An Introduction: The Signature Whisperer
For decades, I have been reading signatures. It started during my 29-year career in the FBI.
Applicants who had made it past the initial background checks would face a three-agent panel for an in-person interview. But we always had their applications. This was during the late 1970s and all through the 1980s. Importantly, there was a block for their signature.
Some would write out their full application with meticulous handwriting or printing, and many would type them. But everyone had to sign their name in the box at the end of the last page.
I noticed that some would start their signatures on the left side, while others would center their names. Those with long names would often try to make their writing smaller so their signatures would fit neatly into the box. Others, with either long names, or just a large writing style, would run roughshod over the right end of the box, and have their signature flow past it and into the next area, willy-nilly. This category was interesting to me, because I found those applicants had a certain personality and view of “the rules.” Often, they felt they were not necessarily written for them.
Then something happened that surprised me. With the list of three references, usually respected individuals, a rabbi or priest, sometimes a banker or a congressman, often one of these names, typed or printed neatly, would be in all capital letters. At first, I thought it was curious, but then I realized that almost everything we do, we do for a reason. When we write something, even if we may not be aware of it, there is a reason we do what we do.
So, with the next applicant who had written the names of Mr. Smith, Mr. Jones, and Mr. Brown, where Mr. Jones’s name was the only one all in capital letters, typed out, I decided to test my theory. I asked the applicant, “Can you tell me what it is about Mr. Jones that makes you hold him in higher esteem than Mr. Smith and Mr. Brown?”
Not exactly to my surprise, but an indication that my test had worked, the applicant answered my question. It had been so clear to him, in his own mind, that he did feel more respect for Mr. Jones than the others. But the thought process went by too fast for him even to wonder how I might have known that. So, in writing out that one name, all in caps, he told me something, not about himself, per se, but how he felt about another.
It meant that much more to me about what it means when writing one’s own name. I began on a certain quest to see if there was, indeed, more to it. By now, this seems to have been a lifelong project, and a wonderful one.
Note that there are graphologists, who study handwriting, and make an analysis using different characteristics, like how high you cross you Ts, where you dot your Is, and how your lettering slants. There are hundreds of aspects to point out and analyze, but, really, that is not for me.
Graphologists can show certain tendencies, but there is something else in signatures. It is much more defining, and you won’t find it in handwriting, alone.
In the half-a-dozen graphology books I read to learn their take on signatures, there was only a very cursory mention of them. Even then, they only applied the author’s rules about handwriting to the way one writes one’s signature. That is not at all the way I see it, so this book might be unique in what it sets out, and how it portrays what there is to be seen within a signature. What is revealed is often a surprise.
It took decades to develop this knowledge, and I can truly say, having viewed thousands of signatures, and conducted analyses of hundreds of them, the results have never been wrong. Sometimes, it has just been party fun, and others, it has helped to solve crimes. But important to my post-FBI career, when conducting comprehensive background investigations for large-business CEOs, a process which includes a “signature analysis,” this one part is what often enables a client to decide if he should, or should not, trust a particular individual in a position of great responsibility. And here is the line I have said scores of times, when asked if all of this is really so: This is not a parlor trick!
Read on and see for yourself.