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The Collation

Thomas Shelton's shorthand version of the Lord's Prayer

Commenters to last week’s post, Heirloom apples and pears, anyone?, correctly identified the shorthand text found in Henry Oxinden’s miscellany (Folger MS V.b.110) as the Lord’s Prayer written out according to Thomas Shelton’s method of shorthand, called tachygraphy.

Below is the prayer and Creed from the last leaf of the Folger copy of the 1674 edition of Thomas Shelton’s Tachygraphy: The most exact and compendious method of short and swift writing, that hath ever yet been published by any followed by the manuscript version from Oxinden’s miscellany:

Lord's Prayer and Creed in Shelton

The Lord’s Prayer and Creed in T. Shelton’s Tachygraphy (London, 1674), detail from final leaf

Comments

[…] of shorthand devised by Thomas Shelton, first published in its full form in a 1635 book entitled Tachygraphy, and used most famously by Samuel Pepys in his diary. The writer here, though, had written out […]

A Document Speaks | Ben Jonson's Walk — June 19, 2013