Mind Your Book Nancy with Alphabet on Reverse (and Poultry Poundage)

Regular price $15.00

I'm not entirely sure why I find this very old scrap so appealing and satisfying, with "Mind your Book Nancy" repeated three times on one side and a partial alphabet three times on reverse, but it certainly has something to do with the hard-trying effort invested in making each of those letters and phrases, including the fact that one "mind" looks like "mond" and also alludes to "mend," and that the second "book" looks a lot like "boob"! (On the alphabet, surely an instructor wrote it the first time at the top, and then our Nancy, or whatever her name was, tried mighty hard to copy those letters, seeming to more or less give up by the end!) It's also the layers of markmaking on both sides, with what guesses in a farm order for pounds of turkey and chicken below the penmanship practice on the Nancy side, and some quick arithmetic below the alphabets on the other. And then these ink stains all over too. 

6 1/4" x 5 3/4", ink on laid paper, mid 19th c. I believe.