How Twitter made handwriting cool

I love writing letters


How Twitter made handwriting cool
From the rise of 'journalling' to the world's greatest pencil, notes are now in vogue

Wohlgefühl: it’s one of those enigmatic words the German language excels in constructing. It can mean ‘wellbeing’ or ‘good feeling’, but it is the word Meike Wander, owner of Berlin’s RSVP stationery shop, uses to describe the timelessly simple delight of handwriting: of pen in hand, ink on paper and skin on surface as thoughts and images transfer from the imaginative to the material.

‘It’s a physical experience, it’s your body doing something,’ Wander says in her hesitant English. ‘Handwriting produces a good feeling – a wohlgefühl.’
The atmosphere in the pine-floored showroom is still and studious, like a place devoted to patience and craft. Displayed on the shelves are jotters, cahiers, journals, diaries and notebooks from all around the world – the rare Mead composition pads, yellow Cambridge block legal jotters, anonymous classroom books by the Korean brand O Check, and bijoux Caderno notebooks by Serrote, a press who reissue classic Portuguese school pads in limited-edition runs.

There are the distinctive black and orange Bloc No13 pads by the French brand Rhodia, and rows of Italian Moleskines in every format, size and colour, from black A5 journals with elastic fasteners to city-break guidebooks and tiny pocket-sized notebooks in pretty pinks, greens and blues (popular with girls, apparently).
Then, there are shelves of elementary writing instruments offered not for the status they impart, but simply for being items that are really good at what they do: attractive little boxes of coloured Kaweco ink cartouches, chunky brass M&R pencil sharpeners and colourful Caran d’Ache 849 ballpoints.

Wander opened the shop eight years ago, she says, ‘for no logical reason’. ‘I’m like most of my customers: I can’t pass a stationery shop. I always have to go in and touch everything. I love the tactility of paper and different surfaces.’
For such rational, rudimentary and often downright plain products, stationery can exert a powerfully emotional pull. Shoppers at RSVP tend to be devoted stationery fetishists – apparently customers rush into the shop and grab an armload of Cambridge pads for fear of never finding them again.

Yet even for less engaged customers, the simple utilitarian beauty of RSVP’s stock is enough to make anyone renounce the iPad, find somewhere furtive, and just sit and think and extemporise on whatever happens to arrive: notes, thoughts and memories, letters to loved ones, diary entries and reflections upon sights and events, or just scribbled to-dos.

Paper, pens and pencils may scarcely seem like aspirational items – they are often more redolent of the agonies of the classroom than anything else. But if there is a halo around handwriting, its tools, techniques and joys, it would only make sense today; handwriting and notebooking is a trend where austerity meets posterity.Writing is cheap and simple, and won’t get lost if your laptop crashes.

There’s even a new word for the urge to scribble that shops like RSVP and brands like Moleskine sell to: ‘journaling’. In an age dominated by the dizzying proliferation of digital communications, of iPhones, iPads, BlackBerrys, Twitter, Facebook, email, SMS and hundreds of other technologies, the simplicity of pen and paper suddenly commands a timeless attraction.

Ancient communication technologies are current like never before. Boutique stationers like RSVP and The Paperie in Chester are thriving: people haven’t stopped handwriting today any more than they eat lunch in pill form or commute to work in electric maglev cars.

The long, slow decline of penmanship is often lamented, and not without reason. A 2006 report published by the Institute of Education termed handwriting the neglected, ‘Cinderella skill’ of literacy. The ability to handwrite legibly, the report said, ‘is essential for everyone even in this age of computer technology’.

According to Angela Webb of the National Handwriting Association, there was once no formal education policy on handwriting for schools. For the past seven years, however, handwriting has been part of the national literacy strategy. Far from dying out, she argues, handwriting is resurgent.

‘We’ve seen a reverse of the trend in the last two to three years, and people are much more keen to handwrite now. Research is coming though from skilled authors who use handwriting to get ideas flowing and then move to the keyboard to develop them.’
Patricia Lovett, a judge on the National Schools Handwriting Competition, says she is constantly surprised by the popularity of handwriting among schoolchildren and, at the same time, she notes a resurgence of interest in handwriting that chimes with other craft-based hobbies and manual pursuits.

‘There is every parallel in the importance of handwriting, and hand writing well, with the Slow Food movement, heritage crafts, after-school knitting and craft clubs,’ she says. ‘There are things in life which have to be taught and learnt, but are worth doing, and worth doing well.’

While some were surprised that Tony Blair handwrote his recent memoir, he is far from alone in authoring longform texts by hand: James Ellroy, JK Rowling and John le Carré all write by hand, as does a promising, computer-shunning novelist named Dawn French.
‘Something handwritten shows that you care and that it is important to you,’ Lovett argues. ‘And, may I say, nothing beats the pleasure of being able to actually tick something off a list by hand rather than it simply disappearing from a screen because it has been done.’

Sales figures in the growing notebook market tell their own inky tale. According to Moleskine’s creative director Maria Sebregondi, the Italian-owned brand of oilskin notebooks, famously popularised by Bruce Chatwin from its Rive Gauche roots, sold 12 million journals in 2009 and expects to sell 14 million this year.

The company has attracted criticism in the past for claiming unverified associations with literary and artistic greats (Hemingway and Picasso among them), yet there is no denying that since the mid-Nineties, Moleskine has pioneered a market for covetable, carryable stationery.

They inspire profound devotion, yet the humble notebook is as far from ostentation as it gets. While Old Bond Street’s Smythson position stationery as a luxury item – time to reflect and consider is a luxury in itself today – the popularity of Moleskine and the lines offered by RSVP suggest the real contemporary fetish is for simple, functional and enduring products that haven’t changed in a long time.

‘We want our customers to perceive notebooks as everyday objects, not something impenetrable or demanding,’ Sebregondi says. ‘Notebooks are not luxuries but cultural items – culture is always inclusive, while luxury is exclusive. That’s the difference.’

And in positioning the cahier as ‘a book yet to be written’, Moleskine tapped a modern aspiration towards creativity; they might not make you be creative, but they certainly make you feel creative. Today the company offers 300 different notebooks, cahiers, folios and diaries, while last year they caused a splash by launching a range of candy-coloured ‘volant’ pocket carnets.

And après Moleskine, le déluge. According to Angela Young of The Paperie, more and more entrepreneurs are spotting an opportunity to expand the market and offer innovative stationery products. ‘The renewed interest in journaling and notemaking is driven by people’s desire to use pen and paper,’ she says. ‘We use computers and mobile phones so much these days, and I believe that people don’t always want to be looking at an electronic screen. They want to be hands-on and connect with what they are writing.’

Young mentions Field Notes, a popular new American brand offering pocket notebooks in proletarian brown card covers, inspired by postwar American agricultural memo books and attractively reminiscent of ration books. Field Notes’ corporate blurb makes the delightfully prosaic claim that they offer ‘an honest memo book, worth filling up with good information’.

Stuart Kirby, of the British company JOTTRR, offers notebooks with radiused, numbered pages, alternately lined and blank, plus perforated, pull-out grid leaves and elastic fasteners with yellow, fuchsia or black covers. JOTTRRs have been ‘flying off the shelves’ according to Young.

For Kirby, a self-confessed hard-core notebook user, they are the chance to capture something in a different way. Rather than diminishing the importance of the notebook, he says, digital has enhanced it.
‘In the digital age there is so much information, but using notebooks is a very different process to writing on a screen – you go back over notes, cross things out, amend and review. You remember it,’ Kirby says. Indeed, there are endless scientific studies proving that taking the time to form a letter - instead of just hitting a key – – promotes neural activity, creativity, memory and fine motor skills.

Just as they can be particular in their choice of paper, stationery fetishists can be exacting about their pencils. But from the mundane to the exotic, the tools of writing have not radically changed over the years.
With the exception of mechanical pencils, which ratchet leads through a plastic case, the pencil in particular remains fundamentally the same: a shaft of graphite encased in two semi-hexagonal sections of aromatic incense cedar. Yet on the internet, these utilitarian tools inspire a devotion bordering on the obsessional (try the Dave’s Mechanical Pencils blog for everything you never knew there was to know about pencils).
A few years ago, a number of pencil bloggers announced that the discontinued Eberhard-Faber Blackwing 602 was, not to put too fine a point on it, the greatest pencil ever. A sleek black object with an oversized ferrule (eraser holder) and the charismatic epithet, ‘half the pressure, twice the speed’ embossed on its shaft, it was declared ‘the world’s best pencil’ by American author Joseph Finder.
The Blackwing’s claim to perfection and authenticity was sealed after a character was seen using one in Mad Men, and to tremendous applause from pencil devotees around the world, an American company, CalCedar, recently reissued and renamed the product as the Palomino Blackwing.
The world’s greatest pencil is back. According to John F Gamber, editor of the Pencil Revolution blog, the new Blackwing is ‘one of the darkest and smoothest pencils I ever used. The graphite core is unreal.’
Amateurs take a professional interest in artistic tools and techniques today, and if you doubt that, try asking a professional. British artist Stephen Walter pencil-draws huge, intricate city maps overlaid with microscopically detailed handlettering of street names, cartographic symbols and his own subjective, psychogeographic impressions.
His work featured in the British Library’s recent Magnificent Maps exhibition, while his studio is festooned with the detritus of creative practice: his laptop sits aside Moleskines, piles of Post-its and A4 notes cascading off the table, and Sellotaped to walls are the sketches, details, scribbles, sentences, thoughts and ‘workings-out’ that eventually coalesce into his mesmerising, forensically elaborate maps.
Walter is an aficionado of the Staedtler Mars Lumograph in gradiations from H9 down to 2Bm. His studio houses hundreds of them, sharpened, blunted, chewed, snapped, unused or worked down to a stub.
The appeal of pencil, he says, ‘is the friction and rawness of it. You’ve got a chunk of base material from the inside of a mountain and the trail it leaves on paper – I like that directness.’
Notebookers and stationery fetishists stand firmly on one side of a modern social divide, representing intimacy and privacy; on the other side is the compulsive self-exposure of social networking, commenting and blogging. More reflective and considered than the digital diarrhoea of status updates, comments and tweets, less coldly perfunctory than emails and texts pecked out on an iPhone, iPad or BlackBerry, the vogue for notemaking returns writing to an act of expression instead of communication.
One question remains: what to write on those intimidatingly blank pages? Well, it’s up to you.
Websites even a stationery fiend will love:
www.thepaperie.co.uk
www.bureaudirect.co.uk
www.jottrr.com
www.moleskine.com
www.stephenwalter.co.uk
www.rsvp-berlin.de
www.fieldnotesbrand.com
www.scoutbooks.com
www.nha-handwriting.org.uk
www.pencilrevolution.com