The Missing Ink by Philip Hensher, r. Mar. 2026

p. 49 It's perfectly possible to enjoy unattainable aspiration while practising a basic version of the art form.

p. 153 The wonderful transformation of writing with a reliable ink reservoir, or transportable bottles of ink, would have been accompanied by a jettisoning of the writing companions of decades – sometimes without the faintest regret, sometimes with a tinge of sadness that things had changed. We gaze at these things, now so useless, and try to garner the faintest sense of the human investment which once went into them.

p. 201 [Proust] is from one of the first generations of thinkers to stress that handwriting is utterly individual, saying that 'everyone, however humble, is a master of those familiar little household creatures whose life lies as it were suspended on the paper, that is, the unique characters of his handwriting which he alone possesses.'

p. 255 Some part of the writer's spirit had passed into the handwriting, and had stayed there. Her humanity and her hand overlapped, and something remained, indelibly, in these physical traces.

The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting by Anne Trubek, r. Jan. 2026

p. 60 Handwriting, [Trithemius] said, was a spiritual act, a form of religious devotion that putting blocks into a press could never be.

p. 95 The media and public were fascinated by the spectacle of typing contests. Going fast was becoming a cultural phenomenon in an increasing industrialized America, and typing speed contests fit perfectly into this general speedup.

p. 97 Only once typing became the de facto method to conduct business correspondence and keep records did handwriting assume the associations we have with it today: a way to express one's uniqueness and personality. It is only in the twentieth century that handwriting becomes evidence of – and a way to analyze – the individual psyche.

p. 105 "This philosophy of the manifestation of the soul through graphic signs is based on the intimate connection which exists between each sign... which emanates from the human personality, and the soul, which is the substance of that personality. Who can doubt that every word is as spontaneous and immediate a translation of thought as speech? All handwriting, like all language, is the immediate manifestation of the intimate, intellectual and moral being." –Michon