Difficulties
Ink bleed-through from the pages' reverse sides was not as big a distraction as I was afraid it would be. While I obviously don't have a 100% transcription, I did not seem to encounter (m)any abbreviations, misspellings, or 19th century shibboleths to make deciphering Houston's writing more difficult.
No, the difficulties all lie in the fact that (for example) Houston's lower case Ps tend to look like lower case hs with long tails, like so:
And other handwriting idiosyncrasies: Capital Ds don't have the loop where I'd expect them to be, Ts tend to be sort of stunted, Ks in general are kind of hit-or-miss, lower case Es and Rs resemble each other, lower case Ys are formed the way Zs ought to be, and so on. It took me 3-4 read-throughs to eventually realize this was (...probably...) the word "drink":
It's very useful to try reading the letters both at ~100% and ~50-60% zooms. There's not a huge difference between the viewing levels (it's not like you go from seeing only one word at a time to seeing a full paragraph or anything so dramatic), but it's enough to add a slightly different perspective on what you're looking at. Forest vs trees and all. Of course, when switching back and forth, I'd keep doubting what I was reading and changing my mind.
It's sort of like a Magic Eye puzzle (except I can interpret anything whatsoever in these letters) where you kind of read and re-read and re-read and, occasionally, inspiration strikes and suddenly that word that looks like "Satnfahases" is likely "Salutations." Typewritten correspondence: sooo much better.
Very helpful post, Elaine. I think posting examples helps everyone working on this project.
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