Rejoining after several years. Little time for writing posts. My parents met at the Gregg Publishing Co., where Mom (Astrid Gescheidt/ Astrid Ramsey) wrote original shorthand for The Gregg Writer, etc., and also illustrated several of the literary shorthand books.
I had a used book store for years. If you are looking to buy old books, try searching at AddAll.com http://used.addall.com/ Be cautious about listers using auto repricers, and undetailed condition grades. You can sort on price ascending.
Never heard of cooking the ink. Mom used regular India Ink.
A somewhat obscure Gregg book was called 5,000 Words. Intended for transcribing; emphasis on spelling and word division.
A quite scarce book, which I think was not published by Gregg’s, but quite interesting, was called Artyping. It was based on the old standard typewriter spacing, which would not work with a computer. You could use typewriter characters, sometimes overtyped, to make all sorts of images.
Cheers,
My note today is not about shorthand, but about Artyping. I've seen several typewriter pictures of the kind you mention, and done one or two myself. In the very early days of the Internet, when the IBM PC was the going thing, people would often use a small typewriter picture under their names as a kind of personal logo. If you want to do the same sort of thing on a modern computer, there are monospaced fonts you can use. Courier is one such font.
Nice to see you back, Donald!
Your mother illustrated six of the nine green Anniversary novels from 1931-1933:
A Christmas Carol in Prose 1931
Hamlet 1931
Creeds of Great Business Men 1932
Legend of Sleepy Hollow 1932
Diamond Necklace 1933
Letters from a Self-made Merchant to his Son 1933
Her name and the current year were written in the corner of each illustration. (This was very helpful in dating some of those books, as they have no copyright dates.)
Did she illustrate any other shorthand textbooks or novels?
Hi Donald
That is fascinating! What a legacy!
I wish shorthand hadn’t faded away!