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Inside Calligraphic Menagerie: Of Swashbuckling Scribes and Cursive Critters
From centuries-old writing manuals to our new notecard set, flourishing shows the playful side of early modern Europe’s masters of the pen.
20 notecards with envelopes in a box with holographic rainbow foil
4½ × 5½ inches
When not busy drafting papal briefs, grants of nobility, and commercial documents, the professional scribes of early modern Europe partnered with engravers to make writing books—instructional manuals and technical showpieces that featured everything from advice on holding a pen to works meant to rival the greatest achievements of fine art. Also, many of these books ran riot with scores of quirky loop-the-loop animal portraits.
Drawing from Letterform Archive’s collection of writing manuals, Calligraphic Menagerie gathers twenty of these exuberant doodles in a box set of colorful notecards. In this post, we take a brief look at the historic artistry that inspired the stationery.
Line Tamers
Before moveable type printing arrived in Europe, monks had their fun in the margins, illustrating creaturely antics at the edges of illuminated manuscript pages. Print reshaped the demand for scribal work but also offered a new medium for its transmission. By the sixteenth century, an enterprising class of writing masters promoted themselves as skilled specialists and instructors. Through printed books that promised true-to-life proof of their talents, they vied with one another for commissions, students, and prestige. In the seventeenth century, a curious new genus of animals started to spring from the margins of these books.
Flourishing—the art of shaping decorative lines, whirls, knots, and images with continuous traces of the pen—first developed as a means of embellishing script compositions, but with time it became something of a main attraction. Brought to its extremes in elaborately figured fauna, flourishing was the writing masters’ best party trick, a skillful performance that today lands somewhere between a double-neck guitar solo and a balloon animal. Meant to astonish and amuse, the practice drew countless admirers, but it also provoked many critics, who grumbled over how far it strayed from writing.
Birds proved a popular subject for writers, maybe out of respect for the creatures they robbed for their quills. But top flourishers were those who, in the words of a student, could “describe, without pausing or lifting his pen, in a single flourish, bird, tree, flower, or any device asked of him.”1 One seventeenth-century plate by Joseph Friedrich Leopold shows the bustling variety such artists could tease from a line.
Two historical terms for the art of flourishing show the significance it held for some masters. The first, command of hand, represents the practice as one of almost martial control of the body by the mind. The second, free striking, emphasizes instead the unplanned spontaneity in the act of laying down a line (or streak, to use a word close to the original) of ink. Considered together, these terms offer a sense of the writer’s wish to combine thoroughly domesticated precision with uninhibited fluidity in work with the pen. It’s no wonder that wildlife, expressive of untamed energies, became the ultimate subject for expert doodling.
Making a Menagerie
To celebrate the lively creatures that hide in the leaves of old writing manuals, the team at Letterform Archive explored dozens of rare works in the collection, selecting favorites that show the vast range of the flourisher’s art. Flashed with color and printed on quality cardstock, the notecards of Calligraphic Menagerie offer a contemporary spin on twenty originals all dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The box of Calligraphic Menagerie features calligraphy by lettering artist Nim Ben-Reuven and—in a nod to the writing master’s extravagance—holographic rainbow foil that compliments the vibrant hues of the cards inside.
Find out more about this stationery set and other recent releases, by visiting our shop at the link below. Members receive 10% off all Letterform Archive titles.
Notes
- Quoted in Ambrose Heal, The English Writing-Masters and their Copybooks, 1570–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931), 3. ↩︎
— Chris Westcott, Editor, Letterform Archive Books