by Maria Victoria Sen Samaranch

Dear Friends,

As we just about to meet in Barcelona in a few days and honor Professor Vels, I feel I want to share with you some of the most important memories that come to my mind when thinking about him.

I heard from Augusto Vels himself that his interest in handwriting arose at his very early childhood when his teacher  -in his then little village in the south of Spain, Puerto Lumbreras - used to ask him to collect his colleagues copybooks. He remembered how he surprised them all in finding out naturally and easily which handwriting belonged to each one of them.  He said it was at this very early moment when he became aware he had some special ability related to handwriting, different from people.

Some years ago he invited me to attend during some days the ceremony for his appointment as Honor Citizen in his own town and the opening ceremony of a Library and Museum as well as a street labeled with his name, all of it offered by the Town Hall of Puerto Lumbreras .

Being with him and his family and those who recognized his human qualities and work you could better appreciate he was a very plain man, he didn't like to show. But he was sincerely pleased being recognized at that moment of his career in the local place of his roots and his ancestors.

He was a self made man with strong will and clear and definite motivations, an outstanding human and professional quality.   The kind of relationship he used to establish with people around him was very selective and different and much deeper from what we are normally used to see.

You could easily see he was moving in a deeper world, the world of non-verbal communication, the world of those who know, understand and accept wisely the very depths of human nature.  He did not speak much with words but all of his attitude and movements were very personnel. He did not make anything in demand of attention but you could feel his body language through the way he waved his body in walking and moved his hands in a soft and gentle way.  He was very kind to everybody, not very talkative, with a soft voice rich in tones, which was not strong and broke from time to time due to his high sensibility.  He even used to loose his voice sometimes, specially when something touched him deep.

He was not a public man; he was a man of research and study who had a deep insight into human psychology.  A man who loved beauty and  art as he showed marrying at early age to a well known sculptress and living in a little Mediterranean village near the see, in Barcelona surrounded by her works in marble and stone and by her intense love for flowers.

Augusto Vels started being known in the early forties in Barcelona by his articles about graphology and his graphological analysis published in well-known newspapers at that moment where no one knew about graphology.  Since then he was more and more respected for his professional performance.  He gave lectures, published articles and founded the Asociación de Grafólogos Consultivos.

Among the many basic books he had published on Graphology the ones I have and have been working with are: Tratado de Grafología, 1945 - El lenguaje de la Escritura, 1949 -Escritura y Personalidad, 1955 --- La Selección de Personal, 1982 - El lenguaje de la Escritura, 1949- Diccionario de Grafologia, 1983-

He had been the representative of Société Française de Graphologie for Spain since 1944 and had been widely recognized by the International Graphological Professional Community as one of the outstanding modern graphologists but probably  a wider recognition of his work and value is still to come.