Re: [Rollei] Obsolete skills (was Why the 6-element lens for 3.5Fs)

[Laurence Cuffe <Laurence.Cuffe]

On 5 May 2003, at 18:16, Don Williams wrote:

>At 02:54 PM 5/5/2003 -0700, you wrote:
>>   For a while I went to a private grammar school where we
>>were taught Palmer Method long hand. I think this was
>>intended to leave you able to write a nice sort of copper
>>plate hand. We did hours of practice drawing coils going in
>>both directions, interlocked figure eight's, etc, etc.
snip
>>   I would love to be able to write in a beautiful and
>>readable hand but have given up on ever getting my muscles
>>trained for it.
>>---
>>Richard Knoppow
>>Los Angeles, CA, USA
>>dickburk  
>
>Same experience.  Can't even read anything I wrote more than a couple of 
>minutes ago.  I couldn't make circles without the pen sticking into the 
>paper.  Also, for some reason I didn't always write with my circles 
>touching the line.  The teacher thought I had a vision problem.
>
>Don Williams
>La Jolla, CA
The palmer method was aimed at producing an elegant 
copperplate. just fine for writing polite invitations on visiting cards in 
accordance with Emily Posts guidelines.
  I started out with this and by age fifteen my high school teachers 
decided that I probably wouldn't graduate because no one could 
read my exam scripts.
The solution was to learn italic handwriting, a style of script 
developed for speed and clarity when the only way to copy a book 
was by hand and people spent all day doing just that.  To do this I 
used a series of 10 handwriting cards published by the dryad press 
and written by Alfred Fairbank. 
It didn't take long to change. Half hour of practice a day for ten 
days  transformed my handwriting from a totally illegible scrawl to a 
very workable high speed hand which stood me in good stead when 
it came to tacking notes in college.  The dryad press is, I think, 
gone and  I know of no one publishing the cards, however there is a 
book by Alfred Fairbank "A handwriting manual" which covers the 
same ground though in a less compact form. This went through 
many editions and should be available second-hand. You don't 
want calligraphy. You want the italic script as a piece of highly 
optimised medieval technology aimed at speed and legibility.
All the best
Larry Cuffe 

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