Manuscript

THE CAP ON the upper-case J is back. That's a good thing. Opinion about the cursive capital Q is mixed, but no one likes the simplified upper-case M. It's Thursday noon at the National Catholic Educational Association convention, and a group of teachers from St. John the Evangelist School in northern Baltimore County is discussing arcane details of handwriting over Caesar salad at a downtown hotel. These teachers prove that handwriting lives, despite the computer juggernaut. Two children from their school have won Maryland championships this spring in the National Handwriting Contest.

The linguist Charles Carpenter Fries strove to show how far classroom English diverged from what is actually standard English, both in speech and writing. In The Story of Ain't   (reviewed yesterday) , David Skinner describes how Fries set out to establish this through empirical evidence, a corpus study of three thousand letters written to the U.S. government by ordinary citizens. He developed this analysis in a book, American English Grammar , demonstrating that "the actual difference in underlying grammar between vulgar and standard was, in reality, quite small.

The manuscript of an unpublished novel by Louisa May Alcott has been discovered at a Harvard University library and has aroused keen interest from book publishers and movie producers, sight unseen.The newly discovered novel, titled "The Inheritance" and believed to be Alcott's first novel, was written in 1849 when she was only 18. It is the second Alcott manuscript to surface in the last two years; in 1994, "A Long Fatal Love Chase" was purchased by Random House for a reported $1.5 million and had a good run on best-seller lists last fall.

Kacie Bawiec has been scribbling stories in notebooks since she was in the third grade. And just two weeks ago, the 15-year-old teenager published her first novel, "Silver Dagger. " The fantasy manuscript, which Kacie wrote when she was in the eighth grade, was picked up last year by Tate Publishing, a small, family-owned Christian-based publishing house that specializes in emerging authors. In its 198 pages, "Silver Dagger" is full of evil spirits, ghostly possession and magical weapons, such as the eponymous blade with its jewel-encrusted hilt, which materializes when Bawiec's characters are enraged.

"The Saragossa Manuscript" was a favorite of Jerry Garcia and Luis Bunuel, and why not? Wojciech Has' 1965 film is a hallucinatory trip into history, the sub-conscious and narrative itself. Zbigniew Cybulski stars as a Napoleonic soldier who spies a book of drawings and is drawn into a series of ever-unfolding dream-stories worthy of Scheherazade. Garcia gave the Pacific Film Archives some money to find a complete print of the 180-minute movie, and the process of finding one ended the day before he died.

At the beginning of "Manuscript Illumination in Flanders" at the Walters Art Gallery is a painting of a crucifixion in a Psalter of about 1300. Christ is shown on the cross between the Virgin Mary and John the Evangelist, on a flat gold background with both the sun and the moon above. The event is rendered in an almost abstract, symbolic way, with no attempt to create a setting from the real world for it.Toward the end of the same show is a depiction of the flight into Egypt from a book of hours of about 1510-1520, probably from Bruges.

Not counting restaurants, my favorite room in Baltimore is on the top floor of the downtown branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. It doesn't look like much from the outside -- just a nondescript blue metal door with "Mencken Room" painted on it -- but I love it anyway. The Mencken Room is the place where I unearthed the long-forgotten manuscript of an unpublished book America's greatest journalist.On the inside, the Mencken Room looks like the library of a slightly seedy men's club: book-lined walls, aging chandeliers, reasonably comfortable chairs.

In December 1860, more than four years before John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln in Ford's Theater in Washington, the actor wrote a 21-page manuscript that showed his fanatical state of mind, his sympathies for the Southern secessionists, and his association with the historical characters he portrayed in Shakespeare's plays.In the view of Lincoln scholars, had these sentiments been known to the officials responsible for guarding the president, it is possible that Booth would not have had such easy access to the theater on April 14, 1865.

HOLLYWOOD -- A priceless "Huckleberry Finn" manuscript discovered stashed away in a librarian's attic here appears destined for the Buffalo public library in New York to which Mark Twain first donated it more than a century ago.Sotheby's of New York, in formally announcing the rare find yesterday, said that there were no plans to auction the manuscript, and the Hollywood librarian who made the discovery said that she probably would return the handwritten papers...

WASHINGTON -- Federal law enforcement officials said yesterday that agents searching Theodore J. Kaczynski's Montana cabin had found the original typewritten manuscript of the Unabomber's 35,000-word manifesto, a powerful piece of evidence that has convinced the authorities that they have the long-sought serial terrorist.Elated officials said the recent discovery of the manuscript in the cabin capped a week-long search of the remote mountain cabin, in Lincoln, Mont., that has so far yielded a trove of physical evidence that prosecutors hope will provide them with an incontrovertible case against Mr. Kaczynski.

A handwritten draft of one of Edgar Allan Poe's earliest poems and a letter to author Washington Irving are among a handful of items that will be part of an exhibit opening April 26 at a Richmond, Va., museum devoted to the writer. "This is the kind of exhibit that comes around only once in a generation," Chris Semtner, curator of Richmond's Edgar Allan Poe Museum, said of "From Poe's Quill: The Letters and Manuscripts of Edgar Allan Poe," which will run through July 11. "Because Poe's manuscripts were not highly valued during his brief life, many have been lost or dispersed over time, making them very rare today.

Baltimore's Walters Art Museum has received a $265,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant to put toward digitizing its collection of medieval manuscripts and making it available, via computer, to the general public. The three-year project, "Imaging the Hours: Creating a Digital Resource of Flemish Manuscripts," includes 113 illustrated manuscripts, encompassing 45,000 pages of text with over 3,000 pages of illumination — elaborate illustrations, such as stylized letters or border decorations.

Twelve years ago, Walters Art Museum curator Will Noel opened a parcel and discovered what he calls "Archimedes' brain in a box. " Thus began a search for buried treasure — in this case, the lost writings of Archimedes of Syracuse, a famed Greek mathematician and inventor who lived in the third century B.C. Noel and his boss, museum director Gary Vikan, found a 174-page book made of cured goatskin that was ugly beyond belief. The sheaves were singed around the edges, the text and pages were defaced by water stains, and mold had eaten away entire sections.

It's the typo that gives it away. The two 13-by-9.5-inch pieces of paper that will go up for auction at Christie's on Friday spell out in big, bold, black letters, "The Star Spangled Banner. " Underneath this heading is written, much smaller, these words of explanation: "A Pariotic Song. " Thomas Carr, a 19th century music publisher who operated a store at 36 Baltimore St., intended to print "A Patriotic Song. " But he was rushing to capitalize on the popularity of the little ditty that Francis Scott Key penned while watching the bombing of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812, and lacked the modern-day luxury of spell-check.

The prized collection of medieval manuscripts at the Walters Art Museum - about 38,000 pages - is heading out of its usual, controlled environment and into the light. The light of computer screens, that is. Thanks to a $315,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, 105 medieval manuscripts from several centuries and cultures will be digitally photographed, cataloged and distributed during the next two and a half years. "This gives us the chance to make accessible, and for free on everybody's desktop, some of the greatest works of art from the Middle Ages [housed]

A federal judge has denied a Baltimore man's motion to unseal court documents from a political corruption case against former state Sen. Thomas L. Bromwell. "The motion is procedurally defective," the case has been closed and the man filing, William Bond, is "not entitled to have any documents unsealed," U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz wrote in an opinion filed Thursday. The documents Bond sought referred to criminal activity alleged against a third party. Bond, who plans to appeal the decision, said in an interview that he filed the motion to prove a point about a "continuing pattern of behavior of ethical misconduct" by an attorney he's dealt with in a copyright infringement case.

The sun came out midway through the card and dried out the track, changing the surface rating from muddy to fast.Oliver's Twist had command for more than a mile, running easily on the lead with a leisurely pace.But the Preakness runner-up couldn't fight off the late charge of My Manuscript, who overtook him in the final 16th of a mile to win the $100,000 Governor's Cup by 3 1/4 lengths at Laurel Park yesterday.There were no excuses for Oliver's Twist, the 1-2 favorite who was making his third start after being eased in the Ohio Derby on June 17."

The Polish phantasmagoria The Saragossa Manuscript would be a perfect midnight movie if it weren't three hours long. Luckily, the Charles' Saturday revival series will screen it tomorrow at noon. The movie is an epic piece of japery: It celebrates visions and magic with the sort of labyrinthine storytelling that bends minds with its own twisted sorcery. Flashbacks within flashbacks make up the story, catalyzed when two soldiers on opposite sides of an unexplained, early 19th-century war stumble upon a manuscript that transfixes them with potent, sexy words and images.

At a time when books can be written and distributed to millions by high-speed computer, there is no earthly reason why anyone would need to spend $5.5 million to create an illuminated manuscript of the Catholic Bible, featuring calligraphy applied by hand on calfskin parchment and other bookmaking methods dating back to the Middle Ages. And yet, that may be exactly why such a project was launched in 2000 by monks from St. John's Abbey and University in Collegeville, Minn. They're not doing it because they have to, but because they want to, for the glory of God and the enrichment of those who view the work.

For 25 years, Teri Noel Towe has deeply treasured a slim volume bound in red morocco that he acquired at an auction house, a volume containing six handwritten pages of a musical manuscript. "Just pick it up," says Towe, a trust and estate lawyer in New York, "and a funny electricity goes through your body. You are holding in your hands something Johann Sebastian Bach held in his." Only Bach would have held a little bit more. The manuscript is missing pages three and four of what should be eight pages of the original organ part for the cantata Christ unser Herr zum Jordan kam (Christ Our Lord Came to the Jordan)