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posted by on Thursday February 23 2017, @01:13AM   Printer-friendly
from the alas!-never-to-be-seen-again dept.

In September 1885, a bunch of librarians spent four days holed up in scenic Lake George, just over 200 miles north of New York City. In the presence of such library-world luminaries as Melvil Dewey—the well-organized chap whose Dewey Decimal System keeps shelves orderly to this day—they discussed a range of issues, from the significance of the term "bookworm" to the question of whether libraries ought to have a separate reference-room for ladies.

They then turned their attention to another crucial issue: handwriting. As libraries acquired more books, card catalogs needed to expand fast in order to keep track of them. Though the newly invented typewriter was beginning to take hold, it took time and effort to teach the art of "machine writing." Librarians still had to handwrite their catalog cards. And this was causing problems.

"The trouble in handwriting," said Mr. James Whitney, of the Boston Public Library, "is that there is apt to be too much flourishing."

Influenced by Edison and honed via experimenting on patient, hand-sore librarians, library hand focused on uniformity rather than beauty. "The handwriting of the old-fashioned writing master is quite as illegible as that of the most illiterate boor," read a New York State Library School handbook. "Take great pains to have all writing uniform in size, blackness of lines, slant, spacing and forms of letters," wrote Dewey in 1887. And if librarians thought they could get away with just any black ink, they could think again real fast. "Inks called black vary much in color," scoffed the New York State Library School handwriting guide.

Dewey and his crew of "a dozen catalogers and librarians" spent, in his estimation, "an hour daily for nearly an entire week" hashing out the rules of library hand. They started by examining hundreds of card catalogs, looking for penmanship problems and coming up with ways to solve them. They concluded that the "simpler and fewer the lines the better," and decided that, while a slant was best avoided, a slight backward slant was acceptable. Then they got to the more nitty-gritty stuff, such as whether to opt for a "square-topped 3" or a "rounded-top 3." (The rounded-top 3 won out, as it is less likely to be mistaken for a 5 during hasty reading.)

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Thursday February 23 2017, @01:39AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 23 2017, @01:39AM (#470553) Journal

    All the respect I'm able of for the "organisational/process engineering subordinated to the physical world reality" approach.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @02:34AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @02:34AM (#470567)

    Empyricism! Yeah it's the way to go.