Book description
Writing by hand is something that has shaped and revealed our humanity
for thousands of years. In a world where people are increasingly
swapping pens, letters and love-notes for typing text messages with
their thumbs, The Missing Ink is itself a love letter to the lost art of
handwriting -- as a cultural artefact, an expression of our
individuality and as a craft in itself. Novelist Philip Hensher traces
the rise and rise of handwriting in the 19th and 20th centuries, as
wider education brought this most individual of skills to the masses. We
meet the passionate early evangelists of fine writing, such as Platt
Rogers Spencer, who travelled to every corner of America preaching the
moral worth of copperplate; and the great educational reformers such as
Marion Richardson, who had a deep understanding of how best children
might be taught to write. But this is also a book about ink and pens
themselves, objects that are even now beginning to disappear from our
homes and offices; and about whether the style of our writing really
does reveal anything about our inner selves. When we can no longer be
interested by our friend who writes a little heart over her i's, and no
longer have the end of a biro to chew thoughtfully, what will we find to
replace it? The Missing Ink is a hugely entertaining, accessible
investigation into the warmest of technologies, and the place it had in
our lives.
