Italic Questions and Answers

Jan Schalkwijk

In the last thitty years that I have been teaching italic, I have learned and seen how difficult this script can be for adults. Everyone who runs a workshop, dear reader, can tell you about the problems when you start writing italic. I am grateful to the editor for inviting me to describe to you one of the beginner's difficulties — there are of course others.

In Holland, the Mercator Society arranges a workshop on the last Saturday of each month. Several men and women turn up in the morning. They have brought a set of broad pens and paper. I find it best to work with paper with 5×5 mm squares. We always use the broadest pen. I hear you ask me: 'Why?' In the first place the writer is writing slowly and is able to see his mistakes clearly: secondly, he has a good control over his movements. We also employ a broad pencil such as the Holbein sketching pencil 6B, the Rexel Cumberland Derwent sketching pencil (soft) or Blackedge No 218 (soft). It is nice to write and learn with these pencils: try it.

Back to the pupils: most of them use a ball-point, some have learned a vertical model and many of the older ones have learned a Carstairs or copperplate script requiring a pointed pen. I say to them: 'We have to learn to write with a pen-hold of 45°.' How to explain this? We do it as follows. 'Lay the hand and arm on the table, as flat as possible. Turn your arm and hand to the right. Now you can see the inside of your hand and arm. Take up the pen with your left hand. Let it rest on the middle finger of the right hand and hold it with the forefinger and thumb, the writing end of your pen being at the end of your forefinger. I think the position of your body is good, the surface of the table not too high or too low. The distance between the table-surface and the eye must be about 30 cm.'

'You see here a drawing of the hand of Erasmus by Ourer. It is a good example. Note the position of the thumb. What do you see when you have the pen in the correct position? Yes, the pen is parallel with the body. Now comes your difficulty. Forget everything you learned at school and try to follow me. Tilt your paper at an angle of about 30°. Move the pen upwards from corner to corner ofthe squares on the paper. Thus your pen remains at an angle of 45° and you make the thinnest stroke. Now move your pen downwards from corner to corner, and you are making the thickest stroke. All the time your pen stays at 45°. Look at these Dryad Writing Cards of Alfred Fairbank. No. 1 shows what I mean. Fairbank tells us: 'The penshaft must not be pointed to the shoulder.' It is so important to hold your pen correctly. You must train yourself to do it automatically without thinking. I know that this requires a lot of self-control and love for the letter-shapes.'

Naturally I am asked: 'Why 45°?' I explain that, first, this is a basic feature in the contruction of italic letters and secondly that it facilitates rapid writing. Then I advise my pupils to look at historic examples of fine italic handwriting, particularly the hand of Arrighi. Among the many books that are available, I'd like to mention Three Classics of Calligraphy (Oscar Ogg), Renaissance Handwriting (Fairbank & Wolpe), and Luminario (A. S. Osley). Study these scripts with a magnifying glass. What do you see? They all wrote with a broad pen held at an angle of 45°.

This is what I tell the people who visit our workshop.