After learning the basic letter forms, we can make small changes to each component to alter and add style to our handwriting and improve our penmanship.

Instructions for writing in English roundhand, from Michael Twyman's personal collection.

Lettering, be it hand lettering, brush lettering, or digital, is enjoying a bit of a renaissance. This is good news for people who love working with their hands and find […]

There’s no Picasso in such a culture. It’s primarily conservative; you are carrying a style...

This English Psalter was made for an East Anglian patron at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The original Psalter contains a calendar for adapted Sarum use, the Psalms, Canticles, Litany, and Office of the Dead, with additional prayers in a humanist hand added by a fifteenth century owner. The text is incomplete; about two-dozen leaves have been removed, resulting in missing historiated initials, and several partial Psalms and Canticles. Three extant historiated initials, accompanied by incipits in gold, stand out among a multitude of smaller painted and flourished initials. The majority of the text is written in accomplished textualis prescissa. This Psalter has stylistic and textual connections to the Gorleston Psalter (British Library Add. 49622) and the Ormesby Psalter (Bodl. Lib., Douce MS 366), placing it firmly within the tradition of East Anglian manuscript production in the first half of the fourteenth century. To explore fully digitized manuscripts with a virtual page-turning application, please visit Walters Ex Libris.

Ужасно, когда горит библиотека, пожар потушить удалось, но около 15 процентов библиотечных фондов все же было утрачено. Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus. Я сегодня виртуально листала, к счастью, давно оцифрованные рукописи. Предлагаю и вам полюбоваться на буквицы, рисунки на полях и…

Da Costa Hours, Illuminated by Simon Bening (1483/84–1561), Ghent, Belgium, ca. 1515, MS M.399, fol. 16r

Engraved Italian t.p., letterpress German t.p. Text in double columns, Italian and German

The British Library holds one of the great collections of Irish-language manuscripts in the world. While it is perhaps not as extensive a collection as those in Dublin or Oxford, and while most of the manuscripts are relatively recent in date, nonetheless the Library’s Irish manuscripts (over 200) contain much...

Through the art of photography Greek artist Anastasia Mastrakouli creates unique typography by incorporating the bare human figure. These naked silhouettes form gestures to create each letter of the alphabet as they interact and press against the pane of wet glass. The identities of the figures are obscured by the surrounding water and panel adding symmetry to the overall appearance of the letters. Mastrakouli's work exposes the connection between typography, art, and the human figure in a new and unique way. See more after the jump!

Text-books upon architecture and ornament: p. 162

On Valentine’s Day this year I started a lighthearted love letters column where I could (tongue firmly in cheek) send romantic missives to my favorite illustrators around the world. In the first I imagined living in quiet seclusion with British artist Henry McCausland, shacked up in a tree house whe

Now on SKILLSHARE! Wohoo! Are you ready to start making money with your lettering? The starving artist mentality is dying off, now with the rise of the internet and online shopping even a hobbyist like you can make some extra income, heck, you can even start a whole lettering business r

This is one of twenty-six known manuscripts by the hand of Luke the Cypriot (active 1583-1625), an accomplished Greek calligrapher who worked after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople (1453). He copied it in 1594 at his episcopal see of Buzǎu (in Wallachia, now Romania) and soon took it to Moscow, where it was richly illustrated with New Testament scenes by a team of anonymous Russian artists. The book contains passages taken from the four Gospels and arranged in the order in which they are read out loud in church in the course of the year (hence its name Lectionary, from the Latin "lectio," reading). Short intructions in Slavonic accompany some of the miniatures, offering a glimpse of the painters' working process. To explore fully digitized manuscripts with a virtual page-turning application, please visit Walters Ex Libris.

Our latest digitisation project has begun as we work to digitise 400 pre-1200 manuscripts from the British Library holdings, with a generous support from The Polonsky Foundation. The joint project between the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France seeks to promote and explore the contacts between France and...