Handtalk, Hand Gestures, Hand Analysis

Welcome to the tenth post of Love Thy Library! This week’s selects are of a single theme—I’m sure you can guess what it is :P. Yes, hands! I do love hands, and photos of hands, and the shapes they make and watching them do things, but I’m not really sure why… I even made a book called Hands Doing Things.

The last book featured was one of my first ‘favourites’ on the Internet Archive in 2016, only for its title and cover design. I read through sections of it while putting this together and was sucked right in. I want to read your palms!

Enjoy this week’s selection, and as usual, chime in with your thoughts, observations, stories, etc! What interesting facts do you have about hands?

Title: Handtalk: An ABC of Finger Spelling & Sign Language
Author: Remy Charlip, Mary Beth & George Ancona
Year: 1980
Publisher: Four Winds Press
Loaned from: Internet Archive

The elements of this book that excite me include the check-out card, the interactive activity of decoding the letters, the little b&w photos collaged on top of the coloured photographs, the use of finger paint to demonstrate motion, the ‘ILY’ shorthand, sign language in general and so much more!

Title: Il Dizionario Dei Desti Italiani
Author: Bruno Munari
Year: 1994
Publisher: Roma Adnkronos
Loaned from: Internet Archive

The elements of this book that excite me include BRUNO MUNARI (a favourite human), four different languages side by side, the illustrated gestures, the glow of light behind the ‘invitation’ gesture, knowing there is a gesture for having or starting a ‘secret liaison’, and the ‘artful’ gesture that “indicate[s] the person under discussion knows the ropes”.

Title: How To Know People By Their Hands
Author: Josef Ranald
Year: 1938
Publisher: Modern age books, inc.
Loaned from: Internet Archive

The elements of this book that excite me include the cover and title, the triple seal logo, the list of lines of the palm, the special markings in the palm, that what I thought was a fingerprint ‘whirl’ is actually a ‘whorl’ and the palm print analysis!

If you choose to share the content from this newsletter, by all means! But please give credit where credit is due :-).

Lastly, I’ve enabled pledges for Love Thy Library. Ultimately these are still free, but if you feel the desire to support LTL it would be greatly appreciated! I love putting these together for me and for you :-).

See you in a fortnight!

Love Lucy from Ok Books