Signature Colors

A different color of ink identified each year: 1956 was green and 1957 a ribbon of red, replaced the following year by bright lavender, and now, in 1959, she had decided upon a dignified blue.  But as in every manifestation, she continued to tinker with her handwriting, slanting it to the right or to the left, shaping it roundly or steeply, loosely or stingily--as though she were asking, "Is this Nancy? Or that? Or that?  Which is me?"

---Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (1966)

Truman Capote's "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood was inspired by the murder of the Herbert Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas in 1959.  In this quote, Capote recreates the character of Nancy Clutter, the family's sixteen year old daughter.   While Capote's characterizations can become tedious at times, he offers a valid interpretation of what is an almost universal teenage activity---filling notebooks with variations of one's signature.

Material Things

In this superb collection edited by Gary Schmidgall (sort of a commonplace book of Whitman) we begin to understand the deeper impact of everyday material things on the act of composition:

Whitman explains his preference for Mammoth Falcon quill pens: "I find I get to like the vast pens: they give me something to take hold of: they encourage me to write spacious things. There's a spiritual side: more than that: a spiritual outcome." A few days later: "it makes a great difference what sort of pen...I am sensitive--I especially hate the little bits of pens--the dwarf ladylike pens: I don't seem to be able to do anything fullsized with them: they interfere with my ideas--break my spirit."

---Taken from Intimate with Walt: Selections from Whitman's Conversations with Horace Traubel 1888-1892, Edited by Gary Schmidgall.