> Like a monk, he labored over his document every day, adding carefully crafted letters and elaborate drawings to what became, over nine years, a remarkably full chronicle of the decade.
That said, I got a femme vibe off the handwriting too. And the inclusion of cartouches around the lunar phase drawings plus a lovingly illustrated entry for Samhain suggests the artist is a neopagan of some kind, which could be a slight tell for femininity. Maybe. Depends on the coven really. Which they were apparently a part of, the full sales post includes an image with a little pile of coven newsletters, some of which are in “paste-up form” which suggests they were participating in the time honored tradition of using the office copier on the sly.
Also, the 1st of January is described as "civil new year", which implies there's some other new year on a different day, which could be samhain.
Second guess: Liz is female author's father's second wife. Ailing, but finishing college as an older student.
Absolutely nothing about the content, lettering, or drawing suggests a male author to me. FWIW!
So the author was introduced to Liz on 1978-01-21, and married someone on 1979-05-05. It's possible that's Liz, but that's fairly quick, even for the 70s.
Maybe Liz is her younger half-sister from a temporarily estranged parent. :)
I realize I'm plumbing the depths of statistical likelihood to support my intuition of a female author.
Two other things occur to me. In the 1980s, there was a wider variety of what was considered "ordinary" in the expression of stereotypical male traits within gendered males. It was much less expected for any in the gamut to follow a non-stereotypical path, of course, and for better or worse.
But more directly relevant, the author is "anonymous" but certainly not "unknown", so it probably makes sense to assume that the auction house / article writer got it right in the first place!