I’ve often come across many faded and dog-eared postcards at antique shows with hand-written messages barely legible on the back. What’s always surprising is how elegant and expressive everyone’s handwriting seems to have been 100 years ago. There was a time when every postcard, contract, or love letter was a thing of beauty – giving each document an intrinsic sense of value and permanence that no longer exists in today’s digital world. Once the primary means for both personal and business correspondance, handwriting is now quickly disappearing from our culture, and our education system. Hawaii, Indiana, and Illinois have all stopped teaching cursive in their public schools this year in favor of keyboard proficiency. Soon even signatures will be a thing of the past.

One of the few places we still get to experience the joy of calligraphy (Greek for beautiful writing) in modern times is at weddings. There are still plenty of capable calligraphers out there who are ready to hand-address your envelopes and place cards, adding a personal and elegant finish to your event. But if you keep digging, there is a whole world of artists out there using calligraphy as their medium, scribbling letterforms to create ideas and images. One of my favorites is Silvia Cordero Vega from Buenos Aires, who has a wide range of styles from dark and tortured to quirky and cute. The scribe behind Peter Greenaway’s films Prospero’s Books (1991) and The Pillow Book (1996) is Brody Neuenschwander. Two amazing calligraphers I’ve worked with recently are Marina Marjina from Russia and Danae Blackburn-Hernandez from New Mexico. Also worth mentioning are Bernard Maisner from New York (featured in the video above), and Nicolas Ouchenir from Paris.

The founding fathers of this country employed the reigning handwriting style from England, called English Roundhand or Copperplate Script (the Declaration of Independence is written in Copperplate). But it’s slow and painstaking style inspired Platt Rogers Spencer to develop a new style of handwriting in 1840 that could be executed more quickly and elegantly. Spencer’s books and penmanship school were highly influential, and largely responsible for the ‘golden age’ of American penmanship that lasted from 1850–1925. Spencerian letters are made with a graceful, rapid, swinging motion that is less fatiguing and more spontaneous in action. The enduring Coca-Cola and Ford logos are derived from Spencerian letterforms. But beginning with the popularization of the typewriter in the 1920′s, penmanship’s popularity has slowly lost ground to the cold speed of new technology.

When Steve Jobs gave his now famous commencement speech to the Stanford graduates of 2005, he spoke about his exposure to calligraphy at an early age, and how it would influence him in the years to come. “Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus, every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.”