The Missing Ink Quotes

“Depressing realization sets in. Writing was invented not by human beings but by accountants. Most of the early writing systems are records of how much crap people own, how much money they have, how much money they owe, and other lowering/boastful facts of human life.”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

“writer’s notebook’. The students have to make notes on all sorts of things – observations, passing fancies, plot ideas, scribbled asides, as well as sketches and drafts of poems, short stories, perhaps bits of drama.”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

“the very best students are the ones who take out a piece of paper and a pen, and write down the things that they think are interesting as you talk, making sense of it as they go.”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

“Perhaps that is the way to get handwriting back into our lives – as something which is a pleasure, which is good for us, and which is human in ways not all communication systems manage to be.”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

“In all sorts of areas of our life, we enhance the quality of our lives by going for the slow option, the path which takes a little bit of effort”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

“Handwriting is not just a motor process; it is also a memory process for letters – the building blocks of written language.”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

“It was a sort of reverse colonialism: just as we had once descended on the courts of Asia to offer them an over-elaborate civil-service model, a long-lasting sense of inferiority and the interesting idea that it might be sensible to stop burning widows, taking from them in exchange various gross baubles and an ingrained sense of post-colonial guilt, so our unfortunate subjects’ descendants were now turning up in Knightsbridge with fully charged credit cards to acquire some tat.”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

“The ink, as Biro had hoped, dries almost instantly on contact with the paper, in less than two seconds. By 2005, 100 billion pens had been sold worldwide.”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

“Someone, sooner or later, was going to invent the ballpoint pen, and it might as well have been László Biró. The dedication of Marcel Bich, the man who bought the patent and turned the ballpoint pen into one of the most remarkable commercial successes in history is, in its way, as impressive.”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

“Ferguson has no difficulty in finding examples of Dreifuss’s analyses which, in the light of subsequent developments, are comically inaccurate.”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

“As long ago as 1989, the Washington Post was recording actions made by the American Civil Liberties Union against firms using graphologists in employment practices, saying they were ‘strongly oppose[d to] all arbitrary pseudo-science employment”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

“Graphological analysis of job applicants has always seemed somewhat morally dubious, and is now considered probably illegal”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

“graphology persisted was in one of the chief money-making endeavours of early proponents – the advice over careers.”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

“What is peculiar and near-unique in Proust is the erotic thrill attached to the literal illegibility of handwriting, as well as the illegibility of people as a whole.”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

“Nobody has ever gone more deeply into the superficial than Proust did.”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

“professional mental-health associations worldwide, such as the British Psychological Society, have declared graphology to be of ‘zero validity’.”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

“Michon seems to have been the first student of handwriting to make a methodical collection of samples of handwriting, amounting in the end to thousands of examples.”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

“The end of the nineteenth century saw an explosion in books explaining how to discern character from handwriting.”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

“in France, and almost everyone who has examined the French model of handwriting teaching has been initially alarmed by the apparent martinet-like quality, and then impressed by the beautiful results it achieves, and the ability of French children to move on and use handwriting as a tool, rather than experiencing it as a blockage.”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

“most of us move on to more-or-less cursive writing when we’re about seven or eight,”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

“Dickens was the greatest observer of the human condition, and keenly aware of what people make of themselves, and what people might make of themselves, if society were not in the way.”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

“Palmer produced some pseudo-scientific truths and some truly gruelling exercises to enable the student to enter into his prescribed style. Far more than any previous handwriting entrepreneur, he examined the movements necessary to writing. He concluded that handwriting was an athletic activity, which involved much more than the hand.”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

“real, live, usable, legible and salable penmanship’ which would be ‘no more beautiful than is consistent with utility.”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

“the man whose work is synonymous with the spread of Moral Copperplate – upright morally, though rightward-sloping graphically – spread the word with stories of his personal redemption through handwriting. Platt Rogers Spencer, born in 1800 in America, devoted his life to spreading copperplate through schools of instruction, countrywide.”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

“the man whose work is synonymous with the spread of Moral Copperplate – upright morally, though rightward-sloping graphically – spread the word with stories of his personal redemption through handwriting. Platt Rogers Spencer, born in 1800 in America, devoted his life to spreading copperplate through”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

“Instruction in handwriting, and the establishment of ‘artistic penmanship’ in his life can lead to a moral transformation, too. ‘Very soon’ – for the student of handwriting – ‘vulgar stories, bar-room scandals and billiard halls begin to lose their attractiveness.”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

“Moral improvement is not exactly the first thing one thinks about when looking at pre-twentieth-century copperplate. But moral improvement was exactly what the systematic teachers of copperplate were after as it moved into the nineteenth century.”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

“The question is: should we even care? Should we accept that handwriting is a skill whose time has now passed, or does it carry with it a value that can never truly be superseded by the typed word?”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

“Our attitude to our own handwriting is a peculiar mixture of shame and defiance: ashamed that it’s so bad and untutored, but defiant in our belief that it’s not our fault.”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting

“The shaping of thought and written language by a pen, moved by a hand to register marks of ink on paper has for centuries, millennia, been regarded as key to our existence as human beings. In the past, handwriting has been regarded as almost the most powerful sign of our individuality.”
― Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting