ABSTRACT
Within each tradition, the major division is between that of bookhands (Figures 19.1 and 19.2) and cursive writing (Figures 19.3 and 19.4). Everybody who writes balances the desire to write quickly with the need to write legibly, and obviously that calculation will work out differently for a person copying a book than from a person writing a receipt or a personal letter, or even a person writing a document of state. Book-hands, moreover, are designed not only to be legible but to be aesthetically pleasing, so the handwriting used for books is quite different from cursive writing, though of course there is a certain amount of seepage between the two, where a literary scribe through carelessness, habit or design adopts a cursive form, or a cursive writer may use a form that is usually restricted to literary texts; and in the long run, the two forms have a great tendency to influence each other.
