The most famous signature in American history belongs to John Hancock, who as president of the Second Continental Congress was the first person to sign the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Hancock’s iconic signature had not always been so flamboyant, as these two books reveal.

A teenaged John Hancock signed this dictionary twice inside the front cover and once at the top of the title page. These youthful signatures are simple and round—note the squat J and the loops at the top of the capital H—and bear little resemblance to Hancock’s famous signature on the Declaration.

By the time he signed the title page of London and Its Environs Described, which he probably owned starting in his mid-twenties, Hancock had developed the familiar, flamboyant John Hancock, with the elongated J balanced by the adventurous curl of the k.

Shown above, Nathan Bailey, An Universal Etymological English Dictionary (London: D. Midwinter et al., 1737). Rare Book Collection PE1620.B3 1737 CB. Image courtesy of SUL Special Collections.

Hancock’s signature revealed his patrician status in colonial society. Born in 1737, he grew up in the house of his uncle, a wealthy Boston merchant, and was educated at Boston Latin School and Harvard College before becoming an American patriot leader in the late 1760s. In the eighteenth century, a good hand was the sign of a good man. Several cramped and inelegant scripts, such as Gothic and Secretary, had been in use in early modern England. By about 1750, however, a new Italian script derived from the writing of the Florentine humanists of the Renaissance had displaced its rivals. Graceful handwriting, along with such genteel affectations as tea drinking and umbrella toting, gained popularity among the rising middling classes in eighteenth-century Britain and its American colonies. George Washington learned a form of Italian script called Round Hand (see the case entitled “In the Midst of War” for an example of Washington’s handwriting). Benjamin Franklin cribbed an English writing manual and published it as The American Instructor: Or, Young Man’s Best Companion (1748).