Books:

Discovered! 505
Odd Enterprises

Hidden Dollars

How to Make
Money at Home

Small Business
of Your Own

You Can Own
a Business

John Ashmore of Seattle thought it would be possible and boldly set out to prove his point. He proved it, all right, and so quickly and thoroughly that he no longer has to compete. His heavily-financed and super-mechanized competitors now pay him good money to spend his evenings and weekends pursuing the hobby he enjoys most.

Ashmore's hobby is engrossing, and the name is descriptive of how Ashmore feels about it. He defines engrossing as the art of decorative writing. His unusual hobby has roots in the distant past.

The various types of handwriting and hand-lettering which we consider decorative today originated in the Middle Ages, when monks and scholars had to copy the world's store of literature and learning by hand, because printing techniques had not been perfected.

The invention of movable type in the fifteenth century by Johannes Gutenberg almost turned engrossing into a lost art. However, the art of beautiful handwriting survived through the centuries because its practitioners continued to improve their techniques faster than they could be duplicated by printers. Even today, the most skillful printers using the most expensive equipment cannot match the work of an accomplished engrosser.

ASHMORE FIRST became interested in the art of beautiful handwriting as a boy in Birmingham, England. His father was a jeweler and Ashmore's first teacher was an engraver who did work for his father.

Through his youth and young manhood Ashmore retained his interest in engrossing, reading whatever works he could find on the subject and practicing during his leisure hours. After World War I Ashmore moved first to Canada and then to the United States, settling in Seattle, Washington. He became a furniture salesman, and that is his regular occupation today.

During his spare-time study of engrossing, Ashmore found that practice never was hard for him. "Engrossing was as relaxing to me as golf or reading might be to another man," he recalls. "And that's what convinced me that engrossing was the one best hobby for me."

After pursuing his hobby on his own for some years, Ashmore decided that a review of the fundamentals of fine penmanship would be in order, along with some advanced instruction, so he enrolled in the Zanerian College of Penmanship, which has its headquarters in Columbus, Ohio, for a home-study course.

"The Zanerian method stresses faithful practice and perseverance," Ashmore says, "but students also are urged to enjoy their work. If accurate, even painstaking writing is boring, or sheer drudgery, no student, no matter how skillful, can ever expect to achieve any success in engrossing."

AS ASHMORE continued to acquire more skill he began to wonder whether engrossing ability still might be in demand, in spite of the marvelous technological advancements made by the printing industry in recent years.

In his reading, Ashmore learned that there were less than 100 true engrossers, outside of religious orders, in the United States, and most of them lived in cities east of the Mississippi. Through inquiries, he discovered that there were only a few engrossers in all of the Pacific Northwest states. And on the basis of his findings, he decided it was high time he dropped his amateur standing and took up engrossing as a part-time business.

His first step in the direction of professional status was to investigate those he thought would be his competitors—the printers of Seattle.

Eventually he was able to discuss his hobby with the printers themselves, and they directed him to a Seattle printing concern that specialized in printing diploma blanks for schools, colleges and other institutions of learning. As a "door opener" Ashmore took along a card on which he had written his own name in his best rolling script. A master key couldn't have worked better.

The manager of the printing firm popped out of the inner office like a jack-in-the-box, shook Ashmore's hand and commented that he didn't think there was anyone left in the country who could write script.

It turned out that Ashmore's talent was needed, and he walked out of the office at the end of that first visit with a sheaf of diploma blanks under his arm. It developed in the course of the interview with the printing firm manager that some of the schools sent along lists of their graduating students and asked that the names be placed on the blanks.

To set the names in special type and then print each blank individually was expensive—so expensive, in fact, that filling in the blanks by hand was an easier and much cheaper operation.

When Ashmore returned his work a week later, he found that his time had been profitably spent. He was paid on a "piece-work" basis that produced earnings averaging close to $4 per hour. He has received regular orders from the firm ever since, and his rate of pay has increased.

Ashmore's unusual job of filling the spaces on diploma blanks required that he develop a new skill. He had to learn to center the name he was writing exactly, and that required that he learn to visualize the completed name before he put pen to paper.

After several years of engrossing names on diplomas, Ashmore is able to center short and medium-long names with ease, but unusually long "handles" sometimes require that he write them on scratch paper first so he can better gauge their length.

ASHMORE USES a steel-nibbed, "oblique" pen for his work. It is important that he be able to see the line he is drawing as it comes off the pen, so the point is set at an angle to give him an unobstructed view. This is particularly important when drawing shaded lines. When holding the oblique pen, the hand can remain in a natural writing position while the point of the pen touches the paper at the proper angle to produce shaded lines.

Ashmore uses a variety of steel points for his pen, but all steel points dig into the paper, making erasures impossible. For that reason, accuracy must be combined with caution if the engrosser expects to keep his spoilage rate down. Ashmore has learned the diploma-blank-lettering technique so well that he spoils only about two blanks out of 100.

A smooth, flowing rhythm is the secret, and Ashmore believes that the rhythm is what makes his hobby relaxing and enjoyable.

When writing script, which is the type of "hand" usually specified for diplomas, Ashmore must keep even his breathing in synchronization with his up and down strokes, so no smoking on the job! Puffing on a cigarette would throw him off.

Also, once he starts "unrolling" a name he can't stop, because stopping ruins the appearance of the name. The heavy downstrokes and light upstrokes of script make it necessary for the whole name to flow off the pen evenly, or each stroke will differ in width from the others.

LETTERING NAMES on diplomas, of course, is a very specialized type of engrossing of the sort that the average hobbyist would not be able to pick up without making a thorough canvass of the schools and institutions of learning in his area. But before Ashmore had got well into the business of filling blanks on diplomas, other possibilities presented themselves, thanks to his having acquired a companion skill, to engrossing.

This companion skill, which he had practiced at the same time he was learning engrossing, was the art of "illumination," and in this case illuminating has nothing to do with improving visibility in a dark room. Illumination, in the artistic sense, is the art of decorating decorative writing, and it involves drawing fancy borders or frames around hand-written text, using large ornamental initials, painting in small illustrations and otherwise embellishing engrossed material.

The work is done with both pen and brush, using richly colored inks, water colors and various metallic inks which simulate gold, silver and bronze.

Illuminating a single, large-sized capital letter may take hours, because the letter must be precisely correct, with all of the coloring applied so as not to overlap and smear. The edges of the letter, both inside and out, must be sharp.

Illuminating is painstaking work, but Ashmore finds that the slow, precision work relaxes him, and, of course, a well-executed illuminated letter gives him great satisfaction.

Ashmore discovered after circulating some samples of his illuminated work that they advertised themselves. Civic groups, service clubs and other organizations passed the word around that if scrolls, citations, memorials, testimonials, resolutions, certificates, or formal greetings were needed, Ashmore was the man to call upon.

As a result, Ashmore's many jobs for Seattle organizations never lack variety. The royal pronouncements read by King Neptune and his queen during Seattle's gala Seafair week in August of each year are scrolls which are engrossed and illuminated by Ashmore.

When the 100,000th G.I. arrived at the port of Seattle aboard a military transport ship after serving in Korea, he was presented with a citation and scroll honoring him and giving him the freedom of the city. Both documents were prepared by Ashmore. The mayor of Seattle sometimes sends special greetings of a formal nature to the mayor of some other city, and Ashmore is called in to prepare the document. One of these greeting scrolls was sent recently to the mayor of Dublin, Ireland. Ashmore's work gets around.

MANY OF Ashmore's assignments come his way while he is at work in downtown Seattle. A total stranger may walk up to him in the store, hand him a typewritten sheet and ask him to turn the material into an artistic scroll or citation. Sometimes he wants the job done in a hurry, and that means that Ashmore may have to sit up until 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning to complete the work. Ashmore works in a small, brightly-lighted studio in his home. While rush orders may force him to stay up late occasionally, he usually works one or two hours after supper to keep abreast of his current orders.

"I'm not trying to get rich at engrossing," Ashmore says, "but my hobby helps financially in a very substantial way."

Ashmore is frank in saying that engrossing is not a hobby that every person can find enjoyment in. It takes an aptitude for handwriting and a special type of temperament. Ashmore has the aptitude and also the temperament. He finds that the painstaking attention to detail that engrossing and illuminating require is a constant challenge to his powers, and therefore enjoyable. What's more, the concentration that is necessary to complete a page of engrossing text gives him a feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction.

For the person who always has been interested in handwriting, engrossing offers an outlet and an opportunity to acquire a very specialized skill. The fact that Ashmore found a way to turn his hobby into a profitable spare-time activity is incidental.

"The hours I spent in practicing engrossing and illumination could not be repaid in mere money," Ashmore says. "The satisfaction I received as my skill increased was the greatest reward."

However, Ashmore emphasizes that engrossing is not a hobby that gives a continuous feeling of achievement. He found that for long periods he would not improve at all. In fact, he worked for more than three years before he could write his own name in script to his own satisfaction.

"At times I would seem to be losing what little skill I had acquired in writing script, which is the most difficult hand to do and do well," Ashmore recalls. "But eventually I got the hang of it."

ASHMORE USUALLY recommends that people who plan to take up engrossing start at the public library. Most libraries have books which give the necessary historical background of engrossing and illuminating and general information on the subject. Ask your librarian.

Once the foundation of knowledge is laid the next step, and many steps thereafter, is simply to put pencil or pen to paper and practice, practice, practice.

First the student should learn to print, and block capitals should be taken up to start with. A T-square and triangle can be used for horizontal and vertical strokes to give the individual letters pleasing precision. The important thing in the beginning is not to be able to draw the letters freehand, but to understand how the letters are formed and how to space them. Most beginners prefer to practice with a hard pencil with the lead sandpapered to a needle point. When the student is satisfied that he has achieved perfect form on a lesson, he can ink in the letters over the pencil lines.

After acquiring skill in block lettering, the next step is to learn to print both capitals and lower case letters in several other "faces." The student should also learn to put on the serifs, which are the ornamentation on printed letters which we take for granted in most type faces. Serifs are the tiny "flags" at the terminations of both horizontal and vertical strokes. Most alphabets require the use of both thick and thin lines and the two widths should be uniform from letter to letter.

The student can find books containing samples of different types of printing at libraries and most book stores, because they are published for draftsmen, engineers, commercial artists and architects. These books will lend variety to the early lessons and give the student a basic knowledge of the various standard types of printing.

AS THE student improves his ability to reproduce the simpler letter faces cleanly and accurately he may wish to begin experimenting with ornamentation, or simple illumination. Ashmore urges that after about the third month of printing practice the student should try brushing or penning backgrounds for individual initial letters. Heavy letters can be highlighted and "shadowed" with a little practice.

Shadow or shading usually is done with diluted ink and a broad pen. In learning to execute the more elaborate initial letters, the student should work in pencil at first. "Boxing" the area to be filled by the ornamental letter will help, and a center line through the box will aid in getting the proper proportions for the finished initial. Many modern books have gone back to the old practice of starting off a new chapter with ornamental initial letters and the student of engrossing should look for them.

As the student does more lettering, he will want to switch to italics now and then. Italics are written with a slope to the right and have a freer flow than standard letter faces. Every standard letter face has a corresponding italic face and the student should learn to recognize both the standard and italic of a given face.

Once italics are mastered, the student can begin to perfect the rolling, beautiful curved writing that is script. In practicing script, the student should place his paper straight in front of him. Lines should be ruled on the paper and the margins drawn in lightly. To begin with, the student should write script large, but he constantly should strive to reduce the size of his writing. Small, accurate script is the mark of the finished engrosser.

TO ACHIEVE success, the engrosser should learn to care for his tools, and especially his pens. The nib of most pens should rest on the paper at an angle of forty-five degrees. It should be inked lightly when in use to avoid blots and thick hairlines, which are the upstrokes in script.

Proper care of pens is something of a skill in itself, and perhaps one that should be mastered before the student attempts to learn script, according to Ashmore. He says the best rule to keep in mind is that a little sharpening goes a long way with a pen.

Scratchy pens make the engrosser's life miserable, but the scratchiness can be caused both by not sharpening the pens and by sharpening them. A very fine carborundum stone, of the type used to hone razors, should be used. The pen is held lightly against the stone at the proper angle and moved two or three times across the stone in one direction only. After the first sharpening strokes the student should attempt to write with the pen. Usually there will be a slight "wire edge," but this can be knocked off easily by writing a few letters lightly on the face of the carborundum stone. This will flatten the "lettering edge" of the pen, Ashmore says.

It is the small pens which need the most sharpening, but they also are the hardest to sharpen, so the student probably would do better to learn sharpening technique on a large pen. When in use, a pen should be cleaned frequently on a wet sponge, and if ink dries on a pen it should be scraped off with a small knife before being used.

THE ACTUAL technique of writing varies from person to person, according to Ashmore, but there are some standard rules which should be applied by the student. He should not write with finger motion alone, but should allow his forearm and wrist to form the up and down strokes. The lower edge of the palm makes a good "flexible foundation" for the hand and should be in contact with the working surface.

To give work the professional touch, the student should retouch all endstrokes with a fine pen, putting on the necessary spurs, serifs and ornaments. Successful retouching also involves the ability to conceal or correct small errors.

The outline of study given here is a bare beginning, but the student could spend many months just practicing the things mentioned—and to good advantage, according to Ashmore. The most important qualities which assure the success of the student engrosser are not digital skill and drawing ability, but perseverance and unlimited patience.

Once the student feels that he has learned engrossing and illuminating he can go out and look for business. This involves salesmanship, and salesmanship usually entails the use of so-called "aids to selling." The engrosser's best selling aid is his own work. He can circulate samples personally or have a friend show them to the officers of local organizations. As reminders, the engrosser should make up some cards with his name, address and phone number on them. Sooner or later every organization will need a citation, testimonial or greeting prepared, and if an officer of the club has the engrosser's card in his desk the job is as good as clinched.

Printers in the engrosser's community might be willing to suggest prospects, and schools of every type should be approached. They just might be looking for someone to fill in the blanks on their diplomas.