RedWorker
24th October 2014, 03:39
Apparently it was notoriously bad... :lol:
"Much has been made of how these differing characteristics revealed themselves in the handwriting of the two men, with Engels' studious, symmetrical script (decorated here and there by a neat, humorous illustration) offering a marked contrast to Marx's furious, blotch-marked scribbling. Yet, in a neat metaphor for their friendship, it was often only Engels who could decipher Marx's meaning."
"Marx's General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels", Tristram Hunt, p. 116
"After Marx's death, Engels had to break off his scientific work to take on the Herculean task of ordering his friend's literary estate. 'Quotations from sources in no kind of order, piles of them jumbled together, collected simply with a view to future selection. Besides that there is the handwriting which certainly cannot be deciphered by anyone but me, and then only with difficulty', he wrote despairingly to August Bebel after wading through the Maitland Park archives."
"Marx's General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels", Tristram Hunt, p. 297
"The line-by-line editing of Marx's impenetrable, cramped handwriting was endangering Engels' health. The manuscripts, according to Edward Aveling, were in a terrible state: 'They contain abbreviations which have to be guessed at, crossing-outs and innumerable corrections which have to be deciphered; it is as difficult to read as a Greek palimpsest with ligatures.' By the mid-1880s, Engels' eyes were weakening and he began suffering from conjunctivitis and myopia. To ease the strain, Engels was forced to initiate a new generation, Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein, into the hieroglyphic mysteries of Marx's handwriting and finally to employ a typesetter, Oskar Eisengarten, to take dictation. But even with this help, the final checking of Marx's manuscript was still up to Engels."
"Marx's General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels", Tristram Hunt, p. 298
"On January 28, 1899 Engels had written to Kautsky offering to teach him to decipher Marx's handwriting and to pay him 50 pounds per annum expenses for two years to make a fair copy of the manuscript - about 750 pages - of the fourth volume of Das Kapital."
"Friedrich Engels", W. O. Henderson, p. 729
"Engels had not enough energy to arrange Marx's manuscripts of Capital and the handwriting of the remainders of the manuscripts was almost illegible, so Engels was extremely anxious to train his successor, meaning Kautsky. Under Engels' careful training Kautsky basically grasped the characteristics of Marx's handwriting. Under these circumstances Kautsky dared not to act and did not publish Marx's Theories of Surplus Value until near ten years after Engels' death."
"Rethinking Marx", Shipeng Zou, Xuegong Yang, p. 32
"Much has been made of how these differing characteristics revealed themselves in the handwriting of the two men, with Engels' studious, symmetrical script (decorated here and there by a neat, humorous illustration) offering a marked contrast to Marx's furious, blotch-marked scribbling. Yet, in a neat metaphor for their friendship, it was often only Engels who could decipher Marx's meaning."
"Marx's General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels", Tristram Hunt, p. 116
"After Marx's death, Engels had to break off his scientific work to take on the Herculean task of ordering his friend's literary estate. 'Quotations from sources in no kind of order, piles of them jumbled together, collected simply with a view to future selection. Besides that there is the handwriting which certainly cannot be deciphered by anyone but me, and then only with difficulty', he wrote despairingly to August Bebel after wading through the Maitland Park archives."
"Marx's General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels", Tristram Hunt, p. 297
"The line-by-line editing of Marx's impenetrable, cramped handwriting was endangering Engels' health. The manuscripts, according to Edward Aveling, were in a terrible state: 'They contain abbreviations which have to be guessed at, crossing-outs and innumerable corrections which have to be deciphered; it is as difficult to read as a Greek palimpsest with ligatures.' By the mid-1880s, Engels' eyes were weakening and he began suffering from conjunctivitis and myopia. To ease the strain, Engels was forced to initiate a new generation, Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein, into the hieroglyphic mysteries of Marx's handwriting and finally to employ a typesetter, Oskar Eisengarten, to take dictation. But even with this help, the final checking of Marx's manuscript was still up to Engels."
"Marx's General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels", Tristram Hunt, p. 298
"On January 28, 1899 Engels had written to Kautsky offering to teach him to decipher Marx's handwriting and to pay him 50 pounds per annum expenses for two years to make a fair copy of the manuscript - about 750 pages - of the fourth volume of Das Kapital."
"Friedrich Engels", W. O. Henderson, p. 729
"Engels had not enough energy to arrange Marx's manuscripts of Capital and the handwriting of the remainders of the manuscripts was almost illegible, so Engels was extremely anxious to train his successor, meaning Kautsky. Under Engels' careful training Kautsky basically grasped the characteristics of Marx's handwriting. Under these circumstances Kautsky dared not to act and did not publish Marx's Theories of Surplus Value until near ten years after Engels' death."
"Rethinking Marx", Shipeng Zou, Xuegong Yang, p. 32