Another weekend with letter writing! Getting geared up for the summer  postcard season.

I read this Wall Streen Journal article a while back about calligrapher Bernard Maisner.   The article ended with:

Yet Mr. Maisner believes that calligraphy answers a demand for beauty and vitality that technology, however advanced, cannot. Calligraphy, he said, “is not meant to reproduce something over and over again. It’s meant to show the humanity, the responsiveness and variation within.”

Yes! And that’s how I feel about handwritten letters versus email and texts.  Beauty and vitality are precisely what I see in the letters I receive.

But any man who, like Maisner, charges over one thousand dollars to write 8 first names on small cards that can “act as a place card along with a take-home gift” is not really preserving calligraphy for the masses.  He’s an artist and he, like many other successful artists, reserves his work for the super rich who can afford his services.

I have no problem with that, but I propose that we all let our artists within run free from our inner critics and just take up a dip pen and try it ourselves.  I’m going to go play right now!

P.S. Check out these pictures of Maisner’s collection of antique writing gear.  They are drool worthy!

P.P.S. And if you want a tattoo of calligraphy, you can get Maisner to design it for you!

Source: NumberSleuth

But hotel note pads are not the only paper products I have picked up.  I am working on some posts about my recent stationery adventures in Geneva, Switzerland and London, England and I have some other stationery adventures I’ve been meaning to post on Boston, San Francisco, New Orleans and elsewhere.  It’s coming!

(Image from Handwriting Makeover)

Cursive handwriting has made the New York Times' Room for Debate section! You can find the varying view points here.

While some argue that research shows it's better for your brain or your fluency to learn cursive, and others argue that the research is untrue, I was encouraged by the general assertion in most of the opinions that handwriting (print or cursive) is still important in our technologically-saturated world.

And the comments section was full of people who thought that even if it seemed old fashioned or a dying art, that cursive is one of those things that are worth preserving in our education system. I whole heartedly agree!

(image from NYTimes)

Check out this New York Times article about Salinger's letters to a Toronto woman years before Catcher in the Rye.  The woman he wrote to is still alive and 95 years old.

As we document every moment of our lives through social media, I find there's something elegant in how a few letters can bring to life a moment in time 70 years ago and leave a little room for the imagination.  Will we sift through 70-year old Facebook posts in the year 2083? Or will the internet as we know it even exist then?  I'll stick with the letters, thank you.

Thanks to my mother-in-law for sending me this lovely postcard postmarked in 1923!

Happy Spring!

For those of you who, like me, adore Edward Gorey, be sure to check out the Google doodle today that commemorates his 88th birthday.

And since you’re here, you obviously like letters, so be sure to check out Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer.  The book includes many illustrated envelopes that Gorey sent Neumeyer.  Delightful!  My sister gave me the book a couple years ago and I am working my way through it slowly so as to draw out the joy.