Chapter 12
The American Greetings world headquarters is located on American Road in Cleveland, Ohio. A large, anonymous glass building looming behind a curved, wooded driveway, it houses gift shops, a cafeteria, and offices for the two thousand employees who have survived the downturn in the greeting card industry brought about by e-cards and the economic recession.
Still employed by American Greetings are seven letterers responsible for creating the look of the words that adorn Mother’s Day, graduation, and other celebratory cards. They create new handwritten scripts—not fonts or typescripts—that are later reproduced. The two most experienced ones, who carry the title of senior letterer, have backgrounds in calligraphy.
Calligraphic-trained letterers are a rare breed. Only three major institutions have calligraphers on staff: American Greetings, Hallmark, and the White House. Although the world of full-time, professional letterers is tiny, the digital age is creating an upsurge of interest in the art of beautiful lettering.*
Calligraphy has long been an art in the Middle East and China, and it has always been linked to cultural and national values. Scholar Albertine Gaur calls calligraphy a “corporate logo” for cultures, “an expression of harmony as perceived by a particular civilization.” The West has a weaker calligraphic tradition. It disappeared within generations after the invention of the printing press and was not revived until the latter half of the nineteenth century. Handwritten communication continued, of course, but the ceremonial, artistic practice of using specific scripts to commemorate and laud did not. As Gaur puts it, “The fact that more people wanted, and were able, to write brought about a leveling down of standards.” 1
William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement revived the work of medieval scribes. The movement was a clear response to the Industrial Revolution, with its machines and smog and printed letters. In addition to tapestries, wallpaper, and furniture using artisanal, preindustrial processes, Morris and his colleagues re-created the writing materials, surfaces, habits, and scripts of the medieval monks.
Morris founded the Kelmscott Press in 1891 to publish letterpress books on handmade paper, and the Central School of Arts and Crafts was founded in 1896 to carry on his design philosophies. One of his friends, Edward Johnston, expanded on Morris’s interest in medieval writing. “Since the traditions of the early scribes and printers and carvers have decayed, we have become so used to inferior forms and arrangements that we hardly realize how poor the bulk of modern lettering really is,” Johnston wrote. He decided to study exactly how the monks wrote, and via manuscripts in the British Library (then the British Museum Library) he determined that monks held their pens differently to create the angles they did. He taught himself medieval writing techniques, such as how the nibs were cut and the parchment was ruled. Johnston began teaching these methods at the Central School and later at the Royal College of Art, single-handedly created a calligraphy movement in Britain, as well as helping other similar movements take root in America and Europe.
In 1906, Johnston published Writing & Illuminating & Lettering, an accessible, charming, and meticulous guide to how to write as the medieval monks did; chapters include how to cut pens, make upward and downward strokes, line pages, and master different hands. Johnston took the medieval revival so far as to recommend re-creating the working conditions of a scriptorium and writing only by natural light—never at night. Working through his book, a calligrapher-to-be first learned uncial and half-uncial, then Roman capitals, Roman small-letter (Roman rustic), and finally italics, or humanist script.
Although self-described revivers of the lost craft of the monks, Johnston’s followers saw themselves as artists; unlike monks, they signed their names and chose handwriting over printing, an option unavailable to medieval scribes. Western calligraphy, a self-conscious celebration of fancy lettering in and of itself, is a wholly twentieth-century concept. So, too, is its popularity due to new technologies. Ironically, Writing & Illuminating & Lettering, reprinted dozens of times and still in use today, led to the revival of handwritten manuscripts.2
Eight years after Johnston’s book was published, the trend was clear:
In recent years England has seen a notable revival of Calligraphy, that is to say of beautiful and formal handwriting. This revival has already had echoes on the continent and in America and bids fair eventually not only to lead to the wide production of highly finished manuscripts for those who can afford them, but also to influence for good, through school-teachers and improved copybooks in many countries, the types of handwriting and lettering now in vogue.3
The Society of Scribes & Illuminators was the first calligraphic association, founded in 1921 in London. This informal society called itself, as would others, a guild, in a nod to the medieval roots of their art. Guilds exhibited work and studied how to write on skins, prepare ink, and gild. Private classes and workshops were offered in England, Europe, and the United States, and the most serious students underwent informal apprenticeships with individual teachers.
In the United States, the calligraphic revival was fueled by this apprenticeship model. Ernst Frederick Detterer, an American, studied with Edward Johnston privately in London and returned to the United States to found a society in Chicago. Other individuals founded societies in other cities: New York (Society of Scribes); Portland, Oregon (Portland Society for Calligraphy); and Philadelphia (Philadelphia Calligraphers’ Society). To this day, most trained calligraphers are members of these informal yet long-lasting guilds.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, calligraphy experienced a second revival for predictably similar reasons: hippies and other back-to-earthers, like those of the Arts and Crafts era, valued making things by hand in reaction to mass culture. The Whole Earth Catalog, that iconic book of the seventies, has a chapter dedicated to calligraphy, and a brisk business developed in calligraphy pens and instruction manuals and offering italics workshops.
During this resurgence both the senior letterers at American Greetings, Mike Gold and Martha Ericson, learned calligraphy. Gold, who grew up in California, was working with a sign painter who introduced him to lettering, the creation of letters in a recognizable design, as opposed to calligraphy, which is the re-creation of historic, formulaic scripts. Gold was initially more animated by lettering and was slower to appreciate the allure of the more rigid, imitative calligraphy: “I thought of it as just Old English; I didn’t realize it was an art, too,” he says, using the term “Old English” to refer to what I have been calling Gothic or blackletter. When Gold discovered copying scripts could be artistic and creative as well, he wanted to learn more scripts, but there were no classes to take. So he started corresponding with a well-known calligrapher in England, Roy Hampton. By writing letters to Hampton, Gold had an ad hoc, long-distance education.
The ranks of amateur calligraphers are growing, as “people want stuff made by hand again,” as Gold puts it. He points to scrapbooking, journaling, and the rise of lettering books and artists such as John Stevens, author of Scribe: Artist of the Written Word, popular among graphic artists, as examples, as well as the lettered chalkboards increasingly popular in restaurants and higher-end grocery stores, and among brides who are requesting menus so ornate and precise they can take up to twenty hours to letter. Wedding invitation envelopes addressed in calligraphy are the bread and butter of amateur calligraphy. “Hire a calligrapher for your envelopes” is on many checklists in glossies like Brides magazine. Occasionally a calligrapher will be commissioned for a resolution or certificate. Diploma work dried up a while ago when degree-granting institutions shifted to Xerox.
Although few professional Western calligraphers reside in the United States, Muslims and Jews still hire trained experts to create copies of their religious texts. In both traditions, the calligrapher must be devout and undergo a long apprenticeship to learn the exacting laws prescribing how to write the holy texts of the Koran and the Torah, as well as other documents such as marriage announcements. In contrast to the West’s boom-and-bust revival of calligraphy over the past century, Muslims and Jews have been so consistent about how their holy documents are written that their current practices remain precisely as they were a millennium or more ago. These traditional practices put into relief the modern reinterpretation that is calligraphy in the West.
Today, in response to the digital age, we are similarly “reviving”—or reinventing—handwriting as an art. On Etsy, a hugely popular website for artists and craftspeople that has the sheen of the preindustrial to it, you can buy computer-simulated handwriting: graphic designs that emulate print and cursive. You can also hire someone to handwrite invitations using “historic” or “old-fashioned–looking” letters.
The revived interest in artisanal handwriting as a hobby or art form brings us back to the question of Ellie’s practical education and what to do in the American second and third grades. If we do not teach handwriting, will the cognitive abilities of children suffer? Does handwriting make us smarter?
* Calligraphers are trained in traditional Western scripts such as capitalis and copperplate. Letterers create new scripts.