Italic Calligraphy

Hello, and welcome to the new edition of italic calligraphy and handwriting. We know writing and printing are subordinate to spoken language. The spoken language came millions of years before writing was ever invented, and writing must have looked very queer to people when they first saw it, especially the alphabetic writing. It was as late as 1,500 BC that alphabetic writing first appeared. Now if I say wearable, warlaunt, scripted monon, you can say, hey, how about that? What was it you said? But I can write it out, and you can read it several times, and I don't have to repeat

it. However, if it is written allegedly, there is no chance of asking the writer what he meant by it, and you may have to wait a long time to see what the purpose of the thing was. Another weird thing about writing and about printing, about the graphic representation of speech, is that speech vanishes once it is uttered. You see, speech comes from the interior, from the mind and the heart, and it comes out, the wearable warlaunt. The word flies is what that means. It flies and it disappears. It's gone. Whereas, it's in time, completely in time, whereas writing, you see, is in space, and this has incredible consequences as far as learning the art of this scribe is concerned. The peculiar thing about the writing is that the four words here are before you, all at once, in speaking, there's only one sound going into your ears at any one fraction

of a second. It's flying, this stays, the scripta or writing, monot, it stays, and it's a great advantage for much of our literature, is literature because it is letters, because it has been written out first after it has been verbalized, probably, and then put into printing types. One of the fascinating things about this design in space, and by the way, we're all designers whenever we pen a note to the milkman, even though it may be scrawled. If you just make a touch on a piece of paper with a pencil, you mark that rectangle, and the design has already begun. So we're working in space, and we have to design these movements of the pen. The pen moves, and it moves through time, but it moves through space too, and writing and printing involve more white paper than they do ink.

In fact, there's a very tiny percentage of ink on any page of writing or of printing. It's mostly paper, and this paper has to be designed, and it is designed by the pen as it designs the letters. So one of the things I would have you watch, when you learn to write, is to watch the shape of the paper that you're outlining, that you're circumscribing, because that will make the reading legible, make it readable. Readable is legibility that is more pleasurable. Now the writing here has thick and thin contrasts and gradations. The ancient writing tool is a stake, a pointed stake. And it was only in the second century, or third century, maybe BC, that the Romans cut the pen across, producing an edge. Now the incredible thing about this wonderful tool, Edward Johnson says it's the letter-making tool, is that edge. That very thin edge, it's almost non-existent.

All the rest of the pen exists really for the sake of holding on to it. The important thing is that edge, and what is most important for you, when you're learning to write, first learning to write, is your control of that edge, and this is what I mean by the control of the edge, that you have a vertical and horizontal axis on a page. Now bisect that 90 degree angle, bisect it with a hairline. The edge of the pen must always be exactly on that 45 degree angle. You cannot vary it this way, you cannot vary it that way. It must always be steep like that. So watch this more than anything else. At the very beginning, pay no attention to much else except that angle. Now we take the letter I, which is one of the letters we'll take today. We go into it at a 45 degree angle, and that gives us a fine line.

Turning here, we get the thickest stroke of the pen. This is a little thinner. It gets thicker here, and then goes into an almost invisible hairline because the edge of this pen is held at a 45 degree angle to the writing line. It's edge, always edge that we have to bear in mind. Take a letter like the N. It's a subtle letter. It looks relatively easy, but it is one of the most important and most difficult letters that we have to learn. We go in at a 45 degree angle with that edge. The edge produces the thinness here. It produces all of the effects. We don't entirely do to that delicate and wonderful, narrow, almost non-existent edge of the pen. So watch that edge. Now if you get the edge too flat, see what happens to that N I had up there. It becomes an intolerably ugly design except we cannot see it as anything at all.

If the pen is too steep, it's all head and it's all feet. There's no design to it. These are utterly impossible. But get in between those. Here the pen angle was flat. Here it is too steep. So get a 45 degree pen angle. Now don't be concerned with much else until your hand learns at all times to produce that 45 degree angle of the edge. The pen must be frozen in your hand so the edge is up steep. You may think I repeat this almost too much here at the beginning, but I couldn't repeat it too much and we'll be insisting on it throughout the early parts of this program, the series of lessons that edge must be steep. Now that is the first lesson in the series of three stages in your writing. Now let's see what those stages are.

In writing as in learning to do anything, in learning to cut down a tree and learning to handle the plane, in learning to play golf, to swim, handle the tennis racket, you have to know what the idea is. So first of all, let's get the idea. Get the idea starts everything. A man may say to a kid with an accent in his hand, what do you think you're doing or with a hammer? Holding the hammer and correctly, what do you think you're doing? Music kid doesn't have the idea. You have to get the idea before you can get the next stage, which is the feel. The feel of the thing. The feel of writing, the sensation of touch, the sensation of movement, and this is going to be all wrong if this is wrong. So read the text, read it over and over, and understand what you are attempting to do, and then get the image of touch and movement into your fist.

Once it's in your fist, your fist can do the writing. You think of a certain phrase, you say hand, go to it. Your hand will write it out. Now when that happens, you're in for the most exciting part of this, which is getting the swing of it. And when you once get this, you're starting to be a writer. You get the swing of it. You remember that old song, it don't mean a thing, it ain't got that swing. The swing is the rhythm. And once you get the rhythm, then you're really moving. And writing is movement in space. Now this element of space is very important because we have to design in space. So let's look at the beginning of plate one in the book. We have a writing line. We have a waist line, which is just above the writing line. We have an ascender line above that.

Now we have a descending line. The P descends down to the descending line, which is also an ascender line for the B, which is on the next writing line. So when I refer to writing line, waist line, ascender line, you know what I mean. Halfway between the waist line and the ascender line is the cap line or the line of the capital letters. Six and eight go up that high. Three, four, five, and nine come halfway down to the descending line. Now how big is a should a letter B? You notice on plate one, these squares marked in here. Now those squares are marks of the pen with the edge held absolutely vertically. You a letter in a tally as a body height of five wids of the pen. So you see I'm measuring the wids of the pen here, one, two, three, four, five. But with your t-square, you draw the writing line horizontally, you draw the waist line

horizontally, you'd mark the same distance up above here and draw the ascender line. You'd mark the same distance down below, five pen wids, and draw the descending line. Some letters are made with single strokes, others with double strokes. There are twenty letters made without lifting the pen in a rapid tally, and there are six letters which I made when one making one pen lift. Now the letter slope is only five degrees off the vertical. I wish you'd go over two with your pen, get this pen set. Get a set that has, as it's called, a lettering set. It has letters, pens from fine wids to medium, and so on, to B, and then to B2, B3, and B4. Now we start our work with the widest nib in order that we can see what our mistakes are, and then gradually, as the lessons proceed, we'll work down to the smaller nibs, so that

it will be of use in letter writing, writing a check, or in writing out small booklets. Now with that pen, with the broad nib and no ink in the pen, let your pen match that edge up here, and match the white line, and pull down according to the directions given in these hairpin strokes, and get the shape, and the order and direction of the stroke. The order and direction of the stroke are extremely important in all cultures, Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic, as well as the alphabets used in Roman history, and it's extremely important that you move in a certain direction and in a certain order. Now our basic form in italic is an ellipse. First I want you to write an ellipse with a pencil, you see the guidelines are here. Just a little before eleven, come down, and draw a circle in perspective, that is you

turn the slope of circle a little bit, and then turn it so that the width is a little over half the height, and you have the outside edge of the o. This is an ellipse or a circle in perspective, well I write an o at five pen widths, and the outside, no this is more than five, the outside edge is an ellipse. Now this appears in ADGQ BP, C, O, and E, and the effect of that is felt in all letters that have entrances and exits, because this is related to the ellipse, the shoulder with its curving is related to the ellipse, so is the exit related to the ellipse. You know I would like to have you do about half a page in pencil of i, o, i, o, i, o, and then do the bottom two lines in i, o with an edge pen. Now fold a piece of typing paper eight and a half by eleven, use bond paper, don't use

erasable bond or onion skin paper, but take this sheet out of the back of the book that has a B4 down in the corner. The first line up here shows you the five degree letter slope, the second the pen angle, so you can check your pen angle by that line. Then fold the paper over and then with your pencil do o i, o i, o i, and then with the pen write o i's and o i's, and that will be enough for the assignment for the first lesson. Let's write the o again, the i and o. I recommend that you use black ink and put only ordinary fountain pen ink in your pen. Don't put carbon-based ink in because the carbon may clog the pen. There's the i, the o, now let's put an an on it, add an an with these ellipses.

The l is very simple, you put the pen down with the edge at a 45 degree angle to the writing line, then just pull, pull from the shoulder if you have to, then make this narrow elliptical exit. We can write a number of words, if we have these few letters, rather important concept in our present time. The word that I like most to write with this combination, whoops, I caught some fiber in that paper, there's that. So with four letters you can get a lion. There's a wonderful old story, a very ancient one about the mother lion looking at her little cobs, they're born and the cub is amorphous.

He has no shape to him at all, he's just a honey-colored ball, and with tender loving care she licks him into shape, and by licking him delicately and carefully she finally comes out with a lion, and that is more or less what you have to do in the writing, is use the pen as if you were caressing the paper, and you caress with tender loving care, these letter forms onto the paper. Don't go straight down on the paper and attacking it viciously, but go down very lightly, gradually, come up off the paper, very gradually like that. Go down slant indicators used to say, come off very gradually, that'll get a very fine hairline, down onto it, just before 11, just before 5, you lift it, if that were a clock dial, complete it, and then the M, a very delicate touch, it doesn't take much pressure. You have only enough pressure to leave a trail of eight, but try to use your wrist.

We don't write with finger motion, we don't write rotating our arm and the big muscle of the forearm. I'll talk to you later about the origin of this, this is very interesting, this is no way to write, and it was invented very late. Writing with the fingers will give you finger cramp, and after you've written for a couple of hours, you have difficulty just peeling your fingers up off the barrel of the pen, they'll be rigid on the pen, and it hurts, it's very painful. I think the reason that forearm writing was invented was that in the 18th century people would have forgotten how writing had been done traditionally. I'm sure writing had been done moving the whole hand on a free wrist, the whole hand on a free wrist, you need a flexible wrist to do this. I've had students with arthritis who said it helped their arthritis and their wrists greatly by learning to write with this wrist movement, and the medical school physical therapy department said this was an awfully good exercise for arthritic wrists, but this is the way writing

was done. But they forgot it, they wrote with their fingers, and then in the 18th century in order to solve the problem of finger cramp in the business offices, the writing masters invented writing on the big muscle of the forearm, and of course you don't get hand cramp that way. But the design of the alphabet was ruined, and that's one reason we have the commercial cursive designs, which we suffer so much through the third grade at the present time. The designs are really degraded forms of this Italian Renaissance script, which we call italic, after the Italians where it was invented. It was invented around 1401, 142, and it disappeared finally because of business uses, but it's been revived in this present century, and its popularity is increasing rapidly. In Europe, especially in England, Belgium, Germany, especially East Germany, Sweden has

it as the only handwriting in the schools. And in Oregon here, it is a possible handwriting as authorized as an official handwriting system in case there's a teacher who was interested in it and can teach it, so in the remaining years, it's been a long time since I was a child, and it's been a long time since I was

a child. When I write, I wish you would try to identify with my hand. Imagine it's your hand, and see if you can imagine the sensations of touch and movement as my hand goes over the surface of the paper. Take it your hand and imagination, and then when the program's over, take the paper and your pens and try the same thing, only watch the edge, the edges, everything. You take a complex letter like, which we won't take for a while yet, but this one. If you drew that, it would take you forever, but you could write it in just a moment. The printer's form, now that it's somewhat different, it uses less space, not as beautiful, I think.

But to draw that would be an awful job, but you could write it, or you can write the more rapid version, very quick, you'll see. Thank you. When you notice, please, that I go rather rapid in the hairline, slow on the heavy strokes, much slower on the heavy strokes than on the hairline.

There is very little pressure on these down strokes, these six strokes. There is much, much less pressure on the hairlines. Barely touch the paper and then a little pressure, very little, just enough to leave a trail of it. And on all these hairlines, this one, the branching, and this one, we're almost off the paper. This branching, by the way, is like the branching on a tree. The branch comes out very gradually, moves out into space. And halfway between the riding line and the waist line, if you look in the inner part of the letter, the counters, we call it, you'll see that branch leaves the stem about halfway between the riding line and the waist line. So when you try an end, watch that branching. We have a reverse branching, and a typical letter is the U. U should look like an end upside down.

See, it branches in halfway up, or if you turn it over, it's an end, and it's branching out halfway up. You can stand on your head and ride a U, and it's a good end. You're standing on your head and riding an end, and it makes a good U. M is like the M, branching out halfway up. The A has the reverse branching like the U. So when you start with M, the critical thing is that hairline branch going in there. Suppose your pen angle is too flat. You don't get a hairline branching in there. You see how ugly that is? You need another kind of italic. It's a more formal italic, and the branching isn't the same at all. The end is a completely different end. Now if you cannot get a steep pen angle, you'll have to write that italic.

You can't base a hand riding on it though. It's impossible. It's just too heavy. You can't join into the next letter. See the beauty of the steep pen angle, and one of the reasons for its invention is that you make a hairline join, which is almost invisible, into the next letter. One of the weak things about commercial cursing is that there's no difference in the line between the join and between the letter, and you can't tell where the letter begins or where it ends because much of it is joined. Here the letters tend to stand out and be unique. You join out of the middle of the E, like that, the two-stroke E. And the hairline should be virtually invisible. We don't use joins with letters this big, with medium nibs or fine nibs. We can use the join, and it'll be okay. But in order to anticipate the hand riding, which we're going to do later, the rapid hand

riding with the small nibs, you'll have to watch this 90-degree angle, which is bisected by the edge of the pen. Everything depends on your consciousness all the time at the beginning of the nature of this edge, so don't think of much else in the first few times you're working with the pens until it becomes a habit. You must remember to get that edge up, steep like that. When we work with the majestials of the caps, the pen angles are a little flatter, but not for the minuscule, and for all rapid hand riding a steep pen angle. Good luck.

Hello, welcome back to the Scriptorium. This is the 13th program.

And this time we'll be working with the alternative finishing strokes. Now these are a little more elaborate than what we've been using. They aren't quite as plain as much of our work would include, but they're necessary often for display lines and they can be done with rapidity and grace and you may want to work a number of these into your handwriting, except I'd say for the push heads on the ascenders of menuscule letters. I think those had better be saved for relatively

rare use. We want a more modern hand. We're not antiquarians writing a Renaissance script, any old old script. Alfred Fairbank showed great genius in the way he modernized the script in the 1920s for contemporary use and I think the plainer, simple forms are the ones that will serve us best. Now I spoke before of the importance of thinking and analyzing before one puts the pen on the paper and I'm not interfering with the hand once we get to writing because that twiddling can paralyze the hand and the hand has to have the image clear in itself in the hand before it can work. Now what you do is not give the hand just verbal direction because the hand doesn't listen that way. The way the hand

would be ready to write is for you to provide the touch and the movement for the hand through going over the letter over the model either with a dry pen touching the paper or the wet pen almost touching it or better probably rather translucent paper placed over the model and you trace the letter on the paper and do that for some time. Not thinking about what you're doing, not giving verbal directions to your hand but letting your hand find what is important to it, what the hand really needs is the sensation of touch, the sensation of movement and until the hand becomes experienced with this proper sensation of touch and movement I'm afraid it is going to make mistakes. Now it would be wrong for you to blame your hand and think that you have no talent or no graphic ability, no

manual dexterity because the problem would be that you hadn't trained given the hand the proper image to begin with. If you can get that touch and feeling into the hand through the hand experiencing the letter before you start writing you have a much better chance of finding a letter with the letter on the paper which you want to get. So while you're writing don't quarrel with the hand, don't blame it. If anything stop blame your head for interfering and blame your head for not having seen to it that the hand experienced the letter rather clearly through touch and movement before the pen went on to the paper. You can do any critical reasoning you want to afterwards after the pen is laid down. Now let's look at some of these alternative forms, the more beautiful forms of the letter. We have here a K. I would suggest that you take the model in your

textbook and let's the dry pen or with the pen almost touching it go over it according to the order and direction of stroke which you have learned from plates two and three. Go over it just about this fast. You flatten the pen angle a little bit as you come down. But do this repeatedly until your hand actually knows in itself in its sensation of touch and movement the image of the majestical flourished metallic K. Keep that up until the hand has learned it. The image has to be in the head then just before writing you have to get it into the hand before the hand will be able to do it. And as I say, say yes to your hand at all times. If the hand doesn't seem to do it it's the fault of it's not

being given the proper preparation beforehand through a rehearsal of touch and movement. Then when you are ready, stop thinking and just observe this wonderful edge on the pen. Watch what that edge is doing because it's the edge that is the outer work of our scribble activity. The inner work takes place beforehand. Take the letter A. It's a beautiful letter but the hand must have that image in it which is a nonverbal image. Having no explanation, no theory connected with it at all. It's something that the hand must know through touch and sensation alone. The problem of learning it is to go over the model, teach the hand, touch and movement. Now I recommend this form of the A because you have

a graceful curve here and then an angle here the contrasts with that curve. Let's take the B. Something which we haven't spent much time with before. Notice that long curve. Train your hand so that it knows this has to be straight and then a rather sweet full curve here until you get into the horizontal and then you can pull over like this. This should not end I'd say abruptly like this because then the weight of the letter looks as if the whole thing we're going to slip off down this way. We want it to be firmly established in that horizontal before we come up and start the upper part of the letter. Now a nice full sweet curve that comes in above just above the center and then a larger full

curve below and you watch who is central vision that point down there so that you can come down and meet it. But get that it's almost like a form of branching in here. You go into that horizontal and then over to the right. See twist on the upper right hand corner just so that your hand can do it. Remember when I was doing the plane caps my hand kept inserting serifs on these caps. I didn't want it there. I didn't intend it but my hand feels that the letter ought to have those serifs and the hand goes ahead and think serifs and does it without my entering into it at all. If I were trying to direct the hand if I were twiddling and unable to decide mentally and conceptually what that should be my hand would be paralyzed. I wouldn't be able to do anything. The hand knows and

say yes to your hand. Now let's try to write a D. Same way with the B we come down with a good strong vertical or flat pen angle over to the left until we get into the horizontal then down to the right up into a hairline. You get this accent and then a strong curve up here. Come down, watch that point and come down and your hand will meet it directly. A nice full strong letter. There must be no curvature on this. This must be strong and then the curve is sweet as you can make it. The E begins the same way. Remember the rather flat pen angle as you go over it teaching your handy touch movement. Go into it until it's quits curving and is straight then come over to the right side. A good strong curve on

the flourish then resting on the center this. This counter larger than the counter above. F is the same move but now don't carry this stroke farther to the right than an extension of that edge. That is this little corner down here. The corner right in there should not be to the right side of the stem. The upper part is like the E but the second arm is just beneath where it would be on the E. If this goes too far to the right it's going to look like an E and you'll have confusion and when the reader is confused by a letter he's not reading the way we want him to and it means that we've failed. The G very much like the C twisting on the upper corner going into the wet ink pulling a full curve around

keeping this down rather low if we don't want us flourish G. Then coming down and getting a nice angle in here. We can with the corner round that a little bit in there. The alternate G the more first one has a nice strong rhythm to it. We come up a little bit on this as if it branched into this down stroke which comes down and has a flourish beneath. But this should be very strong. The H and so I'm all follow the same pattern. The L which you've had is a slab Sarah L is a very plain and somewhat rigid and austere letter like that. Now let's put a little more grace into the letter. Put this flourish in a slight curve come down go to the left as we did with the B the D the E come over to the

right sloping down just a little bit and then up. That makes a graceful graceful letter. I'll go to the listing R one of my favorite letters not just because my last name begins with it. Again this little corner shouldn't be to the right or the right side of the stem. A full curve. You don't need to talk to your hand much about this understand it in your head and then go over a model until your hand experiences repeatedly and feels that it has inside it the letter. The letter has to be in the hand before it can get on to the paper. Now this tricky Y it's a very beautiful Y but tricky because it has a sudden break just about a theriding line. See here is what looks like a rather awkward angle. It's not a graceful looking letter at this moment. We have to

finish it before we can see how graceful it is. As I said before when this comes down it looks as if the curve were part of that right side and we don't notice any awkward angle in here. In fact the angle now seems to be rather pleasing. If you want to practice that Y I don't recommend that you use it right off but remember you have to get this rather quick and almost ugly angular turn there at the righty line. The Q come down and don't go clear to the righty line. Get it and the lips nice sloping the lips. Then this point this part of the quieting of that curve begins the Q part which is the tail. This should be very straight except for a graceful curve at the end. Let me do the

letter again. Now the lips it feels good to write it and then when it's quieted down and becoming almost a horizontal pull it down out of a nice discrete angle so that it doesn't dangle down or it's too bad. I'll let you write it again. I hit some paper that's underneath the edge of it and lost it. You can't bump into things underneath and have the pen work. Now it can come down very straight. If it comes down too steeply it's it's going to look weak and soft yet if it's too high it'll bump into the Q which invariably in an English word will follow the Q. So be sure that it doesn't get so close there that there's likely to be a collision. Now for the chance recursive type of push heads

you know the beginning of a head may be a simple hook like this. You may make a bracketed head serif like that. You may start a little to the right there's a reggae 7 15 22 and then go over to the left and down as in an L. Now it's said that today we don't need to move to the right and then to the left as we come down and making a push head chance recursive type of head serif. But I find it very convenient. It gets all of these serifs get the ink flowing. At first your pen may be a little dry. It doesn't have ink right at that important edge and in order to get the ink at the edge and to come to flow you have to work the pen on the paper a little bit. So this starts the ink flowing. You see this starts the ink flowing and then a slight move to the right and a push back gives

you ink which will lubricate the pen as it makes that graceful curve. And I find out a graded bandage even in writing an A to start a little bit to the right and then you push to the left and you lubricate the movement of the pen as it swings around comes down and completes the letter. So the big danger in these chance recursive strokes is that they may curve all the way down and you'll see people who use it in their daily handwriting get careless and they got a strange looking decender which is almost like a sea like a bad sea and we don't want seas we want strong that is a nice sweet curve then a strong straight stem you hit the writing line bounce up branch out come around with a point farthest east high come in with a horizontal and that gives you a

sweet letter but this is not I'd say a form of writing for rapid rapid work it means more care and a little slower writing we've had an I that I think is the safe one the one I would recommend to you for your general use at least for a long time which is that if it's too boring for you put that medium will type tick on the side it's recognizable as an I it won't be thought of as a one at all but here you have it you come over you get a sweet little curve over come down and just as in the B the D the E the F the L that we've seen you go to the left a little bit and then over to the right now a more exciting I is one that you'll have to practice because it's not the easiest letter to do to come down and the paper allows it you can push up this is more

like a later eye than the one used in the Renaissance but it's for many people a more interesting letter and you'll find it on the bottom line of the plate 16 and you want to write the word iris watch the movement watch the touching movement as I write because the actual part of writing the outward part of writing not the inward part is the manipulation of that edge and you have to know what the edge is going to do one more important thing in this lesson is the round G what might be called the Carol engine G here's our

writing line here's our waistline descend your line down below this Carol engine G takes up a considerable amount of space but at times you want to use it so that this first upper part of the round G doesn't come quite down to the writing line you come down on the writing line you make a curve then swing over and then around and come down like this now this axis is slope you add the air and I may explain that in the later program let's do it again watch the touch and movement if you want to fill it out come go clear to the top but don't make a heavy sagging thing down here but one that has slope it may or may not have the air sometimes the Carol engines omitted the

air on it but it's a definite part of G you can flourish it now the printers couldn't afford all that space with their tight metal so they come down here's the writing line they lift the pen and go over to the left and come down to the writing line and then rest this as a horizontal on the writing line and then get there rather even larger counter beneath some of the calligraphers don't care for that G but I do think it's a rather beautiful one although it's a typographic letter it won't have quite the swing and the rhythm of the other one but if you need space if your lines are rather close together you want to avoid tangling at all costs so you may not be able to use this which can come in very handy on the bottom line of a piece of writing the

the origin of that air is rather interesting we might take a moment to look at it the G the classic G the square G cupitala's quadratis it's like this although the G written by the professional scribes of the Roman period is different generally in that the hand rounded that angle a cursive tendency is to round angles then in the ancho which is called also the Christian alphabet they decided that they wanted that strong stem in so they added it like that sometimes it's a thinner line than that but this is always the first stroke and over centuries they missed that beginning instead of going into

the wedding started coming down before them came around and the hand rounded that angle up there like this now this looks very much like the angle Irish G which you see in Celtic printing now a wonderful thing happened added a flourish up here at a flourish down here so this led to the black letter G which I shouldn't be sloping bit like this and there we have the G which ultimately becomes a talent G and when this is rounded you see it's the 9th century Carol engine G or if the pen is lifted and starts over here we have the printer G but this horizontal is that beginning stroke of the old letter and this rounded G looks as if that's original horizontal or gone and the

writers loving tradition wanted that horizontal so you'll find this in your book types you'll find it in newspapers and in magazines you'll find various forms of it but some of them are rather curious coming up like this but the form to avoid that all costs as being what I would say an utterly illiterate G I'm afraid we see it every once in a while even in some job typography is one that has a top like that that's a horizontal you see it goes back to the horizontal of the original Copitalis Quadratus the square capital so it should be horizontal and never a vertical like this this looks like the top not on the california quail and it's not a good picture of a quail or diagram of the

G at all so let's avoid any vertical up there and get either a nice round G or the G which is going to service in good stead you know almost all our work which is that basal G and don't cut across here and ruin that that nice beautiful shape that's in there at the end of a word as in brush an Indian paint brush in our exercise if you have an M or M the U or an H you may make a quick terminal like that it helps end the line especially if you have some space and give it an added grace occasionally and certainly in Renaissance work you'll find a G which comes a C which descends below the riding line and if you're crowded if you don't have as much space as you'd like to have you can get that

our closer to the C if you use that elongated C so I would recommend that when you're at least when you're crowded for space I almost never use it at all because it's a little unusual and is likely to draw attention to itself and we don't want anything in our riding that will make the reader more conscious of the riding than of what we are saying because we write to be read and if the reader isn't reading directly and easily what we're writing then we're showing off and we aren't doing our work we write to be read not to be praised not to be famous there's one little thing that we haven't gotten into which is a convenience at times and that is the paragraph sign which has an interesting history I don't have time to go into it today but this is a rather

nice form of it here some people have the idea that it is a P for paragraph turned around it isn't at all so let's try various forms of this paragraph . . .

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