GRAPHO ANALYSIS GIVES YOU PROTECTION FROM CHISELERS, THIEVES, HEARTBREAK AND MURDERERS. HOW IT STARTED, HOW IT GREW UP, WHY YOU CAN DEPEND ON IT.

You may be one of those readers who dislikes most heartily to take part in a conversation where one person keeps saying, I, I, until he wears out the pronoun. If you are we have something in common from the start, but no matter how I have tried to find a way to get away from this abominable I, it seems there is no way.

My life has been devoted to grapho analysis and to the research that has gone into it. My countless miles of travel, and hundreds of thousands of letters which were employed for many years in testing writers and their reactions is part of this history. However, you will not have to endure any more I's than absolutely necessary to give you the freedom and pro­tection that came to me personally as a result of understanding what handwriting reveals.

• HOW YOU GET PROTECTION

When you are promised protection, the word is not idly used. You are protected by knowing people. First, how they feel; second, how they think, and then how they will act because they feel and act in line with how they feel. An instance comes to mind that occurred many years ago.

An old lady who was a very dear friend had a nephew who was the apple of her eye. Depression conditions made it impossible for him to find a job. She asked my help. His handwriting warned me that he was selfish, deceitful, and untrustworthy. However, I owed that old lady a deep debt of gratitude for things she had done, not only for me, but others.

So I made a place for the young chap. He was brilliant. He had ability, but in giving him the job grapho analysis protected me. I knew what to expect, and it was possible to anticipate what was certain to happen. He did all right for several months. Then remittances that were supposed to have reached my office were not recorded. Passing thru his office one day I saw him tear up a letter, drop it in the waste basket, and slip a bill into his pocket.

That evening I searched the waste basket. A customer had sent five dollars in currency but the accounting department did not show the remittance. That remittance had gone into his pocket. However, I was not surprised. He had a family. His aunt had been a friend of enduring worth. If I had fired him, it would have hurt her, and he became a guinea pig by which what I had learned from handwriting could be tested.

Weeks and months went by. There were no major defalcations, just shortages of five dollars, ten dollars, sometimes only a dollar or two a day. Then one day he wrote a letter to a customer who owed close to a hundred dollars. If the remittance were sent directly to him, he would square the books for fifty dollars.

That morning the young fellow and I had a conference. I did not accuse him of being a thief. There was no reason to do so. When he was hired he had given me all the warning I needed, and so if there was any blame, it rested on my own shoulders. But I had tested grapho analysis. He had helped to prove it by dropping letters into the waste basket, taking money, and feeling that he was getting away with it.

• GRAPHO ANALYSIS HAS BEEN PROVED STEP BY STEP

This incidentally is how grapho analysis was tested and proved. Not in one instance but in hundreds upon hundreds of cases. Men and women, regardless of age, race or political or church affiliation. Even after I began teaching my first students the tests went on except we were both conducting them. They were doing it because they were warned not to believe anything they found in their lesson books just because they were in print. They were urged to test and prove every point, which brings us down to how grapho analysis saved one of the early students' life. This particular lady was charming, highly educated, and a steadfast church worker. She headed committees, entertained the pastor at teas, worked on committees under his directions. She was, if you wish to use a Biblical phrase, "full of good works."

Then the long time pastor was compelled to take a long vacation. A new man came to town, and the good church worker took him into her home, her husband exerted himself to support his wife's efforts to make the stranger feel at home. The man was popular, good looking, conducted himself well. Everyone liked him.

Then he wrote a note about a committee to the grapho analyst. That night she told her husband, "He can't come into the house again. I'm going to see my sister out of state while this man is here." She fulfilled her intention, and it was another church member who was raped and strangled. That charming fellow was a sex driven man with good clothes, a fine vocabulary, and graciousness, who was ready to turn into a sex demon when he was refused what he demanded.

•"KNOW THYSELF"

So grapho analysis, as you master rules in the following pages, may help you identify a murderer or a thief. One thing is certain. As you examine your own handwriting, you will get a new understanding of yourself. You will suddenly find that some traits you have considered "bad" are not bad at all. Take for instance the lady who wrote me after getting her analyses pointing out that she was proud. "Every night I ask God to help me overcome pride," she said in her letter. You will learn how to recognize pride from handwriting, and you will see what an im­portant trait it is in making your own life happier, and more successful.

You will be sure of one other gain. You will no longer feel there is any value to gossip. You will not need to have what others think about someone to guide you, for you will be able to take a page of handwriting and know how the writer feels, thinks, and acts.

•YOU CONQUER FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN

You may find that some of your friends cannot be trusted. This is entirely possible. However, that docs not mean that you need to discard them as acquaintances—which, after all, is all they have been. You are not learning to use grapho analysis to set yourself up as judge. You are not learning to analyze handwriting just to find "bad" things in others. Grapho analysis is not a science to use in finding either "good" or "bad" but the truth. For instance, you may think that deceit is "always a bad trait. Instead it is merely a trait. It may be used for the good of others, or it can become a dangerous trait. Its value depends on how it is used.

You will gain one other advantage. If you are shy, afraid of people and what they say, you will find that knowing handwriting gives you free­dom from fear. The reason is rather simple. The child that fears the dark is afraid because he does not understand the dark. You are timid, afraid because you do not understand people. When you actually know them you will have no reason for fear unless you have done something to injure others. Even then you may have only yourself to fear.

This promise that you will lose fear is a lesson that I learned during the first few years of my research. Audiences from coast to coast now tell me that there could not have been a time when I was afraid. They do not know. As a young man I was timid, fearful, hesitant to use what I knew. I could get along all right in a play or something I had memorized but to stand on my feet and talk off the cuff was unthinkable.

Then one day Albert G. Burns, founder of the Inventors of America, told me to go out and talk to a group of inventors from all parts of America. I refused. I could not. Al Burns looked at me and said. "If you know anything about it and believe in grapho analysis you can." I talked. He had brought me to a realization that when I knew and understood people there was nothing to fear. So as you go along with your study of these rules you will be gaining knowledge that others do not have. You will under­stand them, and there is no knowledge as valuable.

•A SCOUNDREL EXPOSED

It gives you unexpected protection. At the start of World War II when air mail was not so common as it is today, a letter reached me late one afternoon. It was from a woman who had been trained in grapho analysis, and it contained a number of sheets of a love letter. ikI do not have any right to analyze this writing," she wrote. "It is my daughter's fiance and she wants you to give a thorough analysis. We both feel that because she is my daughter I might be influenced, and this is important.'*

Examination of the handwriting showed that the writer was a scoun­drel, and might easily be a murderer. It was not an opinion. The hand­writing revealed the picture as clearly as an x-ray could have done. So the report was made, mailed, as requested, air mail and special delivery.

A few days later another letter brought the rest of the story. The young man was a stranger in the community, but he and the young woman had met, fallen in love, and were to be married almost at once. Then, as a matter of possible curiosity, the daughter let her mother read a letter and the mother was appalled by what she found. Result, the mother and daughter agreed to submit the handwriting to another analyst, and quite naturally selected the mother's teacher. That analysis undoubtedly saved the young woman's happiness, and possibly her life, for shortly after the engagement was broken the police from another state arrested the fellow as a criminal and took him back to the scene of his crimes.

You will get such protection for your life as you learn and use grapho analysis. You will not get it by merely skimming through these pages, getting some of the rules in mind, and confusing others. Study the rules, and the example of handwriting, and then use what you learn. For more than thirty years students of grapho analysis undertaking professional train­ing have been advised not to believe what they have found in lesson books just because it is in print. When you learn something, test it, prove it and then you have it even if your books are destroyed.

•ETHICAL USES OF HANDWRITING ANALYSIS

At this point there is one point that must be emphasized. Do not approach the study of grapho analysis just to find out about people. There is a vast difference between learning to understand people, and finding characteristics that you may feel will be juicy bits of gossip. When you ex­amine a handwriting you are certain to find some traits that you do not like, but you are not judge nor jury.

You may find unusual talent for dancing or painting and you may believe the dancing is sinful. That is your right, but you still have the knowledge that the writer has natural talent for dancing. Or you may find evidence that a writer is likely to steal. There are many potential thieves possibly who have never been caught, and possibly some of them have never actually stolen. Handwriting does not reveal that a man has done any certain thing, any more than it reveals that he has cancer or tuberculosis. It does show the individual who, given an opportunity, will steal. But if you know this, and protect yourself against his doing so from you, then you have had protection.

However, learn discretion in keeping what you learn to yourself. If you were a professional grapho analyst you would be bound by a code of ethics as binding as the ethics of any medical man. You should tell the person whose handwriting you examine the truth, but that does not mean telling all of her or his family, and the neighbors. Gossip is one of the most reprehensible things in civilization and has broken more homes than any other single human weakness. Analyze handwriting truthfully, but do not repeat to others what you have found.

• CURING SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS

You will be able to do a vast amount of good. A well known medical man told me this story of how he helped a mother who was his patient. The mother had a son in high school. He was just squeezing by, sometimes was not even making a passing grade. The mother was exceedingly worried, and this worry affected her as a patient. Worry has such effect, you know.

Finally the doctor suggested that she provide him with the boy's hand­writing, with the thought that he might find the answer. He did. The youngster was so self-conscious that he did not dare to stand up among the young folks of his own age and tell what he knew. He thought they knew more than he did, and between under-rating his own ability and the self-consciousness he was making his high school days agony, not only for him­self, but his mother and his teachers all suffered.

This doctor, who uses grapho analysis frequently in understanding his patients, had a visit with the boy. He showed the young man from his own handwriting that he was equal and possibly superior mentally to some of his classmates. He convinced him that there was no reason for either fear or self-consciousness, then convinced the mother that she could aid by having her son recite to her. When the bov discovered for himself that he knew and was able to hold his own with other students his own age, his problem was whipped. The boy gained, the mother showed better results from her medical treatment, and the teachers found that they had a near-honor student.

•GRAPHO ANALYSIS HELPS PRACTICAL PSYCHOLOGY

Another instance of a similar nature was successfully handled by the credit manager of a big corporation where he used his knowledge to deter­mine the responsibility of customers. This particular credit manager was invited to talk on his experiences before a large business group. After the talk one of the business men pushed forward and asked for a few minutes of the speaker's time. "You may be able to help us with our son," he said. "My wife and I feel that we may have to send him either to a military school, or let the juvenile court send him to a state school. We simply can­not manage him. He's not a fool, but he has outgrown us."

As a result of that few minutes conversation, the father sent the lad's writing to the credit manager. He studied it. Then he asked for the writing of both parents. He studied those two specimens, and then visited the troubled family. It was a long and a serious interview, but grapho analysis had found the explanation of the trouble. Both parents had become in­volved in many personal and social activities. They were providing a good residence, good furniture in the residence, but they were not making a home for the boy. They were busy attending social functions, bridge clubs, busi­ness conferences.

The lad had become a problem because he resented being shoved to one side. He thought his parents did not care about him, but about their social and business lives. He had come to hate and fear them, and was merely striking back. Fortunately the parents accepted the revelations made from their own writing, the boy admitted that was the way he felt. Today that family is well adjusted, the parents are happy and proud of their son, and he in turn is making good and is fond of his parents, whom he now recog­nizes as something more than a source of money. He has found that they do love him, and he in turn is a wonderful son.

•YOU GET PERSONAL BENEFITS AND SELF-PROTECTION

You may have such experiences provided you study grapho analysis, as you will find it in the following pages. You may be skeptical, and there is nothing that the profession of grapho analysis will like better than for skeptics to be convinced.

This benefit and protection for you is after all the justification for writing this book, and because I began the research and stumbled onto the key that makes scientific handwriting analysis possible, it is necessary for me now and then to talk about myself. Forget that part, will you, and keep in mind that we are both devoting our time to grapho analysis, and what it can do for you in increasing your happiness, your cash in the bank, and your happiness in getting along with people while you earn your living.

You may have noted that I frankly admit that I stumbled onto the key that made grapho analysis possible. Actually, the start came simply because I got to Sunday school ahead of time. The little one room school house served as the church, and there was a long blackboard across one end of the building. On this particular Sunday one of the older boys who had graduated from the eighth grade had come back over the week-end and was writing strange symbols on the blackboard.

All of the early arrivals were properly impressed at how those mysteri­ous strokes could mean words. That was my introduction to shorthand, and when I went home after services it was with the deep-rooted determination that ifanyone else could make those strange curlicues mean words it would be equally possible for me. Somehow that resolution made when I was eight stuck until I was sixteen and could get my hands on the first short­hand book.

From that time on I studied shorthand. When other young fellows were chasing baseballs I was writing shorthand outlines and loving it. One system followed another until I had managed to learn at least in a passable way almost twenty different systems, and if you are starting to grow grey, you will recall that in the early part of the twentieth century there were almost as many shorthand systems as there arc ways of getting a home permanent wave today.

One other subject was essential although I did not know it then. I studied penmanship. Not just ovals, but Palmcrian, Zanerian, Ransom-erian, and half a dozen other muscular movement systems. One teacher after another must have added a grey hair here and there because of my papers. Only a few weeks ago I ran onto an old letter I had written back in those days, and just at first I thought it was the work of some successful penmanship teacher, until my eye caught one weakness.

I put long finals on almost every word. Very long finals, and the teachers said "No" and meant it. My papers would be all right for a day or two, and then I would slip back into my original penmanship sin, and would get the papers back with red ink strokes slashed across the tails on the words.

• LOVE LETTERS AND CORRESPONDENCE CLUBS

The why of this became a consuming thought. After all they had said, why did I seemingly obstinately continue to add those long strokes which did not belong there?, Although I was not very alert mentally, (my hand­writing from those days shows that I was mentally about as nim-com-poopish as the average, maybe more so) I came up against the problem of finding why I put those pesky tag ends on there. Monkeys had long tails, but I studied myself in the mirror and did not find any more resemblance than there was between other people and the simian.

Was I putting those tag ends on there because there was something wrong with me mentally, or was it because I liked shorthand instead of base­ball, and had a morbid fear of snakes? There was nothing else to do. The reason had to be found, and I set out to find it. No young fellow ever wrote more love letters and joined more correspondence clubs than I did in those days. Now and then I found a writer who put on long tails to the words, but their photographs all looked like nice girls, or fairly decent young fellows. When they did it, however, we certainly had one thing in common. What was it?

• TAUGHT 17 SYSTEMS OF SHORTHAND

It was more or less a matter of trial and error, disappointment, and repeated effort until something happened several years later. I had quali­fied as a shorthand teacher, not of one system but several, but the idea of learning anything about my problem from shorthand never occurred to me at that time—and then I actually stumbled onto the answer.

An employment agency had sent me to teach shorthand in a business college in Shawnee, Oklahoma. About the second day it was plain that I had made a mistake. The head of the school was drunk half the time, in­deed he was drunk the afternoon he found that the local business people were talking about running him out of town, and taking over his business school for me to manage. They did get rid of him as a menace to the morals of the town, and I started to Chicago, but stopped in Wichita be­cause I had met a business college man there who looked progressive.

Actually he was just about broke, but there was a little money in my watch pocket and we made a deal whereby I would stay and teach short­hand for at least a few weeks. Possibly he hired me expecting me to stay until he vvent broke, but that summer he began advertising me as the only shorthand teacher in captivity who could write and teach seventeen systems of shorthand. Those seventeen systems and that advertising was the answer to my question. Students who had been exposed to shorthand in high school or other business colleges, came flocking into school. There were Gregg, and Spencerian and Dougherty shorthand writers. All the shades of the Pitman systems, Benn Pitman. Issac Pitman, and a dozen variations all were enrolled in my dictation classes. All I had to do was dictate, and walk around looking over their shoulders and watch for inaccuracies. It was a scatterbrained bunch for most stenographers will agree that only a handful of people ever write shorthand as it is taught.

•HERE IS THE BIG IDEA . . .

It was a dreary afternoon and the Dague Business College had not folded as anticipated. I was dreaming of an editorship of a magazine in Chicago that never materialized, and suddenly back of Frank Gore's chair his shorthand notes hit me squarely. That is, the idea hit me. Frank made his shorthand notes exactly the way he acted. Precise, careful, and almost copybook right. He acted that way. Frank was just as precise as his cousin that I dated out of school. The rest of the class was straggling their notes over the white pages until it was sometimes impossible to determine whether the left to right stroke was intended for an m or n for a curved rather than a straight stroke.

Frank Gore's notes gave me the key to grapho analysis. It was not handwriting that would answer my questions. It was a stroke—an un­necessary stroke, that I had added to my practice pages that had earned those red marks for me. Strokes were what handwriting was made up of. not just letters. For instance, the longhand g had a down stroke, sometimes a backward stroke before the upward stroke was started. The s was made with a circle, but sometimes there was a circle inside of a circle, sometimes two circles. It was strokes, and that is what you will know more about when you complete this book.

From that afternoon the going was fairly easy. After I went into military service there were experiences that were valuable. There was plenty of opportunity to study handwriting as a reflection of people in my organization and slowly and steadily I was arriving at some basic con­clusions. There were times when some principle seemed to be verified, and then it would be knocked out entirely by something that had been over­looked.

One question has been frequently asked by people who are given to statistical thinking. It is a question that cannot be answered. There is no record of the specimens of handwriting nor the people who were studied. Certainly not hundreds or a few thousand. One man wrote me once that he had told someone four thousand odd, but I hope no one believed him. His handwriting showed he would not tell the truth, and as he was one of my test cases, long after proving the principles of grapho analysis, he may be interested, if alive, in knowing that he too was a test. Not a test to see if a principle was correct, but rather a test to prove that a certain combination of elemental traits would produce a scoundrel.

•STUDIED HUNDREDS OF LETTERS DAILY

As for the number of handwritings and people, there were not hun­dreds but thousands of them. My daily mail from magazine readers who were kind enough to read the stuff I wrote—and I wrote ceaselessly except when I was exploring handwriting, ran from fifty to two and three hun­dred letters a day. I read their letters, their confidences, and I studied their handwriting. Frequently our correspondence ran into a dozen or more letters. Every letter I wrote to my distant correspondent was worded to get a reaction. Aside from this the railroads and buses and cars took me over more than a hundred thousand miles, checking on individuals.

You may say, "the man did not have time to do anything else." You are correct. Many of my pieces of fiction and other magazine copy were written on portable typewriters in the caboose of a freight train. Other writing was done late at night. During the day I followed the job that provided my traveling expenses, and gave me a chance to talk to people, get their handwriting, study them, and their surroundings.

One other point was important. My explorations in order to answer my own question about the tails of my handwriting began when I was young. As years went by I was able to follow through «on cases where I had been puzzled.

If I had been sports-minded there would have been no grapho analysis. If the one and only girl had not married someone else, there would never have been any grapho analysis.

• IMPORTANT PEOPLE HELPED

There is a deep debt that you and I both owe to many very earnest scholars, men and women who had achieved too much fame to want to sign cigarette and liquor advertising who permitted me to study their hand­writing, prepare analyses, and then severely criticize them. They did us both a favor. They helped me and as grapho analysis in your hand becomes a tool to make your own life brighter they helped you.

Truly big people are always ready to help. It is the stuffed shirt who does not know and is scared to death that someone will find that he does not. is the only one who scoffs. Really big minds say, "If you have some­thing let us see it. If you are working to achieve something worth while, let us help you."

This does not mean that all of the people who helped were graduates of colleges. Some of them were and had forgotten it. Some had learned in the vast school of life how little they knew.

Even "bad" people, assured of anonymity frequently helped. I shall never forget one scoundrel who, when he learned what I was attempting to do asked me to take his handwriting, and tell him the truth. He sat thru it quietly, and then spent the rest of the night telling me what had hap­pened to him in his life, the little points I had missed, and where I was right.

•ARE YOU WILLING TO FACE YOURSELF?

This, my friend, is how grapho analysis has come to you. In the chapters that follow you are going to get a new look at yourself. When you find something you do not like in your own handwriting, face it like the fellow just mentioned. You are not perfect, and when you find things in your writing that you do not like, you can be sure they are there. And you can be equally sure that before you finally lay this book aside, you will have discovered how you can change at least some of the weaknesses, either discarding them, or overshadowing and starving them by building stronger traits that offset them. You will learn how you can change your own writing and change your character.

At this point you may feel like throwing this book down, and saying "I don't believe it," which after all would be foolish. A man cannot dis­believe a thing about which he knows nothing—and before you complete this book you will have learned how to strengthen your own personality by changing your writing. I know. I did it.

When you know how to use grapho analysis and so understand yourself you will also have found the key to changing your own character traits. This discovery of how to change personality came about as a result of demand. Thousands of men and women through the years wrote, "You analyze our handwriting and tell us how we feel, and think, and act, but you do not tell us how to correct our weaknesses. Do this, and you will have helped us more than money or anything else can repay."

With such a challenge a second period of testing began. It was just as tedious, just as heartbreaking as the long search to find the answer to my own question about the tails on my handwriting. However, one thought persisted. If handwriting revealed the traits of character of the individual, would it be possible to change the writing, and eventually change the indi­vidual, causing him to gain traits he wished to have, and nullify those he wanted to destroy or remove from his thinking?

That was how the tests began, and in a later chapter you will be given the key to how to make such changes. This book alone cannot teach you all there is to know on the subject. Only a professional grapho analyst can guide you in making some of the more complicated changes, but you can change your character by changing your writing.

•CHANGE IN HANDWRITING CHANGES A LIFE

The case of Charlie is a striking example of how such changes can be accomplished, and the results. Charlie made a great deal more money than he ever expected to have by getting the franchise for pin-ball machines in army camps during World War II. When he settled up after the War was over he had money, a lot of money he did not know how to handle. Quite naturally he immediately became the saucer of honey around which hovered men with doubtful ideas that they wanted to finance. Charlie invested and invested until he suddenly found himself without funds. His invest­ments were not paying off. His days of being a capitalist were over, with his bank account overdrawn. He had urged that I accompany him on a trip to the city, and we had unexpected car trouble. It was his car and he wrote a check to cover the repairs. That evening I found him in his hotel room writing a suicide note. Under rather severe cross-questioning he admitted what he considered his failure in life. He was whipped and was not only broke, but ashamed.

"I can't go back and face Mary," he said. "She does not know the situation, and she can of course go back to her profession and take care of thechildren."

As a result of that conversation he started a very simple handwriting exercise, and only a few weeks later breezed into the office to report that he hadbeen made branch manager of a concern where his earnings would mount. He had something he had never had before. He had self-confidence. He had made a few changes in his writing—not major changes, and he had achieved results. You will find out how he did it, before you lay this book aside. You will learn, too, what this simple exercise did for me at a time when I faced great responsibility.

Altogether you will find much in the following chapters that you can use. This is the only reason for writing this book. It is not an easy task, and as I write it there is always the need to omit the pronoun I. What grapho analysis has done for me, and for others, is no more than it can do foryou.

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