How many people can read your handwriting? Assuming, that is, that these days you write by hand at all. Fewer, maybe, than you’d think.

The world’s literature — even that, like the works of Homer or the Vedas (or today’s crudest rugby songs), which were passed on originally by word of mouth — has been preserved for us in writing. Language has been shaped as much, arguably, by the written word as the spoken one. Outside China and Japan that has meant manuscript, or occasionally carving, for all but the past few hundred years. Yet the art of the scribe, and his vagaries, is a topic left almost entirely to experts.

Most educated people in Europe could tell you who invented that continent’s printing. Few have the faintest idea why, or perhaps even that, Johannes Gutenberg’s typeface was what we now call Gothic rather than the letter-forms (much easier to read even then, I’d guess) of the Roman script developed in that empire’s heyday.

Gothic lettering survives these days almost solely in the mediaeval epitaphs, in brass, still to be found in old English churches. I’m an avid epitaph-collector, and I’ve seen many of these. Yet whether in Latin or English, I often find them almost impossible to decipher.

A version of Gothic survived in German handwriting and printing well into the 20th century. It’s gone now. But its forms live on in handwriting to the extent that to foreigners, even those fluent in the language, a postcard in German might often as well be written in Chinese.

Handiwork

I imagine the same is true for other languages and scripts. How many Arabs can read the angular, elongated forms of the Kufic script used in the past for their language? Even when Turkey used Persian script, the swirling calligraphy of the firmans issued by the Ottoman rulers must have been legible to few of even their best educated subjects. And here’s an oddity: handwriting will never be standard — how could it?— yet it reflects the standardization of letter-forms due to the triumph of printing even less than you’d expect.

For centuries printing in the Western world and its offshoots has been dominated by typefaces that are all essentially Roman; as in The Telegraph, for example (and the italic typeface in which that title is here printed is Roman at heart, for all the distinction that printers draw between the two). The letter-forms we read are basically the same in Alaska, Argentina and Australia, or English-speaking West Bengal, for that matter.Yet there is no limit to the variations of handwriting from one person to the next.

Curiously, however, there are — or at least so my eyes say — some distinctive “national” kinds of handwriting. Most of America, it seems to me, writes in a rounded, school-girlish hand, as if the entire nation had been taught by a single specimen of those pretty young schoolmarms who turn up in some Wild West township and find love in the last reel. I’ve a suspicion that the same is true of Australia.

That is not so in Britain. True to its society, handwriting there tends to reflect class rather than geography. It’s easy to spot what my father called “an educated hand”, and its writer probably is so. (Not that the converse is always true: it was once my job to edit columns written by Denis Healey, a thoroughly-educated Labour politician, and his handwriting looked like the trail of a demented bluebottle just released from an inkwell.) Most calligraphers, and Britain has some superb ones, use the lovely italic script that came into favour in upper-class schools 50 years ago. At one time I tried it (start with a flat-tipped metal pen-nib, not a ballpoint). Now, like many others, I just scrawl.

Most of us, of course, just type.