Writers Only Die Twice

 

The poet Horace bragged that he built “a monument more lasting than bronze.” He was speaking of his writing, of course. But not all of his poems have survived two thousand years to reach us. Granted, he is luckier than most ancients in this respect, but maybe he should have considered etching his poems on sheets of literal bronze instead of papyrus. Or maybe he should have just found a better literary executor.

Thanks to the profusion of Halloween decorations in town, and the wraithlike fog that awaits me every morning when I let the dog out, death is much on my mind.

Earlier this year, I heard a podcast in which a young man confessed to being morbidly fascinated with death. Michael La Ronn told his interviewer that his grandfather had left his estate so tidily wrapped up that Michael was inspired to do the same.

But that is tricky, you see, because Mr. La Ronn is a writer—science fiction and fantasy under his real name, and nonfiction for writers under the name M.L. Ronn—which these days means that his copyrights will live seventy years beyond his death.

It’s easy to settle an estate that consists of personal property, real estate, family heirlooms, cash, vehicles, and investments. It is far more complicated to properly bequeath and entrust your literary output to your heirs. Frankly, it is burden that will last decades.

Just what was he supposed to do?

As I listened to this, I thought: Tell me about it, brother!

Seventy years is a long time. Just for starters, let’s say little writer you keels over today, immediately after reading this post. Your very first copyright will enter public domain in the year 2094. That’s so far in the future that your siblings or current literary agent, if you have one, will have also ceased to exist.

No problem, say you. That means my copyrights must necessarily be entrusted to someone far younger than my contemporaries. Great, let’s go with that for a second. Let’s say you and your spouse had kids at age 30, the same year you started writing. If you die at 80 years old, your 50-year-old child will be 120 years old when your very first copyright enters the public domain.

Such a revelator, math! Already it’s easy to see that by making the very selfish decision to drop dead, you must now entrust your precious copyrights to a succession of humans, who now include your children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. In a sense, by trusting family, you are placing bets that they will not a) die young, or b) turn out to be a gaggle of glue-sniffing squish-heads. Furthermore, you are trusting that this lineage will have the publishing acumen when the time comes to see that your work a) stays in print, and b) is exploited properly. (In these cases, the verb exploited is a good thing.)

What if your progeny don’t care about writing—yours or anyone’s? Who can blame them? You know how some writers say that they “just want to write”? What if your successors just want to sell tires, clean teeth, do taxes, or a million other things sane people do for a living? Why should they be saddled with intellectual property that has no meaning for them?

I have now presided over or witnessed the disposition of five family estates. What sticks in my mind is how much pressure executors get—from the state, from lawyers, from siblings—to wrap this thing up already. Everyone wants the decedent’s possessions sold, donated, dumped, disappeared, and converted to cash. No one likes paying for storage facilities longer than they have to. Everyone has jobs and families to get back to.

The thought that some loved one or dear friend will have the time or energy to page through every single hard-copy or digital document to catalog your writing stretches the meaning of love—but that is exactly what a devoted literary executor must do.

Or—call me crazy—what if you don’t have kids?

The great wit of the Algonquin Round Table, Dorothy Parker, married three times but had no children. A supporter of Civil Rights, she left her copyrights to Martin Luther King, Jr., with the proviso that should he predecease her the copyrights would go to the NAACP. He was assassinated shortly after her death. Open a book by Dorothy Parker today and the NAACP is listed on the copyright page.

That’s one way to do it. You leave your estate to a non-human entity—a corporation or org—that is likely to survive to the public domain stage. We’ve all heard of artists—usually musicians—who sell their catalogs to some entity that will profit from those rights into perpetuity. I’m sure that’s easy if you have an IP catalog that’s worth bajillions.

Some writers leave their copyrights outright to their literary agents, which always struck me as dumb. At least name an heir or charity that the agent, attorney, or literary executor must send royalties to while those people or entities you care about still live/exist, with some provision if/when they don’t.

Saying “my agent will take care of it” often feels to me like a cop-out, the “I-just-can’t-bear-to-think-of-this-crap” default decision. The agent option is nice if you have an agent now. But it’s not as if agents and agencies don’t die too.

Some literary agencies operate “heritage” departments that represent the estates of dead authors. Heck, some agencies manage the estates of dead agencies. For fun, look at this agency’s website page and see how many of their deceased authors you know.

But what if you are a mid-list writer with modest sales, zero agent, and a large output? There are no easy answers, which is not something living writers like to hear. A number of books discuss this dilemma, and offer concrete suggestions.

Michael La Ronn, the young writer I mentioned above, wrote two such books, one for writers, and another for their heirs. M.L. Buchman, who some of you will recognize from the SMFS boards, wrote a great book on estates that recommends authors write a letter to their heirs. In a podcast interview with Jo Penn back in 2017, he said that he was inspired when his daughter confessed that she dreaded him dying and leaving her with his books because she had no idea what he did and what she was supposed to do with them.

Seth Davis is the stepson and literary executor of the great short story writer Avram Davidson, who died in 1993 at age 70. When he had time during the Covid pandemic, Mr. Davis, who is an attorney, crept up to a family attic and began paging through mountains of Davidson’s published and unpublished manuscripts. He realized that he was sitting on a treasure trove of material. And if it was ever going to see the light of day—and live anew—that he would have to do the heavy lifting.

Slowly, he re-released Avram’s work in new editions as ebooks, paperbacks, and audiobooks. (He indie-published the new editions.) Next, he began sharing the stories via a delightful podcast, The Avram Davidson Universe. He did so on the hope that someone beyond Avram’s fans would notice and want to produce one or all of the stories as a movie or TV show.

I asked Mr. Davis if he could offer any advice to us. Here’s what he said:

“My first piece of advice to authors is: Get incredibly organized. Imagine having a beautiful spreadsheet with all your stories, when they were copyrighted, when they expire, and what’s under contract. In my own experience, I had to turn a very disorganized estate into an organized one, and trust me, doing it in advance is a lifesaver. Have all the agreements in one place.  Spend time going over it with your heirs.

 

“For heirs, it’s similar: If you know you’re going to be the one inheriting this literary legacy, start organizing things while the author is still around. And if you’re not sure, then just enjoy the process, keep their legacy alive, and don’t put too much pressure on yourself. And of course, reach out to others in similar situations for advice. Don’t throw anything away for a few years and take your time going through the estate.  You can’t rush it.  A little bit at a time.”

Sensible advice. See that part where he says “keep their legacy alive”? The four things he did—ebooks, paperbacks, audiobooks, the podcast—are time-consuming endeavors even for those who are comfortable with traditional or self-publishing. To a non-publishing civilian who has no interest in publishing, audio production, or podcasting, they might well seem impossible.

If such an heir receives an email out of the blue from an editor assembling a future anthology, offering a token payment and a straight-forward, reasonable contract, how will they react? Will they say, “Sure, let’s get this story out in the world again!” Or will they demand a payment so exorbitant that it ensures no one will ever see your work again?

I heard of such things when I worked with editors at Scholastic. The literary classroom magazines were always approaching writer estates for reprint rights, specifically for plays, short stories, and poems suitable for kids. They often ran into heirs who had no idea what they were asking for. These descendants dreaded hiring a lawyer to review the reprint contract, and so they declined the offer or quoted absurd payments that guaranteed that they would never hear from that particular editor ever again. Equally sad were the times those editors could not locate an heir, period.

In that beautiful spreadsheet Mr. Davis suggested, it would help if you also listed…

• blurbs that the story or book might have received
• relevant reviews
• rights that were licensed in your lifetime
• publishing houses you worked with
• names of editors you worked with
• scans of royalty statements
• scans of copyright registration certificates
• scans of contracts (foreign and domestic)
• accounts (logins/passwords) at online retailers/distributors used to self-pub your books and stories
• the bank account numbers where those royalties are wired or direct-deposited

You are creating, in other words, a story bible of the lives of each of your works, so someone who knows little about your catalog can give it the best chance of success in your afterlife. If you this correctly, your spreadsheet and its attendant pages have now grown into a chubby file of digital data. A hard-copy backup with original docs and copies of the original magazines, anthologies, or books would be nice too.

When you get the facts assembled, do what Mr. Buchman suggests and draft that letter.

Considering what has transpired recently in the world of literary legacies, I don’t think it’s crazy to tell your heirs…

• How do you feel about them publishing work of yours that was not published in your lifetime, whether intentionally or not?
• How do you feel about extending the life of your series characters after your death?
• Would you consent to them hiring ghostwriters to write in your world(s)?
• Would you consent to them editing your work to remove material that future enlightened citizens of our fair republic, ha, might find objectionable?
• How do you feel about them publishing your letters, journals, diaries? (Yeah, I know most of us reading this are not Joan Didion, William Faulkner, or Harper Lee, but it doesn’t hurt to get your directives in writing.)
• Can you offer any advice for how welcoming they should be to anthology requests?
• What advice can you offer if a small press wants to reissue all or some of your books?
• What are your thoughts on translations? Are there countries you would prefer not be published in?
• Do you object to your as-yet-unborn, great-great-teenaged nephew writing books in your series using the AI chip embedded in his brain that all the cool kids, circa 2095, use to help them think?

Hate AI? Don’t be such a stick in the mud, dirt-napper you! Naturally, when your stories enter the public domain, they will absolutely be hoovered into the maw of AI, if they haven’t already. You have no choice about that. By then, what happens to your words will be beyond the control of your heirs.

But in the meantime, you have seventy lovely years for a shot at the big time. In the 2017 interview I heard, Mr. Buchman reminded us that Lucia Berlin, who was a largely unknown short story writer in her lifetime, hit the New York Times Bestseller List twice, both times more than a decade after her death. And Mr. Buchman noted that if you ever read the novels that followed the creepy hit, Flowers in the Attic, you probably did so after V.C. Andrews quit the stage. The ghostwriter brought in to finish her last two novels has gone on to write many more V.C. books than V.C. herself ever wrote.

I am inspired personally by the tale of the sickly, acid-dropping mid-list writer whose work was mostly out of print toward the end of his life. When he still walked among the living, a movie studio acquired the rights to one of his novellas. He got to see the first few rounds of scripts—and hated them. Then the production invited him to view scenes they had shot using a revised script. He bitched all the way to the studio in the limo they sent for him. And bitched some more when they showed him around the prop shop.

Then the footage started rolling, and he sank in his seat. What he saw left the writer awestruck. He asked them to run the footage again.  It’s like they got inside my head, he declared later. In 1982, a few months before the movie release, he suffered two strokes and died at age 53.

The movie was Blade Runner, and at least a dozen of Philip K. Dick’s stories have since been filmed, thanks to the careful stewardship of his three children via a family literary trust. They are far from running out of material. PDK wrote 44 books, and more than 120 stories. 

In short, dying is a thing that happens to people, some of whom are writers. It’s sad, sure, but not as sad as leaving an orphaned estate.

If you are undead, feel free to ignore the foregoing. Happy Halloween.

* * *

The books I mentioned, alphabetical by author. The Buchman and Ronn books are small enough to tuck into your estate documents as you plan.

Estate Planning for Authors: Your Final Letter (and why you need to write it now), by M.L. Buchman. (My first lawyer—who knew nothing about literary properties—told me she would have to charge me when I suggested she read this 126-page book. Since I am not running a private law school, I found a new lawyer.)

An Author’s Legacy: A Planner to Ensure An Author’s Life Lives On, Long After Death, by Craig Martelle. (Only available as a large-print paperback, this workbook features many pages that can be photocopied and used to compile your literary assets.)

The Author Estate Handbook: How to Organize Your Affairs and Leave a Legacy, by M.L. Ronn.

The Author Heir Handbook: How to Manage an Author Estate, M.L. Ronn. (I would buy multiple copies of this book to share with my heirs.)

My thanks to Matt Buchman and Seth Davis for their kind assistance (and patience) as I researched this post.

See you in three weeks—I hope!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

How About a Book with that Scone?

My accountant told me I was crazy. “This is not a way people make money,” he told me. Likewise, my financial advisor said that if I blithely ignored her advice that my wife and I would probably jeopardize our retirement plans. The lawyer—who represented the other side, not me—said that the investment on offer was probably not a smart move for most people.

Just what was this crazy thing I was about to do that everyone else seemed to think was moronic?

My wife and I were contemplating buying a bookstore. It made sense to us. We were writers, after all. We wrote books. We liked books. What more did we need to know?

We planned to partner with a friend of ours, a business dude, who dreamed of being a writer. (You know the type.) His wife was obsessed with books, and planned to play a hands-on role in the business. Which was good, because we didn’t. If we went ahead with the deal, we would attend a few bookstore schools—yes, there are such things—with our new partners, but we planned to keep writing. And to our partners’ credit, they wanted us to do so, thinking it would good for “our” mutual brand. He was thinking of the well-known authors who are or were part-owners in bookstores. But I don’t think anyone has ever thought of me in the same sentence as author-proprietors such as Anne Patchett or Judy Blume.

Ultimately, though, we never went through it. Mostly because the seller got cold feet, not us. (I dunno—maybe our questions about the store’s current financials sounded too business-y?)

When the deal didn’t go through, my accountant heaved a sigh of relief that I could hear all the way from Staten Island.

And you know what? Nowadays I’m glad that we didn’t take the plunge because there is a lot I know now—about employees, about business, about myself—that I didn’t know then. Interestingly, I became a better analyst of the bookstore business after the fact.

We have since moved to a small city that has eight brick-and-mortar stores, half selling used/rare books. And there are two online bookstores based in town that also sell used and rare books.

Whenever we are in a new city, I like to visit indie stores. Almost without thinking, I find myself ticking off a silent checklist that I have internalized. Is the store downtown in the middle of the action? Do they have good foot traffic? Are their patrons likely to be locals or tourists? Is parking great—or a challenge? Do they have a decent event space, or would they need to partner with a school, university, church, or some other obliging venue? If there’s ever another pandemic, are they well-positioned for contactless pickups?

The biggest question is unknowable unless I am willing to be impertinent: How much is your rent? Another biggie is typically more visible: what’s your overall business model beyond selling books to people who just happen to walk in off the street?

The most obvious gravy train are events with visiting authors on book tours. The more of these you can drum up in the course of a week or month, the more transactions you are likely to make. When people enter the store to hear an author speak, they are likely to buy something. Even if they skip the book on offer, they will buy a picture book or a finger puppet for a grandchild...or just a cup of coffee.

I used to think all bookstores did tons of events—until I met a woman who ran a teensy hospital bookstore. In her case, her “sideline” business model was selling fresh flowers and magazines to people visiting patients. See? To stay viable, stores often offer a little something extra besides the books.

Recently, when an author friend told me that he and his wife were partnering with their business dude in their cute city in the American South, I naturally started asking questions about their business model.

There are six or so models that I have seen over the years:

The For-Profit Bookstore That Sells New Books, Holds Regular Events, and Offers a Food & Drink Venue.
I worked in New York City in the 1990s when Barnes & Noble rolled out stores that featured overstuffed club chairs and Starbucks coffee. The press ate it up for years! Now even the indie bookstores are doing coffee, with little fanfare. Although, these days, if you aren’t selling coffee and scones that are better than Starbucks I don’t know why a customer would bother. Denise and I did a book event at an adorable bookstore in Alabama one year that offered a full bakery by day, and a bar with music venue by night. (In two separate rooms!)

The For-Profit Bookstore With the Unexpected Extra Wacky Thing. I’m thinking of the tiny bookstore in Charleston that nails its nut doing ghost and history walking tours. In fact, their first iteration of the bookstore was a small space in which walking tour patrons gathered to wait for their tours to start. Naturally, while waiting, they shopped.

The For-Profit Pop-Up. I have met young authors who double as booksellers, peddling a variety of brand-new books by themselves and their author friends from rolling carts that they set up at farmer’s markets and breweries. Overhead is minimal. I have known bookstores to set up satellite shops in different cities during summers, or right after the holidays when Main Street shops go vacant and landlords are willing to strike a decent three-month deal on rent. Just recently, I heard of a used bookstore setting up racks of highly curated books inside a cocktail bar. All the books are $8, and all are chosen to “pair” with cleverly named drinks on the bar’s menu. I guess a patron who chooses a beverage called the LeGuin & Tonic just might buy a hardcover copy of Ursula’s books.

The For-Profit Upscale Tippling Used Bookstore. There’s one of these in our town. They sell high-end bubbly, wine, cocktails, coffee, baked goods, and snacks in an extensive maze of shelves stocked with tons of used books, many of them in locked cases. It is as cute as all get-out, folks! Old books have tendency to look...picturesque, shall was say, especially when paired with attractive lamps and artwork. So picturesque, in fact, that the bane of the owners’ existence are Instagramming nabobs who clutter the aisles shooting footage for their social media feeds but who never buy a thing! The copious booze and sidewalk cafe tables offset the cost of rent, but once, I happened to walk in on a particularly happy day when alcohol took a back seat to print. “We just sold a signed, first edition of Watership Down!” the owner told me. The book’s $750 price-tag was a reminder that sometimes a single sale can bring in more revenue than a $50 bottle of champagne.

The Nonprofit With Side Hustles. I specified “for-profit” stores above because I occasionally encounter nonprofit bookstores. They ensure profitability by soliciting annual donations from their community. If patrons are willing to support local theaters, museums, symphonies, and news organizations, why not local bookstores? As one owner pointed out, bookstores may often be the only public venues in a community to host authors. If you are not lucky enough to live near a local university, or in a municipality with a robust library system or a “town hall” speaker’s program, your local bookstore fulfills that function. One of the nonprofits I encountered used the strength of their endowment to lock in a decent lease in a Main Street building and run a small indie publishing house in the back. They augmented their bottom line by subletting their extra space to a bakery. (This model is different from the Alabama store I mentioned above, which operates their own bakery and bar.)

The Nonprofit Sugar Daddy. I’m being facetious, but this model occurred to me when my author friend told me that a wealthy patron was bankrolling his bookstore. Said Daddy, who hails from a family with money to burn, bought an entire Main Street building with the intention of setting up a nonprofit bookstore, event space, and co-working space for the community. For every million their family foundation spends, they can deduct $100K off their income. This does not sound like a deal to me, but what the hell do I know? In another model I was privy to, a family foundation that owned a lot of real estate struck an unbeatable rental arrangement with the local bookstore. Instead of charging market rate for the store’s downtown space, they asked for a percentage of the store’s monthly revenue. It fluctuated monthly, but they didn’t care. They were writing the whole thing off as a deduction. In the Sugar Daddy model, you have to hope that Daddy never changes his mind, or drops dead and his greedy scions quash the good times.

I love bookstores, as I’m sure many of you do. But increasingly, we (Americans) live in a nation where citizens aspire to read more but just don’t. (Link and link.) It saddens me when the existence of bookstores must be associated with alcohol, coffee, baked goods, or else rely on the kindness of deep-pocketed strangers for survival. Then again, I laugh when I think of the longtime merchant who chided me when I called her place of business a bookstore. Like I made it seem cheap and tawdry.

“It’s not,” she said. “It’s a community center!” I was leaving town, and did not have time to ask her accountant if he agreed with her assessment.

* * * 

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

All I Know About Writing Comes From Something Somebody (maybe) Said

September 1 is the new January 1. If you lose track of time, Labor Day is the holiday that shakes you out of your reverie and reminds you that all those lovely resolutions you made last December now have only four months to come to fruition.

I’ve had a pretty decent writing year but I am forced to admit that client work and the garden took precedence from May to August. I have far more jars of pickles and tomatoes, far more frozen blueberries, figs, and spinach than short stories.

Would that my story crop matched the garden crop!

To inspire myself, this week I reviewed some quotes I’ve collected over the years from other writers and creative types. Some of these quotes have lived on my hard drive for more than thirty years. I’ve done little with them, and now—as a wiser and (ahem) older writer, I understand why. Most of them are full of it.

Let’s take the topic of process, for example. Here’s the late David Lynch offering advice on how to write a movie script. I saw him discuss this ages ago in a written interview. Decades later, he discussed it again in a video that went viral.

Here’s his advice:

“You get yourself a pack of 3x5 cards and you write a scene on each card and when you have 70 scenes you have a feature film. So on each card, you write the heading of the scene and then the next card, the second scene, the third scene, so you have 70 cards each with the name of the scene. Then you flesh out each of the cards and walk away you’ve got a script.”

I ask you: Is this useful advice? Do screenwriters, producers, and show runners today use index cards while blocking a script? Sure! Their work is collaborative and a cork-board of cards helps them communicate their vision to others, just as storyboards do.

Do fiction and nonfiction writers use the same technique? Yes! Not all, but I know people who do. One friend texted me a photo of his bulletin board when, disbelieving, I asked for proof.

I suppose you could do such thing, if you want to go to the expense. The Scrivener software I use even has a “cork-board” mode that allows writers to create digital index cards and move them around to build their story. But it is far from the only way to write a story, script, or whatever. I still rely on a scrap of paper, especially when outlining shorts. When a decent idea hits, I use whatever’s handy to capture it.

I am sure that a million film students watched this clip and bought index cards. A moment’s thought tells you that there is nothing intrinsically valuable about an index card. It’s a freaking blank slate. What matters is what you put on it.

I laugh every time I think of Lynch and his cards. He was possibly the most whacked-out moviemaker of his age. Some of his movies track as if they were indeed filmed not from a finished script but a stack of index cards, albeit dropped on the way to the set, hastily picked up, and sloppily reshuffled. What Lynch might have written on his cards would be vastly different from what you would scrawl on your cards.

Also, Lynch forgot to mention in that clip that his index cards—since they originated in his imagination—were made of equal parts straitjacket fabric, demon’s breath, chocolate shakes, and tuna melt sandwiches. Oh—and you could only buy them at a stationery store that has now, with his death, sadly closed up shop.

Back in the 1980s, I was a fan of the BBC series, The Singing Detective, written by Dennis Potter. He also wrote the BBC series Pennies From Heaven. You don’t need to have watched those productions or to have read any Dennis Potter to know how much he influenced British and American TV. To put it mildly, TV shows critics fawned over and called “groundbreaking”—such as The Sopranos, in which the real world blends seamlessly with the dark fantasy lives of its characters—would not have been possible if Potter had not unleashed his singular vision on the world. People say the same thing of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks—a series I loved—but to be fair Peaks aired three years after The Singing Detective, and 12 after Pennies.

In 1988, Potter did an interview in which he said in a roundabout way that he routinely explores the same themes—and that that was a good thing:

“I’m not afraid to keep going down that same road, you know. The more a writer writes and the more self-confident he becomes, the more he digs in the same little patch. To me, one of the definitions of an amateur writer is that he can appear to be versatile. He will write A and then he will write B before he’s finished A. Well, forgive me, but I think a real writer will be going A, A, A, and will never actually get to B, never wants to get to B.”

Intriguing quote. We know it’s true for him because he said it. But is it empirically true? (Is anything in this profession?) Do his words feel true to you? Do you think that if you are versatile that you are still an amateur?

The other night, at a book event, I heard a young writer quote Bob Dylan saying that he basically has written the same five songs over and over.

I cannot confirm that Dylan ever said this, but I think artists of all types do embrace core themes and explore them in their work repeatedly. It’s the nature of the artistic mind. You work to exorcise or relive experiences, feelings, memories. According to Rabbi Googlevitch, Picasso had no fewer than six art periods in his lifetime. Dali, says the good rebbe, had four.

Lawrence Block says in one of his nonfiction books for writers that outlines are hand-holding devices to give writers the confidence to write just this little piece. As more words hit the page, you deviate from the original plan or you revise the outline. I’m paraphrasing him, but that advice jibes with a famous line by E.L. Doctorow that gets quoted by other writers constantly:

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Heaven help me, I cannot find the source for this quote. Let me observe that this is just enough advice to get a young writer in trouble, especially if they are attempting to write a book for the first time. The quote sounds reasonable. I hear those words, and the subtext assures me that novel-writing is a straightforward, linear process. The truth is, on some projects it doesn’t freaking matter if my headlights are on. I am likely to drive myself into a ravine. Or, somewhere between Chapter 13, Chapter X-P, and Chapter 67 Sirius-Blue, the car has turned into Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, flown into a tree or submerged itself to take in a coral reef in the Dead Sea. Or the road has turned into molasses, and I am about to be baked into a loaf of Anadama bread, car and all.

When writers or artists say these things, they know that the spotlight or camera is on them. What they are about to say is being recorded for posterity. They want to look wise, even if that wisdom differs greatly from the messy truth of their process. So you should probably stop searching for truth in other people’s quotes—Are you listening, D’Agnese?—and enjoy them for what they tell you about the speaker.

When I was in college, I must have read this New York Times interview with E.L. Doctorow in which he argues that some of us are just innately blessed with the ability to glean truth from real life, regardless of our own backgrounds. (I was on a Doctorow kick at the time.)

“Henry James has a parable about what writing is. He posits a situation where a young woman who has led a sheltered life walks past an army barracks, and she hears a fragment of soldiers’ conversation coming through a window. And she can, if she’s a novelist, then go home and write a true novel about life in the army. You see the idea? The immense, penetrative power of the imagination and the intuition.”

Oh yes, young Joe thought. How profound. How deep! I don’t really have to research something before I write it. I can just glean inspiration from open windows!

At the time, I mentioned this line to a journalism professor of mine who had served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. In a heartbeat, he quipped, “Well, she might be able to, Joe, but I don’t want to read it.” (Once again, I have no idea where this Henry James parable originated. Anyone know?)

That professor loved mystery fiction. Reread parts of the Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe canons each year the way other people rewatch favorite Christmas movies. When Robert B. Parker made an appearance at the campus bookstore, he insisted a group of us students stop by and buy a few paperbacks. It’s the only time I had ever met Parker.

Another of the writers that prof urged me to read was James Lee Burke, whose books I later inhaled. Last year, Burke, then 87 years old, was interviewed on a podcast by North Carolina reporter Tommy Tomlinson. In that episode, Burke said that he had no plans to retire and no plans to wrap the Dave Robicheaux franchise anytime soon.

I know Tomlinson slightly, and follow his Substack. He and his wife devour mystery novels and TV mystery series. In a column written a few weeks after that podcast, Tomlinson said he’d been haunted by something Burke said. On the strength of this graf, I looked up the podcast and listened to the whole thing. These are Burke’s words:

“This is what I believe, and it’s metaphysical … the only activity that we do in the same way that God does is creation. That’s it. It’s like a baptismal font. Once you do that, you step into infinity.”

It’s the kind of quote that makes me want to start believing in writer quotes again. To that end, I wish you all a lustrous, productive fall, wherever you are and wherever the waters take you.

* * *

Thanks to Patricia Furnish for Rabbi Googlevitch.

See you in three weeks!

Joe
josephdagnese.com

The Slobbering Detective

New Years Eve sniffing dog.

A charming subset of cozy mysteries feature pets with magical powers. Truth is, dogs and cats don’t need an ounce of magic to do what they do. They are descended from a long line of predators whose only job was to track, kill, and eat prey. To perform that job on a daily basis, they were granted skills by nature that allowed them to carry out that task unerringly.

They needed to see in the dark. They needed to spot movement. They needed to hear over long distances. They needed a strong sense of smell. They needed speed and agility to reach that prey. And fangs and claws sharp enough to get the job done. Wolves hunt in packs. Cats were solitary hunters, which made sense since their prey was often too small to share.

By comparison, our ancestors evolved standing in trees, reaching for fruits and leaves. They’d grab something, and if the light was good they could determine if it was good to eat. To do that one innocuous task, those primates needed the following: to be able to stand upright; thumbs; soft, tactile fingertips to judge their meal’s tenderness; eyes that could judge color and ripeness at close quarters. In time, those nimble fingers were handy to make tools, and the focal length of those eyes helped them assess the facial expressions of loved ones and enemies.

If you’ve ever tossed a treat to your dog, you have had ample opportunity to assess the differences in our two species. When the dried liver hits the kitchen floor, the dog sniffs around for it until she locates and snarfs it. The whole time this is happening, you stand on the sidelines, rolling your eyes.

“It’s right in front of your face!” you say.

It is, but dogs don’t see well up close.

Beholding this, we humans feel smug.

Great Dane / Poodle mix.

Bred to retrieve, um, bears in bodies of water while looking poofy?

Yet when the sun goes down, our ability to see color—or anything, for that matter—declines. We’re useless and must retreat to a campfire or a well-lit room. If we didn’t do this 60,000 years ago, we would be just a delicious hunk of protoplasm wandering aimlessly in the dark.

At night, the dog’s vision doesn’t change much from its daytime vision. The common rap on them is that they’re color blind, but that’s not strictly true. The ability to see color varies breed to breed. They can see some colors; they just don’t need color to survive. Their ancestors hunted primarily at dawn and dusk. (They were—SAT word alert!—crepuscular.)

Bred to point birds.

Now: Bacon sniffing dog.

Dogs hear things up to four times farther away than human ears can. Their peripheral vision is optimized for long-distance movement, and they see parts of the light spectrum that we cannot bother with.

Every sense they have is exceedingly useful in low-light conditions. They spy something moving, they smell something alien or tasty, they hear footfalls—and they’re off. Thank goodness for backyard fences.

Until very recently, dogs thought you and I had bad taste in nighttime entertainment. When humans watched movies on analog TV sets, all those little frames of film moved so fast that our eyes—which, mind you, move at the speed of low-hanging fruit—perceived them as moving images. Dogs didn’t see that. On cathode ray tube TVs, dogs saw one image that never moved. Occasionally, the picture flickered annoyingly.

Then digital TVs were invented, and suddenly dogs could actually glimpse what we were gawping at. Modern nature documentaries often evoke a response in dogs, probably because they’re hearing a rich soundtrack aligned with the image of moving animals. Your dog’s favorite thing to watch on TV? Big shock: other dogs.

Former military dog.

Now: Enjoys serene mountain views.

In my previous August-Dog-Days post, I talked about how good their noses are. 

They know when you’re about to walk in the door after a long day at work. Can they tell time? No—they know that your scent has declined in the house for eight hours, and you always walk in when your scent level has reached about 15 percent. Oh—and by long association they can tell the difference between the sound of your car engine and everyone else’s on your block.

They know when it’s bedtime because they can feel and smell the temperature dropping in the walls of your house.

If you walked in on a chef making beef stew, your sad excuse for a nose would perceive the simmering dish as a whole. “Oh,” you might say, “you’re making boeuf bourguignon.” Ever watch the Food Network? Even professional chefs have trouble identifying all the ingredients in a complex dish they have tasted. Their failure rate goes up if you blindfold them.

Rover walks in the kitchen and thinks, “How delightful! I smell (cooked) beef, onions, carrots, celery, red wine, all in fragrant abundance! Oh—and is that a bay leaf? When are we eating?”

In other words, dog noses are precise enough to detect each scent independent of others. They’re not thrown off if one ingredient has been combined with something else.

Which is why they are so useful when issued a gold shield.

Bred to burrow into tunnels and kill badgers.
Now: enjoys traveling in large purses.

It matters not a whit that the perp packed fifty kilos of cocaine in a giant crate of coffee. A police dog smells both scents equally well.

Trainers have tried to obscure the scents of various explosives by dousing them with perfume, swaddling them with dirty socks or—gag—dirty baby diapers. K-9 cops, God bless them, smell right through all that crap.

Drug-sniffing dogs routinely locate waterproof bags of drugs in the gas tanks of vehicles where smugglers cleverly thought they could cache them. Surely, that noxious smell of gas would “throw off” the dogs, the smugglers thought. Yeah, no.

It’s true canines don’t like the smell of citrus fruits or citronella, but that won’t stop them from doing the job they were trained to do.

When asked to ID a suspect in a traditional lineup, humans—using their primate-endowed visual gift for assessing, ahem, fruit and enemies—pick out the perp with a fifty-five percent (or less) accuracy. A dog who has been allowed to sniff around the crime scene can sniff out the suspect who fled from that site with 80 percent accuracy. If they fail, it’s probably for the prosaic reason that, in the aggregate, we humans stink alike.

Bred to hunt varmints underground.

Terra = earth, hence terrier.

Now: A hit at all the coffee bars.

Last time, I mentioned how, in the classic fleeing suspect scenario, bloodhounds work the trail by sticking their noses to the ground while their marvelously floppy ears stir up human dander. Air-scenting breeds do the opposite: they lift their noses to the air to catch what’s passing by.

Those are the breeds used for search-and-rescue work. Cadaver dogs, trained to detect decomposing human flesh, can do their job even when the murderer has weighed down the remains and dumped them in a body of water. When a killer finally confesses to the crime but can’t quite remember exactly where he buried the remains, cadaver dogs point the way. In some cases, cadaver dogs have located remains long entombed, Poe-style, in the cavities of walls.

Besides Dr. Stanley Coren, the psychologist whose books I have consulted to write these two August posts, I have also enjoyed the work of Dr. Alexandra Horowitz, whose dog books routinely hit the bestseller lists. She works at her own dog cognition lab in New York City. In one of her books she observes that researchers know more about lab mice, rats, guinea pigs, and even rabbits than they do about canines, who are the second-most employed species on the planet. This probably has something to do with the complexities and costs of rearing and studying large animals in labs.

That said, besides K-9 patrol dogs and the specialist animals I’ve mentioned, there are protection dogs, seeing-eye dogs, therapy dogs, and emotional support animals. Those are the givens most people would be able to rattle off.

But there are so many others.

Autism service dogs are trained to help autistic individuals, often children, stay safe in their homes and schools, blocking them, say, if they are about to do something that would harm themselves.

Mobility service dogs help disabled folks open kitchen cabinets, pick up dropped items, turn switches on and off in the home, and perform other essential work.

Seizure response dogs have been trained to bark for help, press “lifeline” buttons to summon assistance, or retrieve a phone when their owner experiences a seizure.

Seizure alert dogs, by contrast, have been trained to anticipate when a seizure is about to happen, alerting their owner to take medication.

Conservation protection dogs protect game on wildlife preserves and assist in spotting poachers.

Arson-sniffing dogs have been trained to detect the remains of flammable liquids and other compounds used to torch a property. Even though accelerants have a tendency to evaporate, a dog can smell it for at least 18 days later, which is usually long enough for the damaged site to be stabilized and permit entry and a careful, walk-through inspection.

Natural gas-sniffing dogs are trained to detect gas leaks in pipelines.

Termite-sniffing dogs do a better job of finding infestations than human pest control experts.

Gypsy moth-sniffing dogs root out nests of these pests that could potentially decimate nursery plant stock or forests.

Beehive-sniffing dogs root out the weird diseases and pests that can infect and destroy bee populations. 

Mold and mildew-sniffing dogs pinpoint the locations of growths that are making people sick in a home or apartment complexes.

In hospital and lab settings, dogs have detected prostate cancer from urine samples and tuberculosis from slides containing human saliva.

No doubt they could do so much more, but using these marvelous creatures to perform such highly specific work always collides with an unavoidable triple whammy. They’re expensive to train, expensive to buy and keep once trained, and their lives are brutally short. A trained K-9 might well cost an agency $50,000 before its new owners buy it a bowl of kibble. For kicks, I priced out body armor vests for dogs—$1,049 to $1,200 pop. That’s before you spring for the protective doggie eye goggles, protective ear muffs, and rappelling gear. (Well, you have to use something to lower a search-and-rescue dog into a canyon to rescue those foolish hikers who always go missing, don’t you?)

For a while there, I dug deep into the world of mystery writers who feature K-9 cops their books. Some have online stores where you can buy bundles of their books along with dog-themed merch for fans and their animals alike. I have listened to podcasts with these authors, and even enjoyed mysteries where entire scenes were written from the dog’s point of view.

Hands down, dogs are the best people. They enrich our lives and we simply don’t deserve them. And that is why I believe the smartest thing a writer of crime fiction can do is stick a picture of a cat on the cover of their books. Trust me—the dogs in your life will still love you.

* * *

Most of the factoids in this piece came from:

How Dogs Think: What the World Looks Like to Them and Why They Act the Way They Do, by Stanley Coren.

Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know, by Alexandra Horowitz.

See you in three weeks, when we return to everyone’s favorite species—humans!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Our-Time

In the morning I head outside with the dog to sit on the back patio and enjoy the garden before it gets too hot. I almost alway screw around on my phone to check emails. The dog checks the news too, but he doesn’t need a device to do it. He just lifts his nose to the air and sniffs.

He probably knows which dogs on the block are already out in their yards, and which females are in heat. He knows if a black bear invaded our territory in the night. He knows if rabbit marauders have menaced the tomatoes since his last patrol, even if he doesn’t feel compelled to let me in on the secret. He knows if a local possum is returning to her den after a night of munching ticks.

In the words of a beloved dog psychologist, when a dog sniffs anything—the air or another dog’s butt—he is reading the local paper.

In one of his books, that shrink, Stanley Coren, who has for decades written the "Canine Corner" column for Psychology Today, delights in telling us that dogs know all the embarrassing things about our lives: when we have used the bathroom, when we have last made love, and what we have most recently eaten. Oh—you thought your dog was kissing you when she licked your face?

When humans sniff, we are breathing—actually taking air into our noses and into our lungs.
With dogs, breathing is optional. They can choose to route some of the air they’re inhaling to their lungs, and the rest to their snouts. They can move each nostril independently, to better detect the direction a scent is coming from.

Once they know the direction, they can turn their heads and begin their process of evidence collection. Long snouts mean more real estate for sensors. Scent-containing particles are inhaled and travel down long bony plates that are covered with spongy membranes containing olfactory receptors. Molecules stick to those receptors, Prof. Coren says, like Velcro.

When we exhale, everything we’ve just sniffed exits our nostrils and we have to sniff again if we want to know what’s going on stinkwise.

By contrast, dogs can “lock” their noses to keep what they’ve just inhaled inside, while they sniff up some more. In this way, the more particles they collect, the more they can build a mental picture of what they are smelling.

Scientists insist that dogs can smell in 3-D, but that is one of those fatuous human statements that make me laugh. I have also heard, for example, that blue whales have so much brain power than they are probably composing symphonies as they swim the deep. They might well be, but how would we dunces know?

Dog brains are smaller than human brains, but the amount of their gray matter that is devoted to the sense of smell so far outclasses us that we are forced to admit that the dog was designed by nature (and humans) to be a smelling machine, 10,000 times better than us.

Oh, you scoff, but humans are great sniffers too! What about those perfume testers and wine experts? Well, sure, those high-paid “noses” have trained themselves to pay close attention to what they are smelling. They might even be genetically blessed with a better-than-average human nose. But in the end, biology fails them.

You know how you can tell when sugar has been stirred into your eight or twelve-ounce cup of coffee? One sniff is all it takes. Yay you, human!

Dogs can smell that teaspoon of sugar too—even when it is dissolved in a million gallons of water. That is the equivalent two Olympic swimming pools.

But go ahead, wine snobs. Tell me how you can smell notes of chocolate and tobacco in your cab. 

Humans have between 5 and 6 million scent receptors in their noses. Dogs have hundreds of millions, depending on the breed: dachshunds (127 million), fox terriers (147 million), German shepherds (225 million). The king sniffer of the canine kingdom is probably the bloodhound, with 300 million receptors. Is it any wonder they are the preferred breed for tracking criminal suspects over long distances? As bloodhounds run, their long floppy ears twirl like rotors, stirring up human skin cells that have dropped to the forest floor, contributing to their olfactory inventory.

Because of the way humans walk, placing our heels down before the balls of our feet, and because we ooze six milliliters of sweat an hour from the bottoms of our feet, a trained canine can determine the direction the suspect was heading based on the freshness of the scent left behind. Despite what you’ve seen in the movies, the only thing that destroys that scent trail is UV light and time.

But even there, dog time is not human time. In one study, scientists pressed their fingers all over a set of lab slides, then left those slides (along with control sets) exposed to the elements on the roof of their academic facility. After six months, dogs in their study could still tell which rained-upon slides were manhandled by humans, and which were not.

When dogs are working, they use other organs to feed their Schnozzola command centers. You may have become disgusted, for example, to spy your dog licking some sidewalk ooze on your daily walk. They’re actually doing the same thing the human wine expert is doing, trying to get some of that road stink into their mouths, mixing with their saliva, and sliding the resulting mix past the bulb of sensitivity located in their mouths known as the vomeronasal organ. It’s the pipeline from the mouth to the nose to the brain. In most humans, the VNO is vestigial.

In the dog, slobber and wet noses help perform critical work. All that wetness keep molecules and pheromones slip-sliding around the dog’s nose and palate, permitting careful analysis of damning eau de squirrel.

Dogs were the first animals early humans domesticated, long before cows, sheep, goats, horses and chickens. But scientists still argue about the details of our inter-species meet-cute. For a long time, we thought dogs were descended of modern gray wolves; now we know that’s not correct. Dogs probably descended of a now-extinct creature known as the Pleistocene Wolf.

One theory is that wolves followed nomadic humans from place to place, feasting on the remains of animals humans hunted and killed. When humans invented agriculture and planted themselves in one spot for a longer period of time, wolves would have regularly visited still larger human dump sites. At some point, humans adopted some wolves and begun breeding them selectively for traits that mattered to the humans.

It’s a testament to human sentimentality that we bred dogs to have traits not otherwise found in nature. Seriously—wolves do not have facial muscles that allow them to do this:

Mopey, upturned eyebrows.

Seeming to smile.

Approached by early humans, wolves would have either attacked or fled, as most animals do. Then how did these predators come to trust humans enough to live and breed in their camps?

Theories abound. Maybe the humans adopted defenseless wolf puppies. Maybe there was an offshoot clave of Pleistocene wolves that were less aggressive and thus willing to accept humans as their providers. (Even today an isolated Arctic wolf colony on a remote Canadian island appear unafraid of humans because they see us so infrequently.)

In captivity, many species lose attributes that they had in the wild. (This accounts for the drop in the dorsal fins of orcas who perform in aquariums.) When wolves became dogs, their ears became floppy, their tails curled, their faces became cuter, and they became incorrigibly playful for life.

Wolves, by contrast, are stone cold killers. After puppyhood, a wolf is all business. And except for a few chuffs and whines, they are silent as they sight and attack prey. But if you’re an early human, it’s very useful to have your designer wolf sound an alarm when invaders approached. Savvy bipeds bred only the most vocal camp companions.

Alone, humans could only run so fast. It was tough work to chase and kill game with stick, stone, horn, and bone weapons. But if your hunting partners can run fast, sink their teeth into the ungulate or ursine you are chasing and run them to ground, the battle is half won. It helped, too, that these new furry companions heard well, saw in the dark, were willing to accept direction, and would even forgo feasting on the kill until humans had had their fill.

Millennia have passed, and they are still at our sides. The perfect partnership, you might say, between two meat-eating predators. It’s only when you count the number of breeds that you realize how many ways humans have shaped this animal’s body to perform a specific task we needed done.

We’ve got hunting dogs, herding dogs, and working dogs bred to perform beast-of-burden labor when horses were beyond the means of simple folk. The original dogs raised by the St. Bernard Hospice monks learned their skills so well that they could teach the next generation of puppies to perform search-and-rescue work without human intervention and training.

Island-dwelling Norwegians bred a dog to scale treeless slopes and invade the tunnels of puffins to carry back eggs and birds for meat and their valuable down feathers. Lundehunds have six toes to help them do that climbing. The small, foxlike dog is so flexible that it can flip itself over in a tight tunnel and reverse its tracks.

There are nearly four hundred breeds on the planet, maybe more. You look at a Great Dane and a Corgi and a Chihuahua, and they look nothing alike. But under the skin, they are descendants of that same wolf.

And yes, cats do have a strong sense of smell, perhaps as good as some breeds of dogs. In academic studies, cats have proved remarkably good at detecting human cancers. But cats will never be the people pleasers that dogs are, and fleeing suspects have never frozen at the thought of being mauled by a law enforcement feline, unless of course they were Maine Coons.

We must also consider that cats are solitary hunters while dogs and humans are pack animals.

One of my favorite dog books is Dogland, by journalist Tommy Tomlinson, who spent three years attending more than 100 dog shows to understand the canine-human bond. He’s a Southern writer, so I’ve seen him speak more than once at various local book events.

There was a time in history, he says, when homo sapiens were not the dominant hominids. But in time, we outbred, outhunted, and outnumbered Neanderthals. How did that happen? Homo sapiens domesticated dogs. Neanderthals didn’t.

Sure, Mr. Tomlinson says, we made dogs...but they made us back.

Here’s how we know your dog loves you...

* * *

I had hoped to get into some military and law enforcement aspects, but I’ll do it some other time, hopefully before the dog days of summer elapse.

Some resources:

By Stanley Coren:

How to Speak Dog: Mastering the Art of Dog-Human Communication

How Dogs Think: What the World Looks Like to Them and Why They Act the Way They Do

By Alexandra Horowitz:

The Year of the Puppy: How Dogs Become Themselves

Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know

By Kevin Behan:

Your Dog Is Your Mirror: The Emotional Capacity of Our Dogs and Ourselves

By Tommy Tomlinson

Dogland: Passion, Glory, and Lots of Slobber at the Westminster Dog Show

Personal interviews in my neighborhood: 

Dogs: All were very obliging, so long as I rubbed behind the ears on their widdle, widdle heads.

Charley the Great Dane

Eddie the Jack Russell mix

Skyolet the Doodle

Jamie the Mutt

Reyna the Golden Retriever

El Señor the Doberman

Kit the Corgi

Cats: My slinky neighbors declined to comment before press time, although after rousing itself from a nap, one subject hissed a single word—“Liver!”—then plopped back to sleep. I tried.

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

That Fine American Hand

Back in the day, an elementary school teacher chose to chastise us students on the poor quality of our handwriting. Pointing to the alphabet displayed over the blackboard, she said, “Look at those letters! Look how perfect they are! Do you think they were drawn by a machine? They weren’t. A person wrote those.”

Which simultaneously shamed and puzzled youthful Joe. The green-and-white sheets of cardboard were clearly printed by a machine. Beyond that, some part of me must have received her meaning. A human being had shaped those letters, even the weird Q that looked like an overwrought numeral two.

Timothy Matlack, Master Penman
courtesy Wikipedia

Five-plus decades later, I blame her tirade for my lifelong obsession with fountain pens, stationery, calligraphy videos, and a late-life interest in books about how adults can improve their penmanship.

Which leads us inevitably to the summer of 1776.

One of the enduring factoids about the origin of the United States is that we’ve gotten our national birthday wrong. (That is so you, America!)

Citizens here embrace the Fourth of July as a holiday, when in fact July 2^nd was the day of the vote that severed the colonies from the Crown. July 3^rd was spent quibbling over the document Thomas Jefferson had spent 17 days drafting in his boarding house on Seventh and Market streets in Philadelphia. Finally, on July 4^th, Congress accepted, or adopted, the language of the Declaration of Independence.

Congressional printer John Dunlap was authorized to print broadsides for the general public of the (now former) colonies. Only 26 copies of these are known to exist today. In 1989, a man perusing a flea market bought an ugly $4 framed picture and discovered an original Dunlap tucked inside. It sold in 2000 during a live Sotheby’s internet auction for $8.14 million to the late television producer Norman Lear.

Yet those broadsides are not the document Americans carry in their collective memories. The document preserved behind bulletproof glass at the National Archives is known as the engrossed Declaration. That’s the word used in the 18th century for an official handwritten legal document.

The man whom historians consider most likely to have put quill to parchment to create this piece of calligraphic history was named Timothy Matlack.

He was a political radical, a brewer, and the founder of the Society for Free Quakers, an organization for like-minded individuals who had been booted by the Friends for the bellicose stance they took during the Revolutionary War. After two Quakers criticized his sons for taking up arms in the conflict, Matlack had them caned. People openly mocked Matlack for wearing a sword around town, which was admittedly weird in an era of flintlocks.

A clerk in the Pennsylvania State House, Matlack was known for his lovely penmanship. He had engrossed the papers commissioning George Washington as general of the Continental Army.

For the Declaration, Matlack picked out a piece of parchment that was close to a square. He might have used a pin to mark off his margins and a straight edge to keep his lines straight, though the document bears no evidence of those standard techniques. His quill would have been dipped in handmade, iron gall ink.

The document contains only 1,337 words, excluding the signatures. So far as I know, Matlack only made two errors, spelling the word “Representative” wrong in the fifth grievance, and omitting the word “only” in a later sentence. Jefferson may have inserted the corrections careful readers will find in the document.

Members began affixing their signatures to the engrossed parchment on August 2, 1776. (The last signer may have signed as late as 1781. Col. Thomas McKean of Delaware was off fighting the war.)

Americans who grow up seeing reproductions of this document often don’t realize that it is handwritten; Matlack’s lettering looks too consistent and too florid to be “real.” The heading—“The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America”—resembles a classic black letter, or “Gothic,” font, and reappears in four other spots in the text. The rest of the document is written in what we can only assume is Matlack’s standard fancy hand.

Brian Willson

Which brings us to 2003, when a gentleman named Brian Willson tracked down a copy of the Declaration he’d acquired as a kid, on replica parchment, and began studying it intently.

By then, Mr. Willson had become one of the world’s leading typeface designers. Since 1993, he has created an impressive library of fonts, often culled from handwritten documents. He has, for example, created typefaces based on the handwriting of Abigail Adams, John Paul Jones, Stephen F. Austin, Frederick Douglass, Sam Houston, and John Quincy Adams, just to mention a few. He created one, dubbed Professor, that mimicked the handwriting of his father, who was a professor of Germanic languages. And once, after spotting the hasty scrawl of a handwritten diner menu in Maine, where he lives, he produced Oak Street, the “messy-looking” typeface of his dreams. (You can inspect all of these at his main web site: 3IP Type Foundry.)

It’s impossible to overstate how important typefaces are to the modern world of design. One of Mr. Willson’s fonts was used to represent the handwriting of Severus Snape in the potions book shown in the movie

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. His work has appeared on the cover of a book by Nicholas Sparks, the design of The Spiderwick Chronicles book franchise, the cover of an album by the Dave Matthews Band, and a Ken Burns parody shown on the Jimmy Kimmel Show. My personal favorite was the appearance of one of his text fonts in a throwaway-but-critical scene in the comedy series, Arrested Development. Another interviewer dubbed Mr. Willson’s work “crazy famous,” and I’m inclined to agree.

Acting on a hunch that Matlack’s hand would prove popular with designers, Mr. Willson spent a “tedious” six months transforming Matlack’s handwriting into 608 characters. It’s not enough for a type designer to replicate the look of the letters that appear in their primary source. They must also extrapolate from the primary source. How would Matlack, in others words, have written a dollar sign ($), the at symbol (@), or the trademark symbol (™)? His process, Mr. Willson says, went like this:

1. Pore over the old scripts, looking for the most typical and legible letters of the upper- and lowercase alphabets, along with numerals, punctuation marks, etc.
2. Scan each of these glyphs and bring the saved digital scans into a program with vector graphics tools (usually Adobe Photoshop), then begin tracing.
3. Export the traced outlines as PostScript files that can be imported into a font design application (Fontographer or FontLab), where each glyph can be tweaked, perfected, and (in the case of cursive scripts) made to seamlessly connect with every other.

The result is a font which Mr. Willson dubs American Scribe. (Naturally, that is the font I'm using to illustrate this post.)

“Matlack did indeed have lovely, legible penmanship,” says Mr. Willson. “Whereas I don’t recall thinking things like, ‘Oh, he must’ve dipped his pen here,’ it’s always gives me pause to see the occasional ink blot or inserted word (as “only” inserted by Jefferson in the Declaration) or cross-out or underscore in some of these old documents.”

The font set he created actually replicates those ink blots…

I asked him what it’s like to trace the words of a long-dead person and then presume to write like them. “In all the old pen fonts I’ve designed,” he says, “I feel like I’m somehow ‘inside the head’ of the writer whose script I’m replicating. You can seemingly get a feel for the emotions based on pen pressure (or lack thereof) and the like. There’s something extra there, too– as when you recognize the handwriting of a beloved family member in the address on an envelope you might receive in the mail (or used to receive, as handwritten letters aren’t anywhere near as common as they used to be).”

Now, you might well ask who buys such a product, and how do they use them? The most logical clientele are designers who work at historical sites associated with the Revolution, such as Colonial Williamsburg, who need reliable fonts to create a library of replica documents. Mr. Willson hears from users and fans often.

“It’s one of the finest rewards of this work,” he says. “And, yes, some folks likely wish to give the feel of the Revolution in their use of American Scribe, but others simply like the look of the font and their use is entirely unrelated (as when it appears on wine labels, say).”

I take perverse glee knowing that someone took so much time to remember Matlack’s work. The great irony, of course, is that his original parchment is so badly faded at this point in history that we must all rely on the 1823 Stone engraving to see what the Declaration looked like during its first century. The U.S. Constitution, written just 11 years later, is in much better shape. Both repose in darkness in the rotunda in Washington, DC.

Visitors who want a peek must press a button, which illuminates the documents for a little while. All day long, as tourists traipse through, the sacred principles of a nascent nation wink on and off, as if saying, We’re still here. We’re still here. We’re still here…

---

• My full interview with Mr. Willson lives here.
• Investigate American Scribe and his other fonts at OldFonts.com and 3IP Type Foundry.
• His novel, about a typeface designer who acquires a haunted house in Maine…
• A documentary recommended by Mr. Willson:

See you in three weeks!

— Joe

JosephDagnese.com