In Memoriam: Alfred Fairbank
Paul Standard
My first sight of Fairbank's name came in some issues of the London Mercury in the 1920S, probably in the book production notes of B. H. Newdigate; and the first sight of his script came in the 1926-27 tracts on 'English Handwriting' edited by Robert Bridges, which showed Fairbank's notes on 'Penmanship'. What made 1926 a watershed year for the italic hand was the parallel publication of our century's first facsimile of Arrighi's 1522 Operina 'with', to quote from the book itself, 'an Introduction by Stanley Morison, Privately printed on the hand-presses of the Officina Bodoni at Montagnola di Lugano, Switzerland, March 1926'.
If 1926 was a watershed year, the ensuing six years were the most critical for the waiting legions of calligraphiles on both sides of the Atlantic. Their confidence arrived with the appearance of A Handwriting Manual in 1932. Its review in the Times Literary Supplement (surely by John Carter?) made me order several copies. With my order I sent a dictated letter to the publishers in Leicester. Some two months later came a reply from the author, to whom the Dryad Press had forwarded my remarks. His reply fairly staggered its recipient and his colleagues - and has been duly recorded in a brief account appearing in the festschrift published by Fabers for Fairbank's 70th birthday in 1965.
All of these colleagues thus began to learn the long-forgotten script, an activity naturally extending into virtually all college campuses. There the age-level was such as to make the students feel a growing contempt for the sluggishness of the educational establishment - and not in the United States alone! This response, I am sure, is the true cause of the continuing rash of calligraphic societies in all of North America. It has increasingly become the source of the present sprouting of faculty talent in lettering instruction. The late George Salter, an eminent book artist, introduced Fairbank's books to the Cooper Union Library and to his classes in his thirty years at its Art School. In 1949, when Fairbank's King Penguin Book of Scripts came out, it was an instant success with the student body for its 64 plates of historic hands, a popularity that continued and became explosive when its 1960 growth into a Pelican volume of taller size with 80 plates gave the student an even wider range of study.
The friendship that began in 1932 was destined to develop into true intimacy, over the fifty years that followed, between the master scribe and this untrained tyro. We discovered so many mutual interests, and had so much to tell each other, that we often found ourselves achieving two full exchanges of letters (always in longhand, in Italic and by air) weekly. But of course the air-mail service was then in its infancy; today, in its maturity, a letter has learned to require a fortnight for its transit by air. We managed to keep ourselves informed of the progress of handwriting, and especially its adoption by, and its teaching in, the grade schools. And as my wife Stella is author of a dozen cook-books (four with prefaces by our dear departed Andre Simon) Alfred's Elsie naturally received most of them. My own contribution to them was usually the jacket-lettering, their often narrative chapter-heads and index-alphabets; for illustration we usually relied on Fritz Kredel, Karel Svolinsky or John Alcorn. On our three visits to Britain since 1954 we visited the Fairbank family for long weekends with motor tours to the regions round Bath and Hove, on one occasion meeting the Frank Allan Thomsons there. With each visit we were delighted to learn that the outer world too was keeping up with our view of Alfred's eminent contributions in the field of his speciality, culminating in his country's award to him of a C.B.E. for services to calligraphy in 1951.
If all of Fairbank's calligraphic commissions could be gathered (with reproductions) into a single volume, it would confirm what his contemporaries have felt: that his pioneer work with Italic entitles him to rank with the greatest scribes the world has known. Produced, as his tasks were, in a period of confusion and stresses which challenged the taste of all present performers, his consistency and ease of style, and his humane tastes and attitudes would emerge in all their modesty as an inspiration to every serious scribe.
In 1935 he asked me (in friendship) to choose two of my favourite passages for him to transcribe on vellum for me. I chose from Shakespeare, Sonnet 66 for Italic, and the Dirge from Cymbeline for the roman. In due course they arrived each done in two colours, and each noting source and author, and each declaring itself 'transr'd' for me by Alfred Fairbank with date of completion. Each is a piece of dignified perfection which I could not bear to keep only for private delight. So I have used them, as their transcriber knew, for instructive display at appropriate stages in my classes at Workshop School, at Cooper Union, Parsons, New York University, Columbia, and at most of my dozen private and parochial schools along the Eastern Seaboard from New Hampshire to Virginia - an audience of many thousand students. And in my first small book (Calligraphy's Flowering, 1947 and 1978) I showed the Sonnet on page 31.
What I could not foresee that after one very happy class session in the late 50s the young student who 'helped' me remove my exhibits from the wall would 'forget' to restore my two Fairbank specimens to my portfolio! I at once reported my loss to their maker, begging him to remake them at his current rate, but he could only reply: 'So sorry to learn that someone's pinched my two vellums, but I've stopped all formal writing a couple of years ago' because his manual powers had declined, and so he was confining himself to teaching teachers. Some day those two items of Fairbankiana will surface at an auction and sell at some astronomical price. Now I see why my book should have shown both my Fairbank vellums, not merely one!
Fairbank's last major scribal work was the R.A.F.'s Roll of Honour, his task being to evolve a model script and to choose his twelve collaborating scribes to complete in double-column the ten vellum portfolios housed in cases round the inner walls of the Church of St Clement Danes. In marshalling his collaborators he wrote out a guiding style of roman with what we call subdued capitals. Each scribe was free to suggest to the master-scribe minor variations of the chosen script; and all competent observers are quick to applaud the added graces so helpful in a work of such magnitude.
A lifelong admirer of all western scripts, notably those in the italic hand
(especially as written by Arrighi and Tagliente), he was able to make several fresh attributions in his magnum opus, produced in collaboration with his colleague Berthold Wolpe, entitled Renaissance Handwriting, an anthology of Italic Scripts published by Fabers in 1960. The book will remain a monument to a script so long forgotten and so eagerly recaptured by a mechanised age. And for this recapture Alfred Fairbank will always be honoured and admired by aspiring scribes in every land using the Latin alphabet.