SÖ-stilen - Skolöverstyrelsestilen - source for copybooks?

[Mercian]

Hello FPN,

only recently, thanks to this thread…

 

https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/374208-cursive-vs-italic-a-brief-history-of-handwriting-in-sweden/

 

…started by @battra, I have discovered the existence of the italic handwriting style mentioned in the title of this thread.

 

The Skolöverstyrelsestilen - or SÖ-stilen - was commissioned by Sweden’s Skolöverstyrelsen (School Oversight Board).

They had wished to create a single style of handwriting script/system to be used in all of Sweden’s schools, so that a uniform method of teaching handwriting would be used across the whole country, instead of the the several varieties of script that had been taught until then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_script#Sweden

 

After a period of research and experimentation by the SÖ, in 1975 they introduced respected calligrapher Kerstin Anckers’ design for the new script, which she had based on the ‘Chancery Cursive’ of renaissance Italian papal scribe Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi.
The SÖ issued orders to all of Sweden’s schools that only the new SÖ-stilen should be taught to children.

 

But they botched the introduction, failing to properly instruct school/teachers in how to teach it, not supplying enough teaching/familiarisation materials, and not introducing/explaining the reasoning behind the new system’s creation to Swedish parents.

It proved to be very unpopular with the children and their parents, because it was so different to what they were all familiar with, and because it hadn’t been taught properly.

A decade later, the SÖ dropped its rule against the use of teaching other writing styles, and SÖ-stilen started to fade into unhappy memory for many.

 

Anyway, after learning of its existence and searching for examples of the script, I have found that I like its appearance, and would like to have a go at learning it.

I have downloaded a sample image of its majuscule and minuscule letter glyphs, but I would ideally like to purchase a work book/copybook that teaches it to children/adult learners.

I wish to learn how to write its glyphs (stroke direction & order, etc) and the intended/designed strokes for joining them together.

So, I searched online for copybooks for SÖ-stilen.

The only book that I have found is https://en.campusbokhandeln.se/b/9789162201548/skrivstilsboken-so-stilen

I contacted that website to ask them if they would sell/deliver one to me here in the UK, and they replied to tell me that they only sell to people in Sweden.

I have not been able to find this book on sale from any UK retailers.

 

As such, I would like to ask whether any of you out in FPN-land can supply me with the contact details of a source from which I can buy either the book to which I linked, or any other book that teaches SÖ-stilen italic.

 

Tack!
M.

[battra]

 My best of luck with your SÖ project! I do think the script looks quite nice when it is written by a skilled hand and not by clumsy children!

 

As for shipping books from Sweden to UK, apparently bokus.com and ginza.se shipped to UK up to brexit, but now it says "Please note that we currently don´t ship to UK" at both sites. Bokus ships to Ireland, in case you have some acquaintance there. Otherwise, there's always the possibility of proxy buying services. I googled for such companies and found shippn.com, but I can not endorse them since I have never used them.

 

Regarding SÖ copy books, I think you have found the only one currently in print. There are about 10 different cursive copy books available now in Sweden, all except one for the old style cursive. I actually used the other book by Britta Redin, about the old cursive style, and it was quite useful, even though it was obviously made for kids. It had the stroke orders, and pointed out some common beginner mistakes.

 

I never got any copy books when I toiled with the SÖ cursive in school, but there were some copy books in the 70s and 80s, unavailable now as far as I know.

 

The calligrapher Anckers was a co-author of two copy books from 1973, "Handskrivning 2A" and "Handskrivning 2B". The cover and a page from one of those can be seen in this blog post:

A blog post by a victim of the SÖ cursive

 

A later copy book is featured in this blog post:

Another blog post by a victim of the SÖ cursive

 

In the calligraphy book by Anckers I borrowed from the library there are a few pages about SÖ cursive. I'll try to scan them when I get back from a trip next week.

 

[Mercian]

3 hours ago, battra said:

 My best of luck with your SÖ project! I do think the script looks quite nice when it is written by a skilled hand and not by clumsy children!

 

Ah. That news may constitute a problem for my intended project…

 

…because my own handwriting tends far more towards the appearance of hastily-hewn Wraith-runes than it does to anything approaching calligraphy 

 

3 hours ago, battra said:

 

As for shipping books from Sweden to UK, apparently bokus.com and ginza.se shipped to UK up to brexit, but now it says "Please note that we currently don´t ship to UK" at both sites. Bokus ships to Ireland, in case you have some acquaintance there. Otherwise, there's always the possibility of proxy buying services. I googled for such companies and found shippn.com, but I can not endorse them since I have never used them.

 

Regarding SÖ copy books, I think you have found the only one currently in print. There are about 10 different cursive copy books available now in Sweden, all except one for the old style cursive. I actually used the other book by Britta Redin, about the old cursive style, and it was quite useful, even though it was obviously made for kids. It had the stroke orders, and pointed out some common beginner mistakes.

 

I never got any copy books when I toiled with the SÖ cursive in school, but there were some copy books in the 70s and 80s, unavailable now as far as I know.

 

The calligrapher Anckers was a co-author of two copy books from 1973, "Handskrivning 2A" and "Handskrivning 2B". The cover and a page from one of those can be seen in this blog post:

A blog post by a victim of the SÖ cursive

 

A later copy book is featured in this blog post:

Another blog post by a victim of the SÖ cursive

 

Very interesting - thank you 😊

And I love your phrasing ‘victim of the SÖ cursive” 😁

 

3 hours ago, battra said:

 

In the calligraphy book by Anckers I borrowed from the library there are a few pages about SÖ cursive. I'll try to scan them when I get back from a trip next week.

 

That would be very helpful 😃

 

Tack!

[Mercian]

Those two blogs are very helpful 

 

It seems that kids were confused the fact that in the SÖ-stilen model only some, rather than all, of the letters/glyphs are ever joined to the ones that follow them. And that the children - and their parents - found that trait of the script to be aesthetically displeasing.

And I definitely agree with Helena’s feelings about the way that she was taught it, in the sense that, if my schoolteacher had forced me to make all my writing large, I too would have found that to be very restrictive, uncomfortable, and dispiriting.
I tend to write my Wraith-runes in a fairly small size 😉

Her comment about the ‘overly-restrictive’ nature of the way that SÖ-stilen was imposed upon children also reminds me of the truism that ‘the Generals are always trying to fight the last war’…

The more-senior people in any organisation are always going to be of an older generation; because those posts need to be filled by people who have had time to develop sufficient relevant experience to be able to understand how the organisation functions, and the tasks that it is required to discharge, in order for them to be able to manage/direct/run it.
And their ideas are undoubtedly very good solutions for the problems that confronted them in their youth/the days when they were ‘working at the coalface’.
But, like Lotten says in her blog, time moves-on, the zeitgeist mutates, and the ‘restrictive’/‘proscriptive’/‘prescriptive’ didactic practices that were appropriate for one generation may be thoroughly unsuitable for the times/ways in which their successors work.
I expect that the reverse is also probably true.

 

If I manage to get my hands on any SÖ-stilen copybook, I may therefore attempt to adapt the ‘joins’ designed for Getty-Dubay Italic in their book Write Now for use in ‘my’ SÖ-stilen.
Assuming, that is, that the strokes in the two scripts’ glyphs are made in the same directions/orders, and the joins can be adapted across from G-DI to SÖ-stilen.

 

Slàinte,
M.

[battra]

Yes, I guess the unjoined letters was what caused most uproar. For me, the main issue was that I wanted to write cool letters with loops and flourishes  like my dad did, and like letters I found in old books!

 

Here are four pages from the book "Från A till Ö" by Kerstin Anckers. The first page is an introduction to the SÖ script, and is written mostly in standard italic. 

The last three pages were originally made for another book, and describes the SÖ alphabet. It is written in SÖ script, but with a broad edge nib (normally SÖ was monoline, at least it was always written with HB pencil in school). 

Written like this it looks rather similar to standard italic. Someone more well versed in italic than me might spot the big differences to standard italic if there are any.

 

The connections are listed as follows:

g, j, q, y are never connected to the next letter.

f, o, r, t, v, w are connected from the crossbar/ the waistline.

All other lower case letters are conncted from the baseline/ the writing line.

 

There are also two pieces of extracurricular information in the document, which we were not told in school - I guess they didn't want to confuse the kids.

1.  On the third page there are some alternative letter shapes.

2. It is possible to choose not to connect o, r, x sometimes. For example, she says it would look silly to connect the word "toft" with a single crossbar through all four letters.

 

The document:

https://pdfupload.io/docs/5f73af3b

 

Perhaps this is enough to start practicing the SÖ script. If you still would like to continue with the copy book, it seems that the Norwegian online shop imusic.no has the book for sale, and ships to UK. Perhaps some other Norwegian shop too, since Norway is not part of the EU.

[inkstainedruth]

This has been a very interesting thread to read.  Especially given that my current "standard" handwriting is a weird mix of joined & unjoined letters.  And (AFAIK) have NO Swedish ancestry at all....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[Mercian]

50 minutes ago, battra said:

Perhaps this is enough to start practicing the SÖ script. If you still would like to continue with the copy book, it seems that the Norwegian online shop imusic.no has the book for sale, and ships to UK. Perhaps some other Norwegian shop too, since Norway is not part of the EU.

Thank you so much for this!
For what you wrote in the post, for the PDF, and for the link to the shop in Norway too 😊

 

I intend to buy both the Skrivstilsboken for SÖ-stilen and the Skrivstilsboken for the ‘gamla stilen’ - so I may be able to learn your father’s loopy-cursive ‘old’ script too!
Especially as I have already found that, when trying to write quickly, I actually make a single-stroke-‘t’ that is very much like the one in that script.

 

Tack!
M.

[snusmumriken]

It looks like I have missed out on some interesting discussions here about SÖ-stilen. Myself I grew up in Sweden in the 1970's and was taught the SÖ script at school. As a kid I had poor fine motorics, so handwriting was never one of my strengths. Our teacher at the time was close to retirement age, and she made it no secret that she much rather would have taught us traditional cursive, had the school curriculum allowed it. I guess this attitude was rather common in Swedish schools at the time -- it was looked down upon like some kind of ersatz-cursive. This in turn gave us pupils (at least me) the feeling that school had deprived us of something -- a "proper" handwriting.

 

My own interest in Italic handwriting didn't come until almost 30 years later, when I got the idea that maybe I should try and do something about my terrible scribbles. I came across books by Alfred Fairbank, Tom Gourdie and Lloyd Reynolds and was quite surprised when I realised that the type of script that I had learned to despise at school actually was the very thing that they were advocating. Nowadays my view of the SÖ script has changed, and I have come to appreciate it more and more as it actually gave me a foundation to base an Italic handwriting on.

 

Kerstin Anckers never got the credit she deserved, and the school system never taught her handwriting the way she had intended. For instance, the copybooks she authored herself clearly show that she wanted pupils to get to try writing with a flat-edged fountain pen, yet we were never offered anything other than pencils to write with. The number of hours dedicated to handwriting on the school curriculum was also cut down.

 

I attach a few pages from one of the copybooks we used at school. Even though the books as such are no longer part of the school curriculum, I believe they are still under copyright, so I don't dare to upload the whole thing, but these pages should give you a good impression of what the SÖ script is like.

Anckers Handskrivning.pdf