The pen does half the work
Calligraphy means beautiful writing, from Greek. Western calligraphy is usually done with a broad NIB, cut flat like a tiny chisel. Held at a steady angle, it makes thick lines when it moves one way and thin lines when it moves another, so every letter gets its contrast automatically. The skill is keeping the angle and the rhythm the same, STROKE after stroke — which takes a great deal of PRACTICE.
Before metal nibs, scribes used a QUILL cut from a large wing feather, usually a goose's, trimmed and re-cut with a penknife every few pages. That is where the word penknife comes from. They wrote on PARCHMENT or VELLUM, both made from carefully prepared animal skin, which lasts far longer than paper.
Gospel books made by hand
Some of the most famous calligraphy in the world was made to copy scripture. The Lindisfarne Gospels, written around 715 on Holy Island off the coast of Northumberland, are thought to be the work of a single monk, Eadfrith, who also painted the decoration. The Book of Kells, made around 800 and now in Trinity College Dublin, is covered with interlaced patterns, animals and spirals so detailed that some can only be seen properly with a magnifying glass. Its pages needed the skins of well over a hundred calves.
In the Islamic world calligraphy was the most honoured of the arts, because copying the Quran was an act of devotion and the religion discouraged pictures of people in holy books. Calligraphers wrote with a reed pen cut at an angle, and developed many styles, from the bold angular Kufic SCRIPT to rounded flowing hands. Our holy books page covers the texts themselves.
A brush, an ink stone and a single stroke
In China, Japan and Korea calligraphy is done with a pointed BRUSH, and each character is written in a fixed order of strokes. Chinese scholars traditionally prized four treasures of the study: the brush, the INK stick, the ink stone on which it is ground with water, and paper. Because the ink soaks in at once, a stroke cannot be corrected, and the confidence of the hand shows in every line.
Calligraphy there has long been ranked alongside painting and poetry, and a hanging SCROLL of a single well-written character can be treasured as a work of art.
From handwriting to fonts
ITALIC began as a quick, slanted handwriting used by Italian scholars in the fifteenth century, and was turned into a printing type in Venice in 1501. The SERIF, the small foot on the end of a stroke in many typefaces, echoes the way a chisel or brush finished a letter. CURSIVE joins letters so the pen hardly leaves the page, and a FLOURISH adds a decorative SWIRL or LOOP.
Steve Jobs said a calligraphy class he dropped in on at university taught him about spacing and letterforms, and that the Macintosh became the first computer with beautiful fonts because of it. Every font on a screen today descends from a letter once written by hand — the LETTERING, the SLANT, the CURVE, and the whole ALPHABET, made ELEGANT by a PEN.