Customer Reviews

Lettering as Drawing

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A true gem of a reference book for calligraphers. Focused on the Latin script, the author provides numerous examples of styles created over a millennium. Don't look for color plates; it's all in black and white. You'll have to go to other books to see the color in works like Kells and Lindisfarne gospels. I haven't even read the text yet, as the letterforms keep me mesmerized. So glad to have my own copy now, and I gladly returned the rumpled and worn library copy.

Calligraphy can be a meditation in discipline Dhamma Brothers to calm stress National Geographic: Stress - Portrait of a Killer.

Gray approaches Western calligraphic hands not as history, nor for content, but as graphic design elements, uniquely inventive as a result of their limitations, sudden reversals, acute angles and sometime need for legibility.

A lively visual approach to letters as components of design, not merely expressing content. Fillips, flicks, lines, double stems, serifs, the evolution to Gothic cursive (try reading it!) can be seen in the design of Rohan and Rivendell in The Lord of the Rings: The Motion Picture Trilogy (Platinum Series Special Extended Edition).

Gray's carefully selected illustrations include repetitive affirmations on obit rolls done in multiple convents in response to a request for prayers for a prioress, which display the stimulating variety of practices extant contemporaneously. From rigid mannered formulaic, technically precise, to exhuberant elegaic unreadable contractions.

No other book approaches letters as art in quite this way, analyzing the evolution of hands through the centuries from Ottonian, Merovingian, Carolingian, Roman, Uncial, Gothic, Baroque to Joan Miro's fantasy marks.

5 star highly recommended for artistic inspiration and a visual approach to handwriting books, papers, letters, architecture Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency, production design.

Also read The Archaeology of Medieval Bookbinding, Live & Learn: Real Life Journals: Designing & Using Handmade Books (AARP), A Life In Hand: Creating the Illuminated Journal, Inner Journeying Through Art-journaling: Learning to See And Record Your Life As a Work of Art, Literacy Through the Book Arts for ideas on binding your own books and design of content.

The most powerful weapon known is the weapon of blessing.
Therefore, a clever person relies on it.
He wins with peace, not with war.
Lao Tzu

I recently received a healing by a Shaman in the Amazon jungle, and another fire ceremony by an indigenous Shaman in the Highlands of Peru. Not all learning is transmitted via written communication, some is by tradition, culture, evolution, incorporation and symbol Faith and Transformation: Votive Offerings and Amulets from the Alexander Girard Collection. I left a few calligraphed thoughts behind in Machu Picchu and the Galapagos to suggest possibilities beyond the confines of ethnocentric culture.

Lettering as Drawing 5 stars for unique approach to letters as graphic design quite unlike any other book on calligraphy I have ever encountered.