This image, courtesy Dartmouth College Library, is from the larger collection that Ray Nash collected and used when he was researching and writing about American penmanship. His work sparked my interest to gather samples and to begin to understand them.

This project has the humble but determined goal to identify, classify, and organize scripts, words, and letterforms in American handwriting from the last several centuries. The material will be used to help people read historical handwriting and to further research in scripts and manuscripts.

While beginning such a project is easy, bringing it to any conclusion is an impossible goal, as writing continues to evolve rapidly in our present time, and there is far too much work to be done. It is clear to me that this journey will never be finished. It can only be started. But it is my hope that others can use this information to move forward. However, I welcome you to join in this effort to explore this vast corpus, much of it still under-researched, and many of its secrets still undiscovered.

David Kaminski