AMERICAN PENMANSHIP

1800-1850.By Prof. Ray Nash (Art). Worcester:American Antiquarian Society, 1969. 303pp. $18.50.

"Try" implored the versatile Rembrandt Peale on the title-page of his 1845 copybook whose intricate and faintly amusing title is too lengthy for inclusion here. Time erases the memory of grammar school penmanship trials, and a nostalgia creeps in when today we come upon those Spencerian entries in old account books and family Bibles. The early writing masters and their copybooks trained those anonymous hands that recorded the progress of the nation before the advent of the typewriter and once again are the subject of thorough discussion and documentation by Professor Ray Nash.

A companion and sequel to his earlier American Writing Masters and Copybooks:History and Bibliography Through ColonialTimes, the new volume takes the subject into the nineteenth century when instruction in the art of handwriting became a proper matter for serious study in our developing system of universal public education and in our growing numbers of commercial schools. A lively, thorough, yet compact historical essay and remarkable illustrations of writing samples and copybook title pages illuminate a catalogue of well over three hundred copybooks from a fifty-year period, culminating many years of research into this fascinating aspect of the graphic arts. From the turn-of-the-century treatises of John Jenkins and his disciples, whose rather "mechanical" and systematic reduction of the "round hand" to some half-dozen basic strokes survives in altered form even today, the author traces the increasing relaxation of discipline that marked the later masters like Spencer and Rice. They outdid one another with their exemplary exercises of swans and flourishes, and were scarcely above liberal borrowing as new copybooks flowed forth in ever greater numbers. The writing masters were a colorful lot, and worthy too. They're well worth looking into - and at - in this handsome volume.

Mr. Brackett is Director of Galleries at theHopkins Center.