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Reginald Piggott


Reginald "Reg" Piggott (1930 - c. 2014) was a British book cartographer whose maps were known for their elegance, clarity, and distinctive italic script. His work was published by Cambridge University Press and The Folio Society among other presses. Early in his life, he was a campaigner for better handwriting and in 1957 organised a survey of British handwriting which drew over 25,000 responses and was subsequently published in book form. He advocated the use of a form of italic script to replace the civil service script widely used in Britain which he thought tended to illegibility when written at speed.

Reginald Piggott was born in 1930. He married Marjorie. He was a long time resident of Decoy Lodge, Decoy Road, Potter Heigham, Norfolk.

In February 1957, eleven newspapers and journals published a letter from Reginald Piggott of 10 Finlay Drive, Dennistoun, Glasgow, in which he requested samples of handwriting. By far the greatest response came from readers of The Observer whose readers sent him 15,000 samples of their writing. In an article in that paper in March 1957, Piggott explained that he had been interested in the history of handwriting since he had begun to study calligraphy and that he wished to develop a "practical, everyday cursive" script to replace the civil service style then in use in Britain that was derived from Victorian copperplate writing but which tended to illegibility when written at speed. By gathering samples of handwriting, he hoped to develop a new style that would command widespread acceptance. He made clear that he was not a graphologist and was not offering insights into the character of the writer.

Piggott envisaged a simplified script that dispensed with loops and flourishes and reduced letter forms to as fundamental a shape as possible. In a running script, joins were to be made in the simplest manner. He went on to discuss the beauty of italic script, which he used in his own writing, and the unsuitability of the ball point pen to produce it before concluding that once his research was complete "and it is certain that the new style is near perfect", then it could be widely adopted, leading to a great improvement in the handwriting of the nation.


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