Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to series four of the Life of Letters, a podcast exploring the art history and future of calligraphy, handwriting and all things letter related.
I'm your host, Laura Edrilyn, a London based calligrapher with a curious mind on a journey to connect with artists, historians, experts and letter lovers around the world. This season is once again kindly supported by Speedball Art, who continue to help celebrate the tools and traditions that keep the written word alive.
Don't forget, if you want to find out more about the guest, the podcast or me, check out the show notes.
Let's dive into the episode.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: In today's episode, I'm delighted to be speaking with David Grimes, an American penman with a keen interest in penmanship history.
His work is rooted in the traditions of the penmen and engrossers of the 20th century, with a particular focus in the pointed pen discipline of engrossers scripture. David, firstly, a huge welcome to the Life of Letters podcast. It's great to be talking to you today.
[00:01:01] Speaker C: Thanks for having me. I appreciate the invitation.
[00:01:03] Speaker B: It's lovely to have you here. And there's, I mean we touched on the history, there's quite a bit of penmanship history to cover, which I'm really excited to get into. But before we do, I wanted to just kind of find out a little bit about your history, where your love of letters and scripts came from. Can you tell us about that?
[00:01:24] Speaker C: Well, I feel like there's this pressure when you are a visible calligrapher to have a really good backstory. I think I've even said this before somewhere. But you know, Paul Antonio has this beautiful story about him walking on the beach plucking feathers out of the sand.
And my introduction into calligraphy was in high school. I had a Math teacher named Mr. Jensen and Mr. Jensen would stop teaching us calculus one week every year and he would invite us all to learn italic calligraphy.
And at the time I could not be bothered to pay much attention at all to that. You know, I was a 15, 16 year old teenager, but years and years later I only started to connect the dots that there was something that was planted there. That after I had gone off to study graphic design and I had kind of thought that I would pursue a career in design, that I found my way back to lettering and calligraphy in the evenings as a hobby, as like a moonlighting, my passion thing. And it was 2013, so just after the end of the world that I, that I sat down and I did a 30 day lettering challenge and it wasn't even calligraphy. Stuff, it was just drawing words or, you know, scratching things out with micron pens. And I was really proud of myself that I had seen that challenge all the way through. And kind of towards the end of that, I started to stumble into a little bit more of the written forms, the calligraphy aspect of things.
And I was just so lucky to meet some really good friends early on. That kind of pointed me in the direction of this American penmanship stuff.
And I discovered that I kind of had a knack for some of the techniques that I use today, and the rest is history. But I do feel like it's not that I am naturally predisposed to being good at this stuff, it's just that I really like how challenging it is. And so I think that the underlying challenge of. And grocer script specifically, or pointed pen in general, is kind of in alignment with a lot of the things that I've done in my life, whether those be sports things or, you know, craft things or academic things. I enjoy a good challenge.
[00:03:56] Speaker B: I love that there is a practice to it. Right. There's a sort of a joy in the. The challenge of getting those strokes right and. And practicing those letters and things. And I think it's such an exciting route that you've taken. I love that your. Your teach, like, yeah, let's do something else today.
[00:04:15] Speaker C: Believe me, we needed it. Yeah.
[00:04:17] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, I think we still do.
[00:04:20] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:04:20] Speaker B: So you're sort of passionate about preserving the art of writing and you encourage people to learn and explore lots of the historic calligraphy techniques in particular. And you do this through your courses, which are dreaming and script. Right. There's a few different paths that people can take. But there is one particular script that I want to talk to you about because it's. It's kind of the one that you're probably most known for, I imagine, which is Engrosser's script. Can you tell us about where this script came from?
[00:04:54] Speaker C: Yes. So engrosser's script is an interesting phrase or an interesting name to grant to this style of writing, because an engrosser is a professional document designer. The 20th century, really, the word specifically has like French origins. And the engross means, which means to write large.
But if you would think about a professional document designer of the 20th century, they probably had quite a few scripts that they wrote. So why does this one get called the engrosser's script? You know, singular, really. It's a subset of the round hand family. So the American writing tradition is by way of the colonists coming over from England and bringing that education that they brought. English roundhand would be our primary ancestor as far as writing systems go.
And English roundhand is significantly different. You know, it was written at a time where steel pens weren't widely available. It was written in a truly written fashion. In many cases where, you know, the pen is being directed in whole paths to create whole letters, and in some cases the pen isn't being lifted from one letter to the next.
Whereas Engrosser's script has this very distinctly broken apart, modular geometric feel that can really only be accomplished with the steel pen, which was invented, you know, in the beginning of the 1800s. Well invented, widely spread, manufactured in the beginning of the 1800s. So there's actually a really wonderful website called the Steel Pen that has some great, great information about steel pin history you guys can link to in show notes. But yeah, so Engrosser script is roundhand and roundhand is English roundhand, French roundhand. There are all these variations, nationalities of the round writing, you know, of the Western world. But N grocer script is specifically American in that the history that I have access to at least comes from kind of the turn of the 20th century. So prior to that, roundhand was the, was the word that was being used. Even here in the United States, people called this style of writing roundhand.
Without going too deep into the history of American writing, in the middle of the 1800s, there was this really big push to the semi angular style of writing, which is what most people think of as Spencerian.
So Spencerian is a semi angular system.
And prior to that there was the angular hand, which was kind of the, you know, how kids want to do everything that their parents didn't do. So the kids of the early 1800s said, we don't want to do that English roundhand stuff anymore. We want to have a different writing system.
I've seen it said that, you know, the invention of the semi angular system was America's desire to have its very own writing system.
There's, there's some really interesting backstory on that as well where, you know, sometimes we credit Platt Roger Spencer with inventing Spencerian. I mean, it's his namesake, it's an eponym, right? But maybe PR Spencer senior took it from an Englishman.
So you can check out in pursuitofpinmanship.com my buddy Michael Gebhart wrote a really wonderful research paper on that specific subject of maybe that there's some, in true American fashion, some plagiarism and renaming going on.
[00:08:36] Speaker B: Amazing. That's a rabbit hole for us all to go down.
[00:08:39] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, yeah, it's beautiful. It's a beautiful article. It really is.
But anyway, so, you know, around the end of the. Of the 19th century, beginning of 20th century, there is a really important book that was published as far as my understanding of inkrass script, and that is the Zenarian alphabets. I'm holding it up right now. A little ASMR for you guys.
[00:09:01] Speaker B: Can you just flick through some pages just to give us a feel for it?
[00:09:05] Speaker C: It's like beautiful, beautiful in this book, which is.
This is a first edition, so this is 1895.
There is a little section here that I would like to read. A passage from these says, no style of writing is so widely admired by educated people as round hand. No style is more EAS learned. And no style is so well suited for the engrossing of resolutions, diplomas, valuable documents, etc. As this.
After proper practice, it can be written quite rapidly, nearly as rapidly as the usual ornamental styles of light line forms. If you wish to do fine art engrossing, you cannot ignore nor neglect this appropriate style of writing. It is many times more rapid than lettering and oftentimes more beautiful and fitting. It captivates alike the sage, saint and sinner.
Wow.
[00:10:01] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:10:02] Speaker C: So what's really important there is that, that's under the heading of round hand in this book in 1895. So in 1895, Charles Zayner, who is a luminary of American writing, he calls this roundhand. And then he shows exemplars for this exact style of writing.
And then in 1900, there's a blue cover, a second edition of this book that comes out, and the heading no longer says roundhand. It says roundhand or engrosser script.
So right there there's a shift, there's some kind of colloquial adoption where people in the industry, people around town are saying this in grocer script stuff.
Now, I have been the projector of many terms in the calligraphy world, so this could very well be that Charles Zayner was just saying, we call this engrosser script. And he's making a decision himself. It could also be that his colleagues are calling it engrosser script, that he's seeing it published in professional journals as engrosser script. The history for this stuff is somewhat accessible, actually, very accessible. As far as calligraphy history standards go, we have a lot of written record, but I always like to operate with some amount of healthy skepticism that I don't know the exact story, because you will adopt some view of that this is the way it was. And then someone will show up with a journal that goes, actually, this is what happened. And you just gotta go, wow, that's amazing, and update your thinking as you go along.
[00:11:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:31] Speaker C: Anyway, that's kind of the beginning of engrosser script is right around then.
[00:11:36] Speaker A: That's incredible.
[00:11:37] Speaker B: And so it is really kind of birthed from this sort of certificates, these kind of formal documents that engrossers would have been writing and then kind of offered as a more common way of writing other things like, I guess, letters and correspondence and stuff. And then does it become kind of mainstream, or would you still have to be a really skilled engrosser?
[00:12:09] Speaker C: That's a great question.
So historically, Americans, colonial Americans were not wonderful penmen. If you look back at our founding documents, they're.
They're a little rough, but that makes sense, right? It wouldn't, it wouldn't. You wouldn't expect the super successful English writing masters to go, hey, they're doing this whole thing over in America. Let me uproot my whole life and go over there and teach, you know, handwriting to these, these colonists. So for a while, there actually weren't writing schools in the United States. It took a little, a little while for them to be established.
So that said, there are generations of people that are being taught kind of watered down roundhand, through the memories of people who didn't necessarily have great teachers.
And a lot of this early, early American history is kind of characterized by the itinerant writing teacher. So you have a small town and there is a schoolhouse, but there's no regular writing teacher. And then there's a writing teacher that comes through town for a couple weeks and he teaches something in the summer. I mean, there are many, many American penmen that. That's their origin story is that in the summer of, you know, 1872, a man came through town and taught me how to write. And that set me on this whole life of being a penman. It's like, wow, that's an impressionable young man going to an interesting summer camp. But, but the.
As far as engrosser's script goes, it is somewhat specialized. It's very slow to write. First of all, because there is such a requirement of high geometric precision, people bunch up on their writing. I'm actually going through a little bit of this this week. I'm having trouble with my writing because I'm pretty stressed about other things in my life. And that's telegraphing into my posture and my desire to control these little pieces, little piles of Ink very specifically.
So it is something that you want to be a little bit Zen with a little bit relaxed and I call it carefree nonchalance. You want to have this, this natural disposition of that. This is not a race. You're riding this way because it's beautiful, not because it's quick.
The semi angular writing that we mentioned before, so that would be the ornamental penmanship, the Spencerian, even the business penmanship, which is kind of what came after the 20th century, really, that would be much more useful for writing letters. It's not that we don't have in Grosso script letters, it's just that when you see an engrosserscript letter, you're seeing several hours of work from someone, whereas when you see a business penmanship or an ornamental mental penmanship letter, you're seeing several minutes of work from someone.
So if you ever get an engrossers script letter in the mail, that is like a. That's a little gem that someone put some work into that for sure.
Which is, which is cool.
[00:15:08] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And it's lovely because it is really a massive distinction even today for people understanding the difference between handwriting and calligraphy. And really to the point that they're not one and the same, they're very different and they serve different purposes.
I know we mentioned it at the beginning, but why engross the script?
[00:15:28] Speaker C: Yeah, why?
Well, I started out with the broad pen and I fundamentally didn't understand how to have the appropriate amount of ink on my pen. So it was quite frustrating. A lot of blobbing, a lot of dropping.
I kind of thought, well, maybe I'll go to markers because at least they don't drop your ink.
And I was introduced to the pointed pen through some photocopies actually of the Znerian Manual, which is a seminal work on the style American penmanship, that you can download from my website for free.
But I got some photocopies of the engrosser script lessons in that book from a colleague, a mentor of mine. And going through those lessons kind of sparked in me a curiosity about the flexible pen, about the pointed pen that just didn't bite. With the, with the broad pen, I find that pointed pens drop less ink. So that also was quite appealing. I had a little bit more instinct with it, which was good.
And in typical me fashion, I immediately wanted to do my own thing rather than really study that. I think at that point I was quite young and I didn't really understand how to study a script. So I kind of just came in, looked around, went, this is Neat. I can probably do that. And then missed a lot of the details that are quite important to it.
But over time, that resolves. You learn more about what you know and then you learn more about what you don't know. And those two things are kind of circling around to who you are. The Dunning Kruger effect, I suppose, is probably what I'm describing, but I think in general, why Engrosser script? It purely comes from this challenge. Very early on, I had this. This idea that Engrosser script was the most difficult style of writing. I don't know that that's true.
Don't want John Stevens to come and wallop me over the head with his Romans. But it is quite a technical style. And that granularity of the detail was something that helped me to focus.
I'm not diagnosed with a attention disorder or anything like that, but I often feel that I have trouble focusing. And yet in Grosser Script, because it was so difficult, it required this focus that. That really drew me in. And kind of I was able to hone myself against how difficult it was.
And then because of how difficult it was, when you experience these breakthroughs with it, they're very satisfying.
And so there's this, by today's standards, very healthy work and reward ecosystem where I think, you know, not to rail against kids these days or anything, but we don't have a lot of things in life that we work really hard for and we have delayed gratification for now. And in Grosser Script is probably the primary example of that in my life. It's the thing I've worked the hardest for, to experience the little wins that I've had with it. So I cherish each of them quite, quite a lot.
[00:18:41] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:42] Speaker B: And what a beautiful script to now have all that experience with and be able to produce and teach.
And you. You have on your website some articles, and there's a brilliant page about the differences between the scripts, which we'll link to in the notes. But I often get asked about the difference between some of the more historical scripts, and I wondered whether you could just share a few of the common kind of. I think you call them aliases that we can. So we can all get it straight in our head. What.
What is what?
[00:19:16] Speaker C: Well, first I'll say that if you're speaking to someone and they are offended or angry about what you're calling something, that should be a red flag as to that that person is not very patient, which is something that's required for calligraphy. It could also mean that they're Young. I will say that I was less patient about this when I was younger because I had this desire to be right.
You want to know the right name to call it? The name that the old penman called it, not the name that everyone, you know, everyone's calling it now. So I like aliases because an alias is something that you can substitute for when we're talking about words and, you know, nomenclature and vernacular and all that stuff. In the calligraphy world, consensus is what we're looking for. When I say a word, do you think of the same thing that I'm thinking of? And if you do, but it's not the same word that you would use, that's okay. We still. The word still served its purpose, right?
[00:20:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:20:14] Speaker C: So in this case, I call in grocer script, modular American writing. In that modular being that the pen is lifted quite a bit, that the shapes are distinct, sometimes they aren't even joined together because we're assembling it for, you know, a viewer position that's several feet away, and it's not advantageous to join the shades together and that the style is unique to the early 20th century writers from the United States.
It is still very much a round hand style of writing. It would still fit in that.
In that classification.
Some of the old penmen called it engraver's script. There are some really wonderful works by Jones and Materaz that call it that by their title, by the title of the book. And that kind of comes from the idea that this is the style of work that bondsman certificate designers were using and then those certificates were being engraved.
I've heard it said, I think Joe Vitolo says this quite frequently, that engraver script is a name that was given to it because it looks like engraving on paper.
I can't say that I agree or disagree with that because I don't have a lot of experience engraving.
But there are distinct shapes, so it would stand to reason that that could be the case.
Copper plate is the one that everyone seems to get really upset about.
I would. I will say it's the one that I got the most upset about when I was growing up, because copper plate isn't used a whole lot in the American historic material, certainly not at the time. At the 20th century time frame that I kind of specialize in. And so you see everyone say, oh, we're doing copper plate writing, copperplate writing. So copper plate is kind of in reference to the intaglio printing process, which is you engrave into these copper plates and you pack them full of ink and Then you press them against paper and you get this kind of relief, you know, design printed.
And some of those plates are engraved with round handwriting. Sure. But they're engraved with all sorts of writing, you know, and pictures and lithographs or I guess not lithographs, but lithographic drawings.
And so copper plate kind of gets some people upset because they'll say, no, copper plate is a printing process.
So I've done a little bit of research into this when I was 20, and then I actually never wrote this article, but because I decided that it wasn't important.
But in the early, early days, in the mid-1800s, sometimes the word copper plate was used as a pejorative for writing that has no life.
So you'll see things like his writing is stale, like that of copper plate. It lacks any personality or beauty or grace.
You'll see. So what they're doing there is they're taking written work and they're saying it's so exact that it doesn't have that characteristic of the graceful line that we're looking for.
And sometimes that's copper dash plate, sometimes that's copper space plate, sometimes that's copper plate in the, in the middle of the 20th century. Lupfer. So Earl Lupfer, who's one of the students from the Zaneering College who was a kind of, I don't want to say disciple, but a follower of Charles Zayner, one of his students, he ended up calling some of his work copper plate in some of the later American historic material. So you do see that there's this slow adoption of that term to mean American roundhand. Copperplate is what we used to call in grosso script would kind of be the, you know, table talk around that. Nowadays everyone calls it copper plate and it's not helpful to admonish people for that for sure.
But there's a distinction between forms that are written with a high degree of geometric precision and are super angular and modular hand forms that are written in more of the round hand tradition, which is that the like. For example, the minuscule O is a single stroke that moves in a direct or anti clockwise fashion. I used anti clockwise because you're British.
[00:24:39] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:24:40] Speaker C: Fashion. It comes all the way around, you know, and so like there are distinctions. Now sometimes you can write engrosser script in such a way that it would look like it was not lifted and angular. And you can also write copper plate with, or modern copper plate with such a degree of control that you might even fool people like me into thinking it's in grosser script. So it really is just, you know, they're two words to get you to kind of the same thing.
As far as contemporary copperplate writers, Nina Tran is one that stands out to me as being a really influential person in that space. She has done, I mean, like a decade worth of live streams, you know, covering techniques and her thoughts on it. And she's quite proficient penman herself.
She's amazing writer, actually, I shouldn't say quite the proficient. She's one of the best writers in the world. But, yeah, you know, Nina and I don't write the same way, but we have a lot of respect for the way that each other write, and I think that's. That's where I'd like people to land, is that engrosser script is a subset of Roundhand in the same way that modern Copperplay is a subset of Roundhand. It's all kind of the same family, a little different techniques, a little different outcome, but we are still in the same ballpark.
[00:25:59] Speaker B: Yeah, I love that. And. And there will always be sort of micro differences, I guess, between every calligrapher's script. And we, we actually. We've got an episode with Nina in this series with you. So it's going to be lovely having two masters of this kind of calligraphic styles coming through and sharing their. Their wisdom and their insights into this, this, this space, because it's a beautiful way to understand letters and really breaking it down into strokes. And I love the way that you talk about it being modular, because I always think about how you explain where to lift, and that's a big part of the difference between handwriting and calligraphy. And I think it is having the right terminology to be able to share and explain to people so that they're able to then develop their own practice.
[00:26:56] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:26:59] Speaker A: If you're enjoying this episode and fancy supporting the podcast, you can literally buy us a coffee. Head to the link in the show notes. It's a lovely way to help keep the life of letters going.
[00:27:09] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:27:10] Speaker A: Now, let's get back to the episode.
[00:27:14] Speaker B: And you've also worked on lots of different projects yourself over the years, and you're always buried in commissions and all sorts of things. And I just wondered whether you could pick something that you have done that has been a real sort of favorite or a standout project to work on.
[00:27:32] Speaker C: This year has been an interesting year for me. I have put a lot of my effort into teaching over the last.
Well, since 2018. Can you believe that? That was almost seven years ago. For the last seven years, I've been primarily teaching, but I am pushing myself to take more commission work like you're talking about. And so this year has been the year of big commissions for me. I have been kind of working on a big project each quarter, and I have a new one that starts in two weeks that lasts six months.
So it's. I'm getting to the point where I am very much pushing myself from an organizational standpoint, let alone, you know, the calligraphy technique required to do these projects. But earlier this year, I had this project. A gentleman, oddly enough, found me through my podcast, which is called Ink Tank, and he listened to.
He listened to some or all of our episodes before contacting me, which is a very strange thing to do because he is quite the busy professional. And I'm kind of amazed that he went through that vetting process.
But he is re imagining a monastery in New Jersey that is being renovated, and they needed some work for the final install. So I've been working on this series of projects that are being installed at the property. And one of them in particular was this large prayer that he had written, I guess, or that someone had recited to him. And it was the largest piece I've done on calfskin to this point. It was like 40, maybe 42 inches wide.
It's quite large. Yeah, it's quite large. And for any of you who have worked with calfskin, which I had worked only, you know, only worked with calfskin in a smaller capacity, this was the largest piece I'd ever handled. There is. There's quite a bit of concern regarding humidity fluctuations in the environment that a piece is installed in, because calfskin can cockle and warp over time.
And so it's not just a matter for me of designing the document and actually producing the calligraphy, but creating a framing packet that has everything it needs for this piece to last for several hundred years.
And I went through a research phase of figuring out exactly how I wanted to do this.
I had got the initial idea from a friend, a colleague of mine here in Portland, who. She frames some of her calfskin using this. But I believe it's called the Chicago String Method.
And I'll describe it now. So you take the calfskin.
You take the calfskin when you purchase it from the tannery, and you want to get it very moist, so you hang it up in a room with a bunch of steam. So most of us hang it up in the shower.
You let the shower run, and you keep that door closed, let it sit for a little While. And it becomes quite pliable. And then you stretch it over your board and you tack it down. I used an industrial stapler. Ding, ding, ding, ding. Staples all the way around the outside.
When it dries, it becomes shorter, and so it sucks tight like a drum.
And now the surface is completely flat and it's mounted to your board, and you're able to prep it and work it, do all the calligraphy work. So that's all of the layout, the sketching, the writing, the painting, the gilding, all of this. And get all that done. And when the project is air quotes complete, it's time to cut it off the board. And you go and you take a knife and you cut on the inside of all your tacks. And now you've released this piece that was pulled tight, and now it's not pulled tight anymore, and it instantly moves. So literally, as you're drawing the knife along the skin, you're seeing the skin shrink right in front of your eyes. You're going, oh, I hope this is all going to be okay.
You take the piece and you flip it over. So artwork is now facing down. And all around the outside edge of this every. I did every 2 inches for the entire perimeter of the document, you do a little piece of Irish linen thread and a little droplet of Jade 403, which is a PVA, a polyvinyl acetate adhesive. It's a stable adhesive.
Supposed to be archival, I think, you know, wheat starch paste is probably what the bookbinders would prefer you to use. But the. There's so much water in that that the skin will react to that. So the PVA, the 403, is a nice middle ground. You tack on all these strings.
So now you've got your kind of your document, and you've got this fringe around the outside. Looks like a. Like a dancer skirt or something like that.
And you flip it now, artwork side up, and you lay it over your backing board, your mounting board, so that you've got the strings and they're running off in every direction. And what you do is you start to pull the strings tight and tape them down to the table just beyond the edge of the backing board. And then you go along one by one, and you start putting twists in these strings to coil them up on themselves like little springs. And you build this suspension system for the entire piece where the strings are being pulled tight. You start in one corner and then do the opposite corner, and then the bottom corner, then the top left corner, and you work all the way around the whole document in this kind of one side and then the other fashion, you get it all pulled tight again. But now it's not pulled tight with staples. It's pulled tight with these tiny little strings.
And then you can go along and you can affix these strings just in front of your tape to the backer board and then cut the tape off and it stays suspended, but pulled tightly. I went the extra.
The extra mile of. Once I had coiled the springs going along and tuning them all to make sure that they all had the same tension so that I could make sure that there was equal tension around the document. And what this does is. It's really beautiful, actually. It's. It's. It. You know, we talk about paper and pieces breathing, but as this skin contracts, those springs can relax a little bit, so they can allow it to move, but still be pulled tight. And as it expands, they can contract on the strings and they can maintain it being held tight. And obviously, then you put it in an archival packet with museum glass and, you know, a nice dust seal, and you do all this stuff.
What a challenge.
The process of writing the document itself was two weeks or something like that. It was quite, quite the feat. And then the preparation for the framing was another week for me, which I was very surprised by because I had never done it before, but it was so stimulating. The whole time I was going, oh, this is amazing. I wish that I could find a way to film this or have everyone here and, you know, we could all do it together or something like that, because it was so.
It was such a labor of love. But when it's done, oh, it looks magnificent, you know, and then it goes into the frame, and you have this. You have this. This faith that that piece isn't going to move too much, and it's going to last for hundreds of years. Now it's in this beautiful. Or thousands of years if kept out of the light.
[00:34:47] Speaker B: You know, it's very cool attention to detail. I feel like you needed a chemistry degree, probably an embroidery or some sort of textiles degree, along with so many other things. Like, did you research all of this before you did it, or did you have to test as you went along? Or is it. Was it just stuff that, you know, I did?
[00:35:11] Speaker C: I did several test pieces.
I definitely leaned heavily on the experience of my colleague, Holly Monroe, who lives here in Oregon, and she was very helpful and supportive. I changed a couple of the things from the way that she does it, because in typical David, I know better fashion. I just thought that I Should, you know, I don't know what that I'm happy with the way it came out. Some amount of it is this mechanical confidence that I have that comes from maybe having a dad who is a builder or having quite the exposure to woodworking or, you know, I'm not too timid about those things as far as the chemistry goes. Luckily, you can get the spec sheets for a lot of these things. So if you're buying your adhesives is the big thing you're worried about when it comes to mounting and reservation in a lot of cases. And so if you're buying from a credible bookbinder like I brought, I bought the adhesive from Talas. So, you know, there are.
You don't have to really understand what if something is acid free? You just have to know the spec sheet says it is, but it is helpful to test, you know, so you can get yourself a ph testing kit or get yourself a ph pen and you can go through those, those processes. I'm. Some of that experience comes from the archival preservation interests that I have. So I, I collect quite a bit of American ephemera, which is almost all paper, so it's very much in that degrading migrating acid category. And then I travel every once in a while to work with ancestors of penman to help them catalog and understand their familial collections.
And so in that case, you're working with pieces that have been stored in dire environments, like in the attic or in the garden shed for 40 years, where, you know, there's a leak or, you know, whatever it happens to be. So conservation is really something I'm quite interested in. And when you're creating a piece and you're selling it to a client and you're doing the framing, you have the ability to take that extra, you know, put in the extra work to make sure that your work is well represented and the client has something that they can give to their children and their children can give to their children.
[00:37:28] Speaker B: Yeah, you're, you, you've got the foresight because you know where things often can go. Yeah. I mean, all of that experience, your background, your, you know, your, your childhood, and I think that's, that's the power of how we get into the things that we get into. Right.
[00:37:43] Speaker A: Gosh, that's.
[00:37:43] Speaker B: That's fascinating.
[00:37:44] Speaker A: And you.
[00:37:45] Speaker B: But you also work with people. I just want to mention speedball triangle, because I sure got one for my birthday and I was thrilled with it.
How on earth that came about? Has that been something that you've had in your mind. So this is a lining tool, Is that what you say?
[00:38:03] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Lining tool.
So the honest version of this story is that my first lining triangle was given to me by my friend Richie Way, who's a Chinese penman. And he was visiting the United States for the national conference. And I asked if he wanted to come and do a, a week long residency style stay with me here in Portland. And he said yeah. So when he came, he gave me this, this gift of his triangle.
And I used that for a while. There were a couple of things about it that were giving me some trouble.
And I drew up plans for a version of my own that had. The primary thing that's unique about the Moss Grimes lighting triangle is that the bottom hole of each set of graduated holes is spaced from the bottom of the triangle the same amount as the holes are spaced from one another. So it allows you to line up consecutive sets of lines. But the, the lining triangle is not a recent invention. This lining triangle, in fact the, the Muskrat's lining triangle you have looks almost exactly the same as the lining triangles that were being sold by seneca in the 1800s.
So this concept of having a problem that you encounter regularly in your calligraphy practice and then trying to design a template for solving that problem, and then trying to take that template and, you know, turn it into a product or reconcile it down into a small form factor or these types of things, I think that ingenuity is kind of in the spirit of a lot of the American penmen where you're seeing, I mean, not just in the lining tools, you're seeing it in the writing tools. I mean, we talked about the steel pen, for example, but what about the vast array of types of pen holders, of oblique pen holders that you can use? There are so many. So that inventiveness is a part of, in my opinion, interacting with your discipline in a really earnest way. You're not just along for the ride, you're trying to participate and add something and improve on something. And so I was really quite happy with the prototype that I, that I had made for the lining triangle. And I used it for years and years and years, since I used it for seven years before I ended up getting Speedball to agree to make it with me.
And they've been so amazing. I mean, Speedball is an amazing company to work with. We went down there and we toured their facility before this whole thing kicked off. And you could just see how, how well they take care of their workers and how close knit everyone at the at the headquarters is. And that's people on the production line and people in the offices and all that. And I had a really wonderful relationship with the. I call her my handler at speedball, Kelly Braun. She.
She was fantastic and she just advocated for me and for the product every step of the way. She has always wanted to make sure that whatever we do with it is in alignment with my vision for both, you know, my. My company and also for what Penman need, which to have a corporate entity that's going, what a Penman need. That's like. That's pretty good.
[00:41:22] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:41:23] Speaker C: That's pretty cool that we have someone in our corner. So I'm. I'm really excited about that.
The recent news about it is that we sold out our first manufacturing run. So we are on to figuring out how to get a second run of these things made. And it looks like there might be some changes as far as coloring goes, which I'm excited about. Oh, so, you know, they're.
They're cheap enough that you people can buy two of them, I guess, if they want the different color.
[00:41:50] Speaker B: But people will be collecting these.
[00:41:52] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:41:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:41:53] Speaker C: But they make a good. They make a good stocking stuffer and they. You can use them for all sorts of things. So I'm glad you have one. Have you used in a bunch or.
[00:42:01] Speaker B: Yeah, it's brilliant. It's brilliant. And.
And where did I see you? You were demonstrating it at I am Path and I think it was shared online. Your sort of tutorial or how you were using it. It was just brilliant. I mean, there is. There's videos online as well where you've shown. Shown how to use it. But I mean, once you've got the first couple of steps, you're like, okay, I've got this. But it's brilliant. And just knowing that it's. It's just so clever because of the angles on the side as well. It's. It's having again, that sort of passion to develop something like that and that the innovation to create it into such a small, easy to, you know, take with you places or wherever.
And it's. Yeah, it's a great thing to sort of slip into the pencil case of a calligrapher's kit and stuff, so.
[00:42:52] Speaker C: Absolutely, absolutely.
[00:42:53] Speaker B: It's.
[00:42:54] Speaker C: That's. I mean, that. That compact form factor again, is a historical design. But I do. One of the big things when we were putting it together was this idea that I wanted something that was small, that could fit in your wallet or your purse or your pen case or Whatever. And that was unobtrusive. That didn't have this giant, you know, bulky form factor of like almost self congratulating, like, if I had my logo really big on it, for example, or something like that.
[00:43:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:43:23] Speaker C: And that just makes it bigger. So I can have a big logo, but then you have a bigger product. So coming up with the nice balance between beauty and utilitarianism. And.
Yeah, it was. It was a fun project, for sure.
[00:43:37] Speaker B: No, that was. It's great. It's great.
And this is a bit of a curveball question, to be honest, right at the end, because.
[00:43:45] Speaker C: Oh, no.
[00:43:46] Speaker B: So brace yourself. Brace yourself. No, this series we're asking guests a bit of a challenging question, although it may not be, but what is your favorite letter of the Alphabet and. And why?
[00:44:01] Speaker C: I'll come at it from the perspective of my favorite Majuscule and my favorite minuscule to teach in a grocery script.
So my favorite Majuscule is the Maguscule D. And it is very difficult D for difficult.
It is a very long stroke and it's all one stroke, which is kind of unique. For engrosser script, we don't have very many letters that are only one stroke.
By the time I get to the point in the curriculum where I teach it, the students are really used to letters being broken down. And then I throw them this curve ball of, well, we're going to do this one all at once. And what it really tests is it tests your ability to think about where you put your hand down to the. To the table, because you have to be able to reach every corner of this form without moving your hand. Generally speaking, unless you want to use kind of a floating arm technique or a arm movement technique. And so people really struggle with it. But I think that is good because it is a metaphor for that. We can go down the rabbit hole of one technique, convincing ourselves that it's going to be the thing that's going to let us go to the next plateau. It's going to. Once we get this down, we're going to be the penman we always dreamed we were going to be.
And the reality is that you need to embrace all techniques and all approaches to writing to be a holistic penman. Because it's not about how well you write one script. It's about how well you wield the pen.
Very specifically, the pen is an extension of you. It is your instrument. And so a musician that can play one song really well is not worth any more than a musician that can play a thousand songs off the cuff. You know, that kind of thing. So I enjoy that and I like framing it that way for students to make sure that they are continually investigating what works for them. You know, not just what I say, not just how David does it, but say, this is a unique shape and your hand is different shape than me. So take a little bit of agency now and you can make decisions for yourself the same as I can make decisions for myself. We all have that agency.
So that's the minuscule. The minuscule is going to be the minuscule S.
And in my vision of an engrosser script curriculum, I said that there were five principal shades, so five principal elements that are thick, that have pressure. And the fifth one is the one that we use in the S, it's that curve that goes to the right. So it's the right curve.
And it's very infrequently used. And in grosser script, the other shades get used quite a bit more. So we use it for S vers, some versions of X and some versions of P in the minuscules anyway.
And what I like about it is that sometimes I have these memory devices that I use to help people understand the letterforms by anthropology.
Anthropomorphizing.
[00:47:04] Speaker B: That's a big word.
[00:47:05] Speaker C: I feel like I'm saying it wrong, but imbuing them with, you know, the qualities of a person. And so the S has a big chest sticking out. And I like to draw as a muscle man with his arms out to the side and little biceps.
I'll actually, I'll send you a drawing of this as well, so you can put that.
[00:47:21] Speaker B: Yes, please.
[00:47:23] Speaker C: And so I like to say that the S is proud versus if you drop the weight of the S too low, then it can become kind of depressed and somber. And so by keeping your S proud, you kind of are remembering that as you're going along through your writing, you are supposed to be proud of each letter. You know, if you judge all of your writing on a page by whatever you failed on the page, you're always going to feel like a failure because every page is going to have failures on it. But little failures don't make you a failure.
They just help to illuminate where you need to spend practice or time or study.
And so you come along, you give this S a nice big chest, and you say, yeah, this is going to be all right. I think I'm going to get a couple more good, you know, letters out of this page. And I like that, the optimism of that. So there you go.
[00:48:15] Speaker B: I love that. What a way to wrap up. I think that's such a. That's. Well, it's a lovely thing in calligraphy, but probably also in life to just look for those prouder moments. And I think, I think it's so handy having teachers who can bring lots of different ways and tools and methods of understanding the letters on the page. And we all do it so differently and we all learn so differently. So being able to see it and hear it and, and understand the lines that you should be drawing is. Is such a huge.
Yeah. Such a huge asset. And I mean, I don't think really the bio at the beginning really did you enough justice. It was. It's. You're really one of the masters in, in the calligraphy world. And I think it's.
It's just been such a delight and I feel so grateful that you've been sharing your time with me today. And it's. It's a lovely conversation to have, but I really hope, you know, the listeners get lots out of this. There's been lots of brilliant extra rabbit holes for us to go and explore. So we will put lots of things in the show notes. But if people want to find out more about you, they can visit ma.maz grimes.com or you're on Instagram @maz grimes. And it's M A S Grimes, right? Is it like Master Grimes?
[00:49:36] Speaker C: So. No, no.
[00:49:38] Speaker B: Give us a. Give us another story.
[00:49:41] Speaker C: I vehemently reject the idea that I am a master or that there are any masters, actually.
[00:49:47] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:49:48] Speaker C: I would say.
No, that's okay.
I appreciate it comes from. That's the thing people say, and it comes from such a nice and respectful place.
I think that there is a lot of danger in the calligraphy world of lifting certain voices or people or techniques up and holding them as gold standards.
So no mas is Spanish for more. So more than Grimes.
And it's also the second half of my middle name, which is Tom Mess.
So it's Tom Maas Grimes.
I would say that I consider myself very much a student who struggles with all the same things that all of you that are learning in grocery, script, or copperplate struggle with. I have writing days where I'm embarrassed by my writing. I have writing days where I have to do projects over and over. I have writing days where I say, I cannot do this today. I have to go do something else. Maybe I'll go out to the garden. Maybe I'll go pet my cat.
And so I hope that in the future we have less of a focus on what very few people are doing really well and more of a focus on what we as a community or as a generation have done really well. And if I could have any kind of legacy, I would just want to be one of the seats at the table for people who contributed something that was very valuable and improved what we were given by the penmen of the past. And I think deep down a lot of the other penmen in the world feel that way, is that we know that we are part of a collective. And the idea of mastering something and implying that one, you're better than people who haven't mastered it or that you're done learning that those two ideas, they don't really line up with how calligraphy is really experienced by people today anyway.
So I. I like the term posthumously. When I am gone, if you all would like to call me that, Old Master Grimes, I would be honored as a ghost to look back and say.
[00:51:58] Speaker B: Or always Mastering Grimes.
[00:52:00] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, There you go. Yeah, yeah. We're all a work in progress.
[00:52:04] Speaker B: It's not a destination. Yeah, absolutely. And you've got two S's, so it's excellent. Extra bonus points for getting some.
[00:52:12] Speaker C: Very proud.
[00:52:14] Speaker B: Yes, it's been such a delight. Thank you so much. And as always, we'll put the links in the. In the show notes. But just a huge thank you for being part of the life of Letters and. And joining me today.
[00:52:25] Speaker C: Thanks for having me, Laura. I appreciate it.
[00:52:29] Speaker A: Thanks so much for listening. This series would not be possible without my producer, Heidi Cullip, and kindly supported by Speedball Art, champions of creativity, connection and craftsmanship. If you've enjoyed the episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review or share it with a fellow letter lover. Until next time, keep listening, keep creating and keep celebrating the life of letters.
