Research Notes present provisional, object-centered studies exploring handwriting, print, and written forms. These notes support ongoing research and may later develop into articles or book chapters.

Backslant Type and the Intersection of Handwriting and Print History

Slant, or the absence of slant, is a deliberate choice in all typography and all writing. While a vertical orientation is frequently treated as neutral for printed matter in particular, typography and writing may also exhibit backward slants of varying degrees, as well as rightward slants, which are more common and likewise appear at many angles. For carving, engraving, and typography, slant may be governed by practical considerations of legibility and efficiency, or it may be selected primarily for visual, stylistic, or expressive effect.

Typographic discussion is relatively muted regarding slant as compared to the debates among penmen and those who are adherents to styles. Most penmanship styles, and the authors who promoted them defined a preferred slant that they presented as optimal according to their own criteria, and the history and culture before and during their time. Slant has been discussed extensively in penmanship manuals of all kinds—often at great length, and in some cases with more emphasis on verbal explanation than on illustrative examples. In penmanship, slant, as just one element, is a subject of intense debate and it is so heavily emphasized that any “incorrect” angle could render all the writing unworthy, regardless of its legibility and utility.

This thumbnail sketch, while incomplete, is a short overview so that one can better appreciate and understand items I have personally collected and to see them in a broader context. My interests extend beyond handwriting into the study and collection of typographical material as it offers a discussion with written matter. Accordingly, selected examples of printed matter are included in the Kaminski Handwriting Collection to examine the geographic and chronological boundaries of slant, where such boundaries can be identified, and to assess its functional and visual purposes within broader systems of written communication.

As one early print example of leftward slanting type from the collection is a Davis & Brown receipt from Boston, dated March 27, 1815.

Davis & Brown, receipt, March 17, 1815, archival image, Kaminski Handwriting Collection. Item can be found at AAS.

While collected by others for its fine graphic in the upper-left corner, its leftward slanting type is one of the earlier examples I have seen. Notice that it is also one of seven typefaces on this receipt. Is this intentional? One must believe so, and its purpose points to the security of the receipt, as, upon closer inspection, on notices that the sellers, Davis & Brown, sell “Rich Jewelry and Silver Plate…[and] Watches,” among other items. The multitude of typefaces, both more common and less common, is an obstacle for the average person, including a forger. Reverse angle type is also used often on bank checks, for example, in the decades that follow, thus indicating it as an enduring obstacle for forgers, or, at least, comfort to the majority of clients. 

Is there some other possibility? Could the printer simply have run out of other type? Did he have other “standing type” that is here repurposed? Perhaps these or other reasons may be the case. But it is reasonable to believe that security was the primary purpose of the reversed-angle typeface in this business receipt for jewelers and fine goods in the early nineteenth century.

Interestingly, one finds this is the same typeface that appears in Philadelphia’s Charles William Bazeley’s book in 1821, Elements of penmanship: simplified and illustrated. Here, it appears for entirely different reasons. In Bazeley’s second edition, the angle is used with purpose. (Bazeley’s 1811 first edition is a book of an entirely different kind, and it bears no resemblance to the second edition.)

In the second edition, Bazeley uses the term “reversed hand” and says of it the following, on page 35 of his book: “The reversed hand contributes to an agreeable variety, in cards of compliment, invitations, and exhibitions of fanciful and ornamental penmanship. It may be written by changing the position of the arm, or by reversing the position of the paper, from what is customary when writing the text hand.” By suggesting that this typeface be used as a writing script, Bazeley is in effect promoting it both as a new writing style and also as the first reversed angle writing script of which I am aware an author endorses in the United States. (Please advise me when you find an earlier author. It is a curse to chase this detail.) It may be worth noting that this typeface, while among the earliest (or earliest?) of reversed angle script faces used in the United States, is by no means designed as one with the consistencies needed for fluid motion of the pen.