Bookarts Calligraphy Type
A Teach-Yourself Guide to Italic Handwriting
The Italic Way to Beautiful Handwriting is your key to mastering the Italic hand in just minutes a day. Originally developed in the early Renaissance as a "speedwriting" technique by Papal scribes who wanted to combine beauty and legibility with speed, Italic handwriting continues to appear today on diplomas, wedding invitations, and other special announcements.
Now through modern teaching methods developed by Fred Eager, this handwriting can be yours. The foundation of the Eager system is a dual approach: you learn calligraphic and cursive simultaneously--one handsome, the other functional--to synthesize a perfect balance. Eager's techniques have been widely used throughout the United States and inspired the resurgence of Italic classes and clubs from coast to coast.
In this step-by-step, trace-and-copy manual, renowned Italic instructor Fred Eager shows how to develop the ideal handwriting--legible and beautiful, yet characteristically your own.
Some years ago, Oliver Darkshire stepped into the hushed interior of Henry Sotheran Ltd (est. 1761) to apply for a job. Allured by the smell of old books and the temptation of a management-approved afternoon nap, Darkshire was soon unteetering stacks of first editions and placating the store's resident ghost (the late Mr. Sotheran, hit by a tram).
A novice in this ancient, potentially haunted establishment, Darkshire describes Sotheran's brushes with history (Dickens, the Titanic), its joyous disorganization, and the unspoken rules of its gleefully old-fashioned staff, whose mere glance may cause the computer to burst into flames. As Darkshire gains confidence and experience, he shares trivia about ancient editions and explores the strange space that books occupy in our lives--where old books often have strong sentimental value, but rarely a commercial one.
By turns unhinged and earnest, Once Upon a Tome is the colorful story of life in one of the world's oldest bookshops and a love letter to the benign, unruly world of antiquarian bookselling, where to be uncommon or strange is the best possible compliment.
The biography of one of world's most popular typefaces. "Whether one likes Palatino or not, Mr. Bringhurst's book is an instant classic."--The Wall Street Journal
Hermann Zapf was one of the great practitioners of the graphic arts and Palatino is probably the most widely known and used of all Zapf faces. Author Robert Bringhurst traces Palatino's development, with all its infinite permutations, and often invisible refinements through a long and fascinating history of variations and permutations, imitations and conflations--from hot metal, through the brief interlude of film setting and finally into the digital world. It is all here, in encompassing detail: a fully illustrated account of Palatino and its extended family: foundry and Linotype, Michelangelo, Sistina, Aldus, Heraklit, Phidias, Zapf Renaissance, PostScript Palatino, Palatino and Aldus Nova, and Palatino Sans. Included with the text are over 200 illustrations of design sketches, working drawings, smoke proofs and test prints, matrices, foundry and Linotype patterns. But beyond that, the book is an argument that artists who create letters can, and should, be judged by the same standards and held in the same esteem as composers who write music and artists who paint on canvas. Bringhurst asks the question, "Can a penstroke or a letterform be so beautiful it will stop you in your tracks and maybe break your heart?" In this groundbreaking and totally original book, he answers the question: "It can."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.- « first
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