In defense of handwriting

It’s slow, fussy, laborious, old-fashioned, inefficient. These are the frequently-cited reasons for the decline in the use of handwriting, apart from the big, obvious one: People prefer to text, email, and do their writing on a keyboard.

In the last year I’ve read at least three news features on the coming extinction of cursive script (or as we said in grade school, dikit-dikit). One American writer even wondered why schools bother to teach penmanship at all when children are not likely to write anything by hand in the “real world.” Her son, she reported, was needlessly traumatized because he could not form the letter “G” according to academic specifications. Oh, the horror. Perhaps those of us who had to endure years of penmanship lessons should file a class suit for child abuse.

As a columnist who constantly uses keyboards and keypads but also writes in cursive, I can tell you that each method has its advantages.

You can’t beat typing on a computer for speed and convenience, especially if your deadline was two hours ago. But handwriting allows the mind to meander, to wander off the topic and explore other mental routes. One gets to ruminate, cogitate, and work in more layers of meaning — a real challenge when there’s a cursor blinking in front of you as if to say, “Hurry up! Get on with it!”

Handwriting is also more personal: that’s literally you on the page.

True, cursive works best if you have nice penmanship; if your writing is an illegible scrawl you would spare everyone a lot of grief by using a keyboard.

“Technologies change, but Moleskines don’t,” says Arnault Castel, head of Working Unit Ltd, the notebook manufacturer’s representative in Asia. Cellphones, PDAs, smart phones, Blackberries, iPhones, iPads — just when you’ve grown attached to one gadget it is superseded by something more advanced. However, the Moleskine notebook is essentially unchanged from the plain pocket notebooks that Van Gogh and Picasso sketched and doodled on, and Hemingway scribbled on.

That is the genius of Moleskine, a brand that did not yet exist in Van Gogh’s or Picasso’s time. Those guys used oilcloth-covered notebooks produced by French stationers. The late British author Bruce Chatwin deemed the notebook with the elastic closure and pocket such an essential writing instrument that he bought every one he could find, and was reportedly distraught when the stationery shop closed in 1986.

(Another bit of Chatwin lore: he numbered every page of his Moleskines for easy reference.)

Twelve years later an Italian company resurrected the notebook under the Moleskine brand, and assumed its history. The result: a fairly new brand with a great story and an iconic design. A few years ago the brand was acquired by a French company and the product went global. In 2005 Moleskine’s Asian office opened in Hong Kong, and last year Moleskine stands appeared in National Book Stores. Manila is the fastest growing market for Moleskines in Asia, Castel notes, and now the Philippines has its own Moleskine.

My Pilipinas, the limited-edition Moleskine with the Philippine map silkscreened in silver on the cover, is a collaboration between Moleskine, National Book Store, and Collezione Cs, the brand which put the Philippine map on the, um, fashion map. Credit goes to designer Rhett Eala, who in 2006 was looking for a truly Filipino symbol. “I considered the jeepney and the kalesa,” he recalls, “but they were too touristy.” Six months later the perfect symbol occurred to him: the Philippine map. “I found that just wearing our map on a shirt gave me a sense of pride,” he says. “When the first map shirts came out and I wore them on my trips, Filipinos would ask where to get the shirt, and foreigners would ask me whose map it was.”

“We’re always approached by different brands proposing collaborations,” Castel notes, “but Moleskine is very cautious about who we work with. The project has to be more than a logo on a notebook; it must be meaningful. Otherwise it’s just an expensive notebook with a logo.”

“The three brands involved in this project are brands to which people have emotional attachments,” adds Trina Alindogan, chair of the National Book Store Foundation. “We have a loyal audience that keeps coming back to us.” In April National will open a store-in-store featuring the entire range of Moleskine products.

Moleskine and Collezione C2 have another thing in common: their products are frequently ripped off and cheap copies openly sold. “All these fakes and copies must mean we’re doing something right,” says Joey Qua of Collezione C2, bringing up the old adage about the sincerest form of flattery. “To stay ahead of the game we innovate constantly and produce interesting twists on the product and its extensions.”

Castel points out that it is difficult to make an exact copy of a Moleskine. For starters, each notebook is bound and stitched like a hardcover book so that it opens flat on the table. “You can make a sketch and easily scan it onto your computer without ruining your notebook. You don’t have to choose between digital and analog, you can have both.” For an analog product, Moleskine is closely connected to the digital world through websites, user groups, and blogs.

“Handwriting is not dead yet,” Castel says. He quotes a study which suggests that it is more productive to bring pen and paper than a computer to a meeting. Participants interact more freely with each other, and they don’t have to look over the top of a screen. (I know from personal experience that when I bring a computer to a meeting, I pay more attention to my screen than to the people I’m speaking to. Which goes against the idea of a face-to-face meeting with other human beings.)

The Moleskine My Pilipinas notebook is now available at National Book Store and Collezione C2 branches — P995 for the pocket notes, P1,480 for the large notebooks. The My Pilipinas project supports the education and literacy campaign of Efren Peñaflorida.