenting.
Human ingenuity soon found something more permanent than marks in sand. Clay and
charcoal mixed with animal fat produced cave paintings in southern Europe that
have lasted 35,000 years. Long-lasting, but not the handiest form of record.
It was the Egyptians who took pictures or signs and turned them into a system. A set
of signs strung together could pass on a more complex message than cave paintings.
A more mature civilization needed more sophisticated communication.
The civilizations of the Middle East grew from the rivers of the Fertile Crescent. Tigris,
Euphrates and Nile gave more to man than fertile soil. From Mesopotamia came the clay tablet
writing, cuneiform. From Egypt came the system of writing, which was the beginning of the
alphabet we know today. Our alphabet began with the hieroglyphic writings of ancient
Egypt. Symbols, the owl, an eye, the snake, the goose, which at first represented just
the object itself. Then these symbols were gradually adapted until they also
represented an idea. The owl for wisdom, an eye with a tear for sadness, the jackal
for cunning. Complex stories could be told like this, but carving them in stone was
laborious. Growing in the swamps of the River Nile, the Egyptians found something
more practical, the papyrus plant and the reed. From papyrus, which they matted
together and dried in the sun, they made the first paper. With the reed chewed at
the tip, they made the first brush. And by mixing soot with water and gum, they
developed the first ink. Used together, they represented a major step forward.
The combination of a pen like this, ink and papyrus was magic. If you
can imagine, it enabled the transmission of messages over long distances very
easily. I mean, imagine what it would be like if you were a postman if you had a sack
full of rocks. I mean, if you wanted to actually deliver letters which had been
carved onto stone or into clay tablets. But you could roll up this stuff, which
is very light, and you could carry long distances, store it very conveniently.
The ease with which you can write with this ink gives you a lovely fluent mark.
The impulse to find a speedier way to write changed the shape of the marks
made by the Egyptian scribes. Their pictures became less realistic, the marks
more simplified, and all the time they were coming nearer and nearer to
painting letters, the shapes that were to become the letters of the alphabet we
know today.
So pen, ink, papyrus and ingenuity had turned pictures into letter shapes, and
that was not all. The letter shapes began to mean not simply the animal they
symbolized, but the sound of its name. The letter shape that stood for an ox, an
aleph, in the language of the Middle East, began to stand not only for the animal
itself, but also for the sound aleph, whenever it occurred. In time, aleph was
shortened to a, and the original ox is the letter a in the Arabic alphabet
today. The letters of the modern Arabic alphabet, like the a, have their origin
in the basic hieroglyphic signs written by the scribes around the Eastern
Mediterranean 4,000 years ago.
The ox was to travel and change. Merchant men sailed from port to port along the
coast of the Eastern Mediterranean, and with them when their alphabet. It was
probably the Phoenicians who sailed furthest west, and first spread the
letters of the Fertile Crescent to Cyprus, Crete, Greece and North Africa. The aleph
traveled to Greece, merged with the Greek alphabet, and became their letter, alpha.
After mixing with the alphabet of the Etruscans of northern Italy, it reached
its final destination in Rome.
It became the Roman a, the letter we know today.
And so pictures became letters. From cave paintings had come our alphabet. Letters
that are now as well known as a national flag, but were then symbols of the order
and precision of the Roman Empire.
For 400 years, Rome was the greatest power the world had known. Where Roman
armies marched, Roman customs stayed. Their rule and their thinking, expressed
in their precise and ordered lettering, radiated to all the shores of what they
called Mare Nostrum, our sea and beyond.
The people of Rome created the Latin alphabet, and her soldiers, administrators
and engineers spread it throughout the known world. With the rise of
Christianity in the West, the monks and scribes in the monasteries copied the
Gospels for men to read. The feather was the favored pen of the Middle Ages.
Taken from the wing of a goose, the quill needed special preparation. First a
soaking to make it flexible, then baking in hot sand to make it hard enough to
write with, and further treatment. Donald Jackson. We take off the the barb by
stripping it out, because it's hard to hold. Now the next step is to take a
scoop from the underside of this tube-like shape, so that I can introduce
a certain amount of balance to the flexibility of the writing instrument.
And then I take my pen knife, and having got that there, the next thing to do is
to put a slit into it. Put the knife up so, and then apply a little pressure, crack,
and there we have a very clean, sharp slit in the center of the tube. The next step
is to shape this into a pen-knife, and then I measure across and take an identical scoop
from the other side. Then I'm ready for the final three cuts, which will give me
the shape of the pen itself.
So I put it onto a flat surface, preferably something which isn't going
to blunt the knife, and a sort of 60 degree shallow cut first, and then two
90 degree vertical cuts. A little tiny click, then the final tiniest of slivers
to remove, to make sure it's absolutely certainly crisp, because that sharpness
there is going to be immediately reflected in the letters that I start to
make. The sharpness of the pen gives me beautiful, sharp, crisp letters. So I dip
it into the ink.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating, or as the scribe says, the cut of
the quill will determine the shape and sharpness of the letters. He will cut
his pen to suit whichever style of writing he uses, and there are several
for the modern calligrapher to choose from. This is the italic style, the fair
Italian hand, as the medieval teachers called it. It was the script of Leonardo
da Vinci and of Michelangelo. Light and elegant, the italic style was developed
by those scholars of the Italian Renaissance who sought their inspiration
from the letter shapes of classical Rome.
Carolingian had been the style used by the scribes of the Emperor Charlemagne,
as they copied all the religious texts and the works of science and literature,
which had survived the collapse of the Roman Empire. It was a rounded script,
earlier than the italic, and it too was influenced by the everyday letter shapes
of ancient Rome.
This script was the black letter writing of northern Europe, sharp, upright,
spiky, like gothic architecture. It was in keeping with a solid and formal
temperament of the north. The Italians found it crude and brutal, and christened
it gothic after the Goths, the barbarians. But gothic appealed strongly to the
practical needs of the northern scribes, who copied books. It was easy to write.
They could compress the letters and get more to a page.
The medieval scribes could choose between these different styles and the
production of their manuscripts. At first, the finest writing came from the
monasteries of Europe. As the copying of books became an expanding industry,
the methods perfected by the monks were copied by layman scribes too. Writing on
vellum, scraped calfskin, they illuminated their texts with gold. Today's
calligrapher uses the same technique. First gesso, a mixture of lead, fish glue,
plaster, and sugar, which, when dried, remains slightly raised from the surface
of the skin. To this layer of gesso, he will apply the gold leaf. It is the
purest 22-carat gold, beaten very, very thin, laid out carefully on a leather
pad. The slightest movement of air makes it move, so we have to be very careful
that there are no doors open or things of that kind. No sneezes. We've got it
flat on the leather, and then we cut it up into pieces which are going to be
convenient for the size of the letter that I have made.
The tiniest little grease on the end of my finger is enough to attach the gold to
it so that I can control it. After I've put on the gesso and scraped it smooth, I
then have to make it damp so that it the gold leaf can stick to it, so I breathe
on it through this little tube to introduce moisture from my lungs onto
the surface. The humidity has to be just right, and the timing is critical. If the
gesso is too dry, the gold will not stick. If it is too soft, it will smear across
the page. He uses a burnisher made from hematite or bloodstone to press the gold
onto the gesso, and he presses hard.
Once the burnishing is complete, as you can see, some of the surplus gold still
adheres to the surface of the skin where we don't want it to, so we have to clean
that away with a knife so that when we have got that out of the way, we're ready
to apply color.
And I start by drawing with the quill as a thin line around the burnished gold.
This allows me to make a nice clean edge to what might be just a little
imperfect. The reason I use a quill pen is because gold, being very smooth and
shiny now, tends to reject the ink, and the slightly harder edge of the pen
scrapes a little purchase for the ink along the edge to stop it from rolling
back. I'm using a brush, painting on with the blue, because the area I'm trying to
cover is larger, and therefore I can spread out the hair of the brush and very
quickly complete the manuscript.
After all the gold and all the broad areas of color have been added, step by
step, it's only when the final details which are added by the pen or the brush,
last little stroke, that the full beauty of the finished illuminated letter is
revealed.
It was the golden age of the decorated manuscript. Scribes and book producers
were at the peak of prosperity, and then in the 15th century the printing press
arrived. The printed book spelled the end for the scribe, just as surely as later
on the motorcar did for the horse. It broke his monopoly and easily outran him.
No scribe could compete with a machine.
A printer could run off 120 pages in an hour, while the scribe could write only
one. Movable metal type was the tool of the printer. The scribe had only his quill,
and he finally gave up.
By the time of the Industrial Revolution, millions of books had rolled off the
printing presses, and thousands of scribes had been put out of business. Those who
survived became teachers or writing masters, for it was a period when every
man aspired to read and write, and every hand wanted something to write with.
Something that was cheap and something that would last. The answer of the
Victorian manufacturers was this, a steel pen. The workshop of the world was burning,
and this was where the first successful steel nibs were mass-produced. There had
been many attempts to invent something that would replace the quill pen, but it
was Birmingham in the 1830s, the triumph. The Birmingham button makers developed a
special hand press for cutting and shaping steel blanks, and they found the
same method could be used for nibs. By 1900 they were exporting over 500
million nibs every year. They made over a thousand different patterns, pens by
appointment to the royal family, pens for the Indian Railways, the Togo pen, named
after a Japanese admiral, all different shapes and sizes.
And the style of writing used with the steel nib became known as copper plate.
After the engravers whose copper plates had popularized the elegant, rather
formal lines we recognize today from visiting cards and wedding invitations.
In the days before the telephone, people chatted by post, and the well-written
letter became an art in itself.
Pen and ink were not easily portable, and the problem of how to carry writing
equipment around fascinated Victorian inventors. This shop in London is a
memorial to their clever minds and inky fingers. Pen collector Philip Poole. Here
we have one of the many examples of an effort to make an instrument which could
be carried around by a traveler. In the end here, we have the quill pen with
which he would have written.
And then the other end of the instrument, he would have carried some ink. This is a
type of writing instrument which would have been carried by travelers in the
Middle East. Here we have the ink well, and in the tube is the pen, which
incidentally is a reed pen. Inventors were always trying to work out a method
whereby the ink could be carried in the pen holder itself. Here we have the
fountain pen, and here we have the device whereby the ink could be put into the
pen. Early attempts at fountain pens came in many shapes and sizes, and there
were many ingenious devices. Here we have a fountain pen, probably about 1900, which
has an ingenious mechanism, which is retractable.
The purpose behind this was that if the pen nib was retracted into the barrel,
it could not be damaged when not in use.
Finally, we come to a pen which I suppose we could regard as a bit of a joke. I
think the idea of this is that because of its size and bulk, it would be
difficult to lose. Difficult to lose and difficult to use. Those early
attempts at portable pens look now like an amusing hiccup on the route from the
old hand-cut quill to the factory-produced fountain pen of today.
Stainless steel, silver, and even gold, the modern fountain pen can be made into
a prized possession, a piece of jewelry, in a way that goose quill never could.
The modern pen comes off the drawing board, not from natural materials
growing close at hand. Like fashion, it changes. Fountain pen, ball point, fiber
tip, floating ball, each a pen tip in a slim casing, manufactured to look
different and make a different kind of mark.
Surprisingly, each has its origins far back in the story of writing. Even though
our shiny modern pens are made nowadays by sophisticated machines, they're
basically the same kind of writing instrument that man's always used. I mean,
this fiber tip pen is really no different from the Egyptian reed brush.
And the fountain pen works in just the same way as a quill.
And if you think about it, every time that we write with a ballpoint pen, we
make the same kind of mark that the Romans did when they scratched letters
into the surface of a waxed-out ink.
Typewriters, electronic word processors, computers, these mechanical word makers
are no threat to the art of writing, as printing once was. They are a challenge
to it. In an age of mass production, handwriting remains the one individual
art that can be practiced by all. Writing is every man's art. What you've
got is a pen. If you look at it very closely, if you look at it sideways,
you've got a sort of bevel. Every time we write a letter, we make a set of
patterns. Every one of them is different, because we are all different. Every mark
we make says something about us. Each letter we draw reveals our character and
feelings, impatience, determination, energy, caution, recklessness, generosity.
Ugly or elegant, our handwriting speaks for us and for our times. Every mark we
make is like a fingerprint in time, which will tell the future what we were like
just as, by looking at the writing of the past, we can find out what they were like.
Thousands of years ago, a man whose words have outlived his name wrote,
all the possibilities of a human being can flow from the point of a pen.
Keep going. Let it flow. Keep the flow going.