Abstract

This chapter on Baskerville as writing-master incorporates a new survey of penmanship in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It critiques 20th century scholarship in this area, and presents new evidence for the technical basis of English Round Hand. With Baskerville as a case in point, this book section reverses the received understanding of two traditions (typography and calligraphy) that increasingly diverged from one and argues for a cross fertilisation between calligraphy and the design of type as a continuous historical process, itself contributing to the development of 'modern' typographic style. In brief this chapter offers a revisioning of a significant part letterform history.