Mimeograph letter or not?

[N_Cook]

How to tell? Googling the phone number then its from an estate agent making out its a personal letter of house purchase and private phone number . So just junk mail, but interesting in telling whether by human or not. Envelope has postage stamp and the "hand" much as the A4 office paper inside. All the same letters are noticeable, to my non-graphologist eye, have differences. No dottiness of laser or inkjet printer under low mag microscope. All left hand line starts are not in register, as are the bottoms of words not preciely in line and lines are not perfectly parallel. Is a mdern day mimeograph a robot hand holding a biro, with sufficient sloppiness/fuzziness to remove stepper-motor jerks? So far no hint of technology found, any more ideas?

[Chris Bacon]

You could phone him up and ask him.

My friend had one recently. From "Adam Barker Company Director" (Orchards estate agent), who was "looking for more space for his family". I regard this as sharp practice, or even abuse. I assume he's trying to get property at a lower price than if advertised.

[Andy Burns]

Not quite the same, but during lockdown I assume the JWs have been unable to go out and recruit on the doorstep, I've had a hand written and letter from a local JW, and it seems to be a nationwide tactic as one arrived at my father's house too. I presume they have enough members with time on their hands to go to the extent of writing them individually.

[N_Cook]

I forgot to add that my suspicion went to machine done letter as it otherwise could be a pro-forma letter with just the requirement to change the name of the road in each case, buried in the text. With the appropriate spacing adjustment throughout the letter and adding a house number as well as road on the envelope

[John Rumm]

You could apply Occam's razor - the most obvious explanation of it looking like a hand written letter is that it was hand written. Lots of EA's will canvas areas looking for prospective properties to sell.

[Martin Brown]

HP7475A pen plotter could do it back in the early 80's. Tricks to make small random variations in vertical scale and slant with ease. It is quite amazing what you can do with cubic splines and signatures.

The pain and suffering was in digitising a handwritten font. The thing it couldn't get right was pen pressure (up/down) but modern kit can.

OTOH they may be using manual office drudges or unpaid interns.

[N_Cook]

A 50 word letter even for interns ,repeated hundreds of times seems unlikely. I remember having to do 500 lines at school, its the tedium of the repeats rather than the writing itself. Ended up finding a fudge, tying some pens together and doing 5 at a time over some felt backing to the paper, but the bloody teacher twigged that and another 500 lines, the bastard.