Bookarts Calligraphy Type

Now back in print after a long absence, Block Prints: How To Make Them is an eminently readable guide that remains as functional as the day it was made. Written for the novice, Rice's every instruction is provided with a dose of steadying encouragement. The modern crafter or art student will find useful guidance in the contributions of Martin Krause, author of this new edition's introduction. His footnotes added throughout provide context to the original edition, translate terminology that might be unfamiliar, and provide updates where needed. As Rice wrote in his preface, this book "is offered with the sincere hope that it may prove both instructive and encouraging to those who are seriously interested in this most absorbing handicraft."

Discover the timeless art of beautiful writing! This introduction to creating calligraphy combines beginner-friendly clarity with thorough guidance and gorgeous examples.

• Introduces nine major calligraphic styles, with detailed diagrams and tips for writing each letter.
• Sub-sections include histories of each alphabet, step-by-step tutorials for embellishing your calligraphy, and ways to showcase your elegant lettering.
• Full color photographs and illustrations throughout.

A lively, lavishly illustrated biography of the great printer Bodoni, vividly describing his work, life, and times while justifying his reputation as the "prince of typographers."

This is the first English-language biography of the relentlessly ambitious and incomparably talented printer Giambattista Bodoni (1740-1813). Born to a printing family in the small foothill town of Saluzzo, he left his comfortable life to travel to Rome in 1758 where he served as an apprentice of Cardinal Spinelli at the Propaganda Fide press. There, under the sponsorship of Ruggieri, his close friend, mentor, and protector, he learned all aspects of the printing craft. Even then, his real talent, indeed his genius, lay in type design and punch-cutting, especially of the exotic foreign alphabets needed by the papal office to spread the faith.

Bodoni's life changed when in 1768 at age 28 he was invited by the young Duke of Parma to abandon Rome for that very French city to establish and direct the ducal press. He remained in Parma, overseeing a vast variety of printing, some of it pedestrian, but much of it glorious. And all of it making use of the typefaces he personally designed and engraved.

This book goes beyond Bodoni's capacity as a printer; it examines the life and times in which he lived, the turbulent and always fragile political climate, the fascinating cast of characters that enlivened the ducal court, the impressive list of visitors making the pilgrim- age to Parma, and the unique position Parma occupied, politically Italian but very much French in terms of taste and culture. Even the food gets its due (and in savory detail). The illustrations--of the city, of the press, of the types and matrices--are compelling enough, but most striking are the pages from the books he designed. And especially, pages from his typographic masterpiece, the Manuale Tipografico, painstakingly prepared by his wife Ghitta, posthumously published in two volumes, and displaying the myriad typefaces in multiple sizes that Bodoni had designed and engraved over a long and prolific career.

Intriguing, scholarly, visually arresting, and designed to Bodoni's standards, this title belongs on the shelf of any bibliophile. It not only makes for compelling reading, it will be considered the biography of record of a great printer for years to come.

In the Service of Scholarship is a history of one of the leading printing firms of the twentieth century. It is also a character study and biography of Harold Hugo (1910-1985), whose career at Meriden Gravure began at the age of fourteen and continued until his retirement as president in 1975. During his tenure, Hugo brought the company to standards of excellence that earned worldwide recognition for art reproduction of the highest quality. The distinguished graphic designer and educator Alvin Eisenmann said of Harold in 1978, "there has never been anyone who held the position that Harold does in American scholarly printing." This book records the practices that were employed to advance illustration printing during the era of film-based printing technology, from collotype and letterpress to offset lithography. Many of the groundbreaking procedures that Hugo pioneered were subsequently made obsolete by digital technology, but his refusal to compromise on quality and his attention to detail stand as a model in any age. The author was associated with Meriden Gravure for thirty years and regarded Harold Hugo as his mentor. He records a life richly lived, with deep and abiding friendships for the talented figures in the scholarly community with whom Meriden was so deeply engaged. He offers many anecdotes and insights reflecting Hugo's leadership of the company.

Letterwriting in Renaissance England reproduces in full size and transcribes a number of letters from the early sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. Both a sourcebook for scholars and a treasure trove for the general reader, the book includes sections on love letters, secret letters, letterwriting manuals, and on the tools required to write letters. It describes the beginnings of the postal service in England and introduces a consistent terminology for describing Renaissance letters and their various parts.

The letters of this collection speak for themselves. They are funnier, richer, more bizarre, and more moving than anything the fiction of the period has to offer, and lead to a more convincing picture of everyday life in early modern England.

The biography of Theodore Low De Vinne (1828-1914): illustrious printer and scholar of typography.

Theodore Low De Vinne was a seminal figure in the history of American printing. De Vinne was born in upstate New York, the son of an itinerant Methodist preacher. It is unclear what propelled him into the world of printing, but once he discovered it, he never let it go. He was, for years, the primary and preferred printer for the Century Company, printing its distinguished list of books and such national magazines as St. Nicholas and The Century. His masterly printing of wood engravings, together with his obsession with presswork, tight composition, and typefaces, gained him and his firm an international reputation.

But it is De Vinne's skill as a historian as well as a printer that endears his name to the student of typography. His four volumes on the practice of typography are considered classics. In an age when few American scholars were examining early printed books, he made significant scholarly contributions to the study of incunables. His books on title pages and early Italian printing can still be read with profit. His working library was immense, and when the Grolier Club was founded in 1884, it was not surprising that, as New York's most illustrious printer, he was asked to be one of the founding members and to provide much of the Club's early printing. Unlike those who followed him, his strength was not in design but in production and organization. He thought endlessly about how printers should be fairly paid and how shops could be efficiently arranged. He fought a long and losing war with unionization, yet was beloved by his men and lionized by the printing trade. Although the firm foundered after De Vinne's retirement, it is impossible to conceive of the printing revival that followed him without taking into account his daunting accomplishments.

This complete, definitive, and richly illustrated survey of small nineteenth-century printing presses, written by a former curator at the Smithsonian Institution, is the first history of these machines. There was, in those days, a small printing press for every purpose. And there were innumerable boys and men eager to make their fortunes by investing in one, printing for a local clientele, and, with luck, building a printing or publishing empire.
Printing was the most widespread, and competitive business of nineteenth-century America. Every city had not only its big presses for printing catalogues, books, and newspapers, but also countless smaller presses for printing small jobs - the pamphlets, posters, handbills, stationery, cards, and tickets that gave the century so much of its color. Several of the names we now count as giants of the publishing industry: Scribner, Doubleday, George Houghton of Houghton Mifflin, and Donald Brace of Harcourt Brace started out not as publishers, but as small-job printers, running their own shops and working humble, everyday, manually-operated presses.

The biography of a central figure in the final era of hot-metal composition and printing

The book and type designer Frederic Warde is remembered today chiefly for his collaboration with Stanley Morison, for producing the singular typeface Arrighi. His life was short (he died in 1939, at the age of only forty-five) but in the previous two decades he had pursued a peripatetic, rollercoaster career that saw him come into contact with most of the leading players in his field, in England, Europe, and America: Bruce Rogers, Mardersteig, Updike, Ruzicka, George Macy, William Kittredge, and, of course, Morison, are just a few of a stellar cast of characters whose lives intersected with his orbit.

Until now, as it was scantily documented, Warde is the missing piece in the story of design, type, and printing in the interwar years, and this book will make essential reading for anyone interested in that critical period, one that saw the end of hot-metal and the emergence of graphic design as a distinct profession. Warde laid many false trails about his personal history, but the author has drawn upon a surprisingly large body of surviving documentation to piece together a fascinating picture of his life and of the complex, frustrating, sometimes dislikeable, but often inspiring, figure at its center.

The best of Warde's extensive body of work displays a restraint and economy linked with an often striking color sense that feels thoroughly modern in its approach. This output was maintained, sometimes erratically, against the backdrop of Warde's mercurial and fragmented professional and personal life. Polarizing the opinions of those he met, he was unfailingly a prolific, entertaining, and informed letter writer, and his correspondence provides invaluable insights into his world and those around him. Here is a designer's life played out against the backdrop of the boom years of the 1920s, the challenges of the Depression, and the obstacles and opportunities created by his own remarkable, but troubled, genius.