Circular letter

“ She wants to see her son's hand-writing, for to her loving eyes, his angular, awkward, and even misspelt, letters are a thousand times more beautiful and symmetrical than any letter any typewriter ever produced. What ardent lover would care to receive a type-written letter? Do not lovers fondly linger, and dote, and dream over the very characters wrought by the hand they love so well? A letter from a lover's hand is a revelation that no machine-written letter can ever be. ”

“ Have a line ruled, in red ink, down each margin of every page, an inch off the edge (the margin should be wide enough to contain a number of 5 digits, easily: I manage with a 3/4 inch margin: but, unless you write very small you will find an inch more comfortable) .
Write a précis of each Letter, received or sent, in chronological order. Let the entry of a 'received' Letter reach from the left-hand edge to the right-hand marginal line; and the entry of a 'sent' Letter from the left-hand marginal line to the right-hand edge. ”

“ In fact the collocation of capital letters and other logograms, without space, is a beautiful feature of the art. We will explain:
"All the consonants of the English alphabet, when written as CAPITALS, are logograms or word-signs that require no space before or after. Four letters, G, J, Q, X, (being of less frequent use) , are also used for affixes besides being word-signs. The capital letter B invariably stands for be, by, but; C stands for say, sea, see. It can never mean anything else. D is used to express day, die, do; F is the word-sign for of, if. off; G stands for God, go, age. ”

“ Is it not a disgrace to a man of letters, to be unable to tell accurately what a letter is? Yet to say, with Lowth, Murray, Churchill, and a hundred others of inferior name, that, "A letter is the first principle or least part of a word," is to utter what is neither good English nor true doctrine. The two articles a and the are here inconsistent with each other. ”

“ To my personal knowledge many teachers fail to arrange the form of the letter to appeal to the eye, and this is essential. Paragraphing counts for much in a letter of application. The long, loose, scrawly, disjointed letter, hard to follow when reading it, with pages mixed until you must turn the sheet once or twice to tell for sure where the sentence is continued—these letters often cost the writer a position, and it is right that they should. Use the standard business letter size of paper of good quality. Make your left-hand margin uniform. ”

“ Another practice of the past, now happily discarded, is that of crossing letters; only a school girl, nowadays, would cross and recross a sheet of writing paper, and two sheets of paper are used if one sheet will not contain all that is to be said. If half the second sheet of paper is left blank it is not torn off, a whole sheet being more convenient to hold and to fold, and if a few last words are necessary for the completion of a letter they are written on the margin and not across the writing on the face of the pages. ”

“ The student will do well however to stick to the plain alphabet until the various letters are thoroughly mastered.
Among printers, this alphabet is known as “Gothic,” and some showcard men call it a “block” letter. The term “block” comes from the fact that most of the letters should occupy the same amount of spacing.
While not a beautiful alphabet—it comes in very conveniently, and is a splendid letter for making bold lines. As an illustration—the word “HATS” is a comparatively weak word on a large show card, unless the lettering is heavy, or embellished with some shading or outlining. ”

“ MY DEAR MRS. WORDSWORTH, I have repeatedly taken pen in hand to answer your kind letter. My sister should more properly have done it, but she having failed, I consider myself answerable for her debts. I am now trying to do it in the midst of commercial noises, and with a quill which seems more ready to glide into arithmetical figures and names of gourds, cassia, cardemoms, aloes, ginger, or tea, than into kindly responses and friendly recollections. The reason why I cannot write letters at home, is, that I am never alone. ”

“ Take care in folding a letter to make all the creases exactly straight and even. If one is looser than another, or if there is the slightest widening out or narrowing in towards the edge of the turn-over, the letter will have a crooked, unsightly appearance. ”

“ OLD LETTERS. There were always two divisions of handwriting: the formal hand, employed for clerk’s work, and a freer, less mechanical, less careful style, used for private correspondence. Writing was a profession, and, as late as the sixteenth century, when it was necessary to communicate with persons at a distance, a professional scribe was employed to write the letter. ”

“ One single letter gave it to me.”
“How was that?”
“If you will look at the telegram,” said Ben, spreading it out before me, “you will notice that in one instance only is a single letter seen standing by itself. That is the letter ‘b,’ which I concluded must stand for the article ‘a,’ for I know of no other, unless it is ‘I.’ Now, the letter ‘b’ is the second one in the alphabet, and stands next in order to ‘a.’ If this system is followed throughout the cipher, we have only to take, instead of the letters as written, the next in order as they occur in the alphabet. ”

“ Two sets of alphabet letters, one set red and the other black, are given out, one to each line. In playing this with a small group where there are not enough guests to have twenty-six in each line, two or even three letters may be given to one person, those holding “unpopular” consonants like X. Y. Z. Q., etc., being given the extra letters. The leader calls out words, necessarily easy ones, and those from each group holding the letters making up that word must run to the appointed place and form the word, each one holding his letter high and facing the judges. ”

“ It is quite a common occurrence for letters—especially letters of a small size—which are dropped into a letter-box, to slip inside newspapers or book-packets, and to be carried, not only out of their proper course, but to places abroad, thus getting into the hands of the wrong persons. ”

“ The process of “forming” a hand requires time and practice: it resembles the passage of “Copy-book” into “Running” hand, familiar to us all (see p. 323) .
Fig. 58. SCRIPTS I. & II.
Having cut the nib of a reed or large quill to the exact width required for the thick stroke, copy the component strokes of the letter (Script I.) , and [p087] immediately make the complete letter: go through the whole alphabet in this way several times (fig. 58) . Next join the letters together (see p. 73) [p088] to form words—writing always between ruled lines (fig. 59 & p. 414) .
Fig. 59.
Fig. 60. ”

“ And thus there are in this paragraph, after we have done our subtraction, sixty-four vowels and two hundred and twelve consonants. Good! that is the normal proportion. That is about a fifth, as in the alphabet, where there are six vowels among twenty-six letters. It is possible, therefore, that the document is written in the language of our country, and that only the signification of each letter is changed. ”

“ The letter you write, whether you realize it or not, is always a mirror which reflects your appearance, taste and character. A "sloppy" letter with the writing all pouring into one corner of the page, badly worded, badly spelled, and with unmatched paper and envelope—even possibly a blot—proclaims the sort of person who would have unkempt hair, unclean linen and broken shoe laces; just as a neat, precise, evenly written note portrays a person of like characteristics. ”

“ Gradually I found that my name signed to a check was even more welcome than when signed to a letter, though I wrote them at stated intervals. ”

“ Please to understand, then, ignorant Reader, that this curious alphabet reduces all the complex machinery of Cadmus and the rest of the writing-masters to characters as simple as can be made by a dot, a space, and a line, variously combined. Thus, the marks .— designate the letter A. The marks —... designate the letter B. All the other letters are designated in as simple a manner.
Now I am stripping myself of one of the private comforts of my life, (but what will one not do for mankind?) when I explain that this simple alphabet need not be confined to electrical signals. ”

“ Cross t one space from line. Dot i and j one and one-half spaces from line. In foreign languages special care is essential.
Joined hand. Connect all the letters of a word into a single word picture. Complete each letter; e.g. do not leave gap between body and stem of b and d, bring loop of f back to stem, etc.
Avoid slanting r and s differently from other letters. They should be a trifle over one space in height. The small p is made as in print, and is not extended above the line as in ordinary script. ”

“ When letters or words are set double, and are required to be taken out, a line is drawn through the superfluous word or letter, and [43] the mark No. 6, which is the letter d, an abbreviation of dele (expunge or erase) must be placed in the margin.
A turned letter, or one placed the wrong way upward, is noticed by making a dash under it, and placing the mark No. 7, in the margin.
Where a black mark is seen in any part of the line, which is occasioned by a space standing up, it is noticed by making a dash under it, and placing the mark, No. 8, in the margin. ”

“ I have all her letters still—a score of scribbled notes sent up by messenger from one wing of the Hotel Cecil to the other and a few longer letters written when she was on her holiday or week-ending somewhere apart from me. Here, I spread out the sheets. It is a competent, well-educated writing; the pen rarely leaves the paper, running on from letter to letter, from word to word. A rapid writing, flowing, clear and legible. Only here and there, generally towards the ends of her brief notes, is the clarity troubled; there are scrawled words made up of formless letters. ”

“ But it is of the essence of letters that we should have the whole of each. I think it wrong to omit even the merely formal parts. They all hang together. The method employed in the biography of George Eliot was, in my opinion—I can but state it—a vicious method. To serve up letters in solid slabs cut out of longer letters is distressing. [Pg 237] Every letter a man writes is an incriminating document. ”

“ O may be regarded as the Key letter of an alphabet. Given an O and an I of any alphabet, we can make a very good guess at the forms of the other letters.
In fine Inscriptions the external line of O is commonly an almost perfect circle (see Plate II.) —i.e. its height and width are equal. This may be regarded as the ideal shape, though a slight widening or narrowing of the letter (fig. 157) is quite permissible.65
Fig. ”

“ After the writing is completed, attention should be paid to the initial and the decoration. A good method for the beginner is to fix a sheet of tracing-paper over the page; as the lettering shows plainly through, there is plenty of opportunity for experimenting with decoration.
Some good types of letters suitable for initials are shown in Fig. 26. The first alphabet is based largely on a type of letter used in the eleventh century, while the110 second one is a free rendering of thirteenth-century letters. These letters are all built up. They may be made with either pen or brush. ”

“ Bond of a good quality is probably the best choice. Colored papers, while attracting attention in a pile of miscellaneous correspondence, are not in the best taste. Rather have the letter striking for its excellent typing and arrangement.
Department stores and firms that write a great many letters to women often employ a notepaper size sheet for these letters. On this much smaller sheet the elite type makes a better appearance with letters of this kind. ”

“ Moreover modern designers are showing a welcome attention to minuscule letters, and it even seems possible that before long some small letter forms that shall be distinctively of the pen may be developed, and that the use of type models for minuscule pen letters will no longer be found necessary or commendable. ”

“ This method of outlining precludes the possibility of becoming confused on account of a multiplicity of lines, the spacing may be more accurately judged, and enlarged proficiency in free hand work is attained. Especially in the first draft of a letter design is the use of the outside lines only to be commended. The balance of a letter or a series of letters is that effect which gives legibility and artistic proportions to the design. A top-heavy appearance is a fatal defect in a letter. ”

“ The printed symbol (given here in its two forms, the capital and the small letter) is to be known to the child as representative of the sound of the letter, not of the name of the letter. It requires but little effort to teach the child how to sound an initial letter. The teacher may request him to “start to say” some familiar word, as run, but to utter only the first sound of the word. To facilitate the process, she may do this herself and afterward have the child do it. ”

“ I began, "I received in my morning mail a letter, the delicate penmanship of which at once attracted my attention and awakened my curiosity. Turning to the signature, I read the name of a young lady friend of mine, and, somewhat startled at the thought that this was the first time I had ever seen the handwriting of one I knew so well, I perused the letter with an interest that presently became painful as I realized the tenor of its contents. ”