Spencerian script

Spencerian script is an American cursive script that was used in the 1800s before typewriters. There’s some pretty cool business letters written in it.

I looked at the book “Spencerian Key to Practical Penmanship” at special collections on the 6th floor of the San Francisco Public Library. I need to upload my pictures from then.

I recommend looking at the New Spencerian Compendium (New Spencerian Compendium at the Internet Archive).

Pens and nibs

See also pens.

Speedball #22B nib
May be a good balance of stiffness and flexibility. Seems like what you might use if you wrote in Spencercian as a typical script.
Speedball #101 nib
More flexible than the #22B. Might be more for calligraphy?

I’m not too familiar with dip pens and nibs yet, but I went to Blick Art (on Van Ness in SF) on 2024-10-12 and got a pen holder and nib. (I also went back later on 2024-11-14.)

I got a pair of Speedball #22B nibs, as they say on the back that they’re specifically great for Copperplate and Spencerian scripts. They’re made in the USA and cost $3.83 for the pair of them. I’m pleasantly surprised that there are still goods on the market for Spencerian today, and not just online but in physical nearby retailers!

I then also got a Speedball pen holder for $2.50, which is made in China.

On 2024-11-14 I got Speedball #101 nibs. They seem more flexible, which you may want if you’re going for variation in line widths. A pair cost me $4.16, after sales tax.

For ink, I’m trying out Higgins Black India, which is a pigment-based drawing ink. Blick’s signs suggest pigment-based inks for calligraphy. It seems to work all right, but one thing about it being waterproof is that it may be hard to clean the nib. Oh, and it’s important that you clean the nib since otherwise you start to get too much ink on it, then you get even more blobs of ink.

I probably should have gotten a different ink because this well has an eye-dropper, so I don’t know where to put it as I’m using the pen.

I’ve also tried water-based inks, which seem easier to clean but you’ll have to dip more frequently.

Nib care: Make sure you clean your nibs and dry them after use! They can get rusty, and if you dip your pen holder in hot water to clean off ink, there may be excess water in the grooves of the holder. Perhaps taking the nib out of the holder and drying it will lead to a longer nib lifespan.

Dimensions

These are the dimensions for how to horizontally rule a paper, as described in The New Spencerian Compendium, Figure 47 (page 35).

Standard size
⅑ inch
Corresponding size
⅒ inch
Ledger Headings
⅛ inch

You’ll use 6 horizontal rules for each line of text. A lowercase letter “o” fits between the third and fourth rules, and so it would be ⅑ inch tall. A lowercase “l” goes from the first to fourth rules, and thus would be 3/9ths of an inch tall.

The distance between the straight lines of the lowercase letter “u” is called the u-space, and is used to measure width. This width also seems to be the distance between the horizontal rules. So in standard size, the lines between a “u” are ⅑ inch wide, and the “u” is ⅑ inch tall.

Slant

The main slant of Spencerian is 52°.

In SVG, to get this slant you can use the transformation skewX(-38) (which skews -38° off the vertical). The number “38” here comes from the fact that 38 + 52 = 90 .

Where does 52° come from?

I didn’t see it mentioned where 52° comes from. But one thing I noticed when refining my front position is that when you align the main slant so it’s nearly vertical with you, the opposite corners of an 8.5" × 11" paper are nearly vertical. In fact, the angle of these opposite corners is tan¯¹(11/8.5) ≈ 52.31°.

I’m not sure about how many dots are on a line per u-space, it might around 5 dots. The u-line is 8pt. Might set stroke-width: 0.5pt, stroke-dasharray:0.5pt,1.5pt, stroke-dashoffset:0.25pt.

Misc