BS: cross-written letters

Subject: cross-written letters
From: keberoxu
Date: 26 Sep 16 - 04:26 PM

My first look at a cross-written letters was a photograph plate in a biography of the author George MacDonald. Before this, I did not know that cross-writing existed, nor had ever seen a piece of writing or a letter that was cross-written. From this it can be inferred that I had never paid a lot of attention to Jane Austen who often cross-wrote her many letters in order to save on postage.

Austen's cross-writing is at ninety degrees, and I find it really a strain on the eyes to puzzle it out. The family of MacDonalds, a number of whose letters are quoted, and some photographed, in Rolland Hain's "Victorian Mythmaker" biography, preferred forty-five degrees to ninety degrees, judging from the photos. It is easier to read the forty-five degree cross-writing, there is something about the diagonal slant that is more quickly understood by the eye.

What is your acquaintance / experience with cross-written documents?

Subject: RE: BS: cross-written letters
From: Jack Campin
Date: 26 Sep 16 - 05:08 PM

My wife has a cross-written diary written by an ancestor who was a cook with the British Army in Afghanistan in the late 19th century. Some day I will attempt to decipher it.

Subject: RE: BS: cross-written letters
From: Mr Red
Date: 27 Sep 16 - 06:28 AM

I've written a few angry letters.

Subject: RE: BS: cross-written letters
From: Senoufou
Date: 27 Sep 16 - 09:00 AM

Mr Red, get your coat at once!

Subject: RE: BS: cross-written letters
From: Mr Red
Date: 27 Sep 16 - 02:35 PM

will an acrostic T-Shirt do?

Subject: RE: BS: cross-written letters
From: Senoufou
Date: 27 Sep 16 - 03:24 PM

Hahaha!

Subject: RE: BS: cross-written letters
From: mkebenn
Date: 28 Sep 16 - 08:33 AM

Dense dull tool here. What is cross writing? Mike

Subject: RE: BS: cross-written letters
From: Senoufou
Date: 28 Sep 16 - 09:24 AM

Mike, over 150 years ago, people used to try and save paper and postage (charged by the sheet) so they wrote across the page, then turned the paper 90 degrees and wrote across the written lines. It's quite hard to decipher, especially when written with a pen nib dipped in ink.

Subject: RE: BS: cross-written letters
From: keberoxu
Date: 28 Sep 16 - 05:21 PM

Mike, Jane Austen is a famous example. Her personal letters, preserved in archives, are sometimes cross-written.

Subject: RE: BS: cross-written letters
From: Charmion
Date: 28 Sep 16 - 06:57 PM

When I worked in the Manuscript Division of the Public Archives of Canada (as it then was), the cross-written letter was the bane of my existence. People who needed to save the cost of posting an extra sheet of writing paper tended also to use cheap, gall-based ink and a nasty steel-nibbed pen, and the net result was illegible after a century in storage. Even when fresh, such missives could be puzzled out only by the eye of love.

The practice died out rapidly as postage costs dropped with the expansion of railways and the introduction of steam-powered mail ships.

Subject: RE: BS: cross-written letters
From: ketchdana
Date: 29 Sep 16 - 03:30 AM

Sometimes it helps if you sight along the upright parts of the letters, to bring out the vertical lines.
Pretend you are a small plane coming in low, and you align yourself to land on those runways.
This will darken the main vertical strokes and make the cross strokes, including most of the cross lines, that much thinner so they tend to disappear. To read the cross lines, rotate by 90 degrees.

("vertical" here is relative. My handwriting can come close to a 45 degree slant.)

(Vertical astigmatism might help, too.)

Subject: RE: BS: cross-written letters
From: mkebenn
Date: 29 Sep 16 - 04:46 PM

Thanks, folks. I can't imagine. People have trouble reading my script without any help. Mike

Subject: RE: BS: cross-written letters
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 30 Sep 16 - 10:37 AM

Cross-written letters Google image search.

We have a number of them in our Special Collections at the university where I work, and grad students and staff with an eye for such things have had the task of transcribing them. I will note that it works best when you use a very sharp pen and the writing style is rather spindly elongated cursive.