On Gould’s Official Signature

Why does the official Glenn Gould signature only have one “n”? I know it’s a bit of a stupid question but I’m curious!

Not stupid at all—many people have justifiably wondered about this particular eccentricity.

For the record, he was born “Glenn,” and that remained his legal first name. But in his signature, from early in his life, he wrote both “Glenn” and “Glen” interchangeably, and seems to have used “Glen” more frequently in his later years. (When choosing a sample of the signature to use on the cover of the Foundation’s magazine, in 1995, I selected a late specimen in which the first name is very clearly misspelled “Glen,” just to be naughty.) Indeed, it can be difficult to find a specimen of his signature in which a double-N is clearly discernible.

Why this is so, I cannot say for sure. Perhaps we are dealing once again with an inexplicable superstition. Gould’s longtime record producer, Andrew Kazdin, in his 1989 memoir Glenn Gould at Work: Creative Lying, reports Gould’s own justification for writing “Glen” in his signature: He had discovered early on that once he started making two N’s he was unable to stop and ended up writing three N’s. Kazdin considered this an absurd explanation “coming from the man who could play an unbroken stream of thirty-second notes faster and cleaner than any other pianist on the face of the earth.” And yet, maybe there’s something to this: In many of the signatures in which Gould does seem to be attempting the double-N, the first name simply peters out into vague squiggles open to endless interpretation—Glem, Glew, Glemn, Glern, Glerv, Glemm, and yes, even the dreaded Glennn …