As per my post last night on the forgery question, it is noteworthy the alacrity with which the issue of the documents authenticity has been raised in the mainstream press. For example, today’s NYT: Commander’s Son Questions Memos on Bush’s Service

Farrell C. Shiver, a forensic document examiner based in Georgia who said he was a Republican, said the superscript “th’s” throughout the memos were “something you would expect to find being done with a computer” and were “not consistent with something that you would expect to find from someone typing a document; they used typewriters in that particular time.”

Mr. Shiver also said he was suspicious of the spacing in the memos and the curves in their apostrophes.

But he said that while the font seemed unusual for the period, “that does not prove that the documents are not genuine.”

Philip Bouffard, a forensic document specialist from Ohio who created a commonly used database of at least 3,000 old type fonts, said he had suspicions as well. “I found nothing like this in any of my typewriter specimens,” said Dr. Bouffard, a Democrat. He also said the fonts were “certainly consistent with what I see in Times Roman,” the commonly used Microsoft Word font.

However, Dr. Bouffard said, a colleague had called his attention to similarities between the font in the memos and that of the IBM Selectric Composer of the early 1970’s.

But he said it would be unusual for Mr. Bush’s commanding officer to have had the IBM machine because of its large size.

Dr. Bouffard said he would see if the fonts match more closely on Friday. “The problem I’m going to run into if this matches and Times Roman matches, to the extent of what we are able to see on these poor miserable copies that are passing around,'’ he said, “then I don’t think anybody’s going to be able to say for sure.'’

A senior executive at CBS said said, “We are convinced our source who got the documents had access to them and we trust the source.'’ He added, “Can we produce the typewriter they came from in 1972 or 1973? Obviously not.'’

No, but one wagers that one could find out what likely equipment was used at the time and obtain samples. Further, one could look at known memos from that same office to see if there is any evidence to suggest that other documents had similar fonts and spacing.

The following also occurred to me:

It has only been in the last ten years, maybe less, that most people used type-written materials easily and commonly. For example: when I worked in a law office in the early 1990s none of the attorney’s (save one newly minted associate) even had computers in their offices (these were guys in their 40s). What are the odds that a Lt. Colonel would be typing memos back in 1973?–especially memos to himself? If they had been typed by a secretary, common practice would have it that the initials of the secretary would be on the document, usually at the bottom left corner.

Further, assuming that advanced equipment was available that would have produced the fonts and spacing in question, would a Lt. Col know how to use it? more importantly, would he use it for a memo to a file?

It is most strange, to be sure.

We are so used to technology, especially with documents, that it is easy to forget the way it used to be.

James Joyner has more.