Mary Noble is a freelance calligrapher and an enthusiastic adult education teacher. She trained originally in graphic design and later completed the Advanced Training Scheme of the Society of Scribes and Illuminators and was awarded the Advanced Level National Diploma in Calligraphy by The Calligraphy and Lettering Arts Society. Janet Mehigan has always been interested in calligraphy and lettering; they were her main subjects when she attended art college. She holds a BA(Hons) in Education, is a Fellow of the Society of Scribes and Illuminators and a Fellow of the Calligraphy & Lettering Arts Society. She teaches calligraphy and art in Adult Education, holds regular weekend workshops for students and calligraphic societies and is the co-author of The Calligrapher's Companion and Beginner's Guide to Calligraphy. She has also contributed to The Art of Colour Calligraphy. Janet's work is full of colour and interest and she enjoys both traditional and contemporary calligraphy. She also enjoys painting, drawing and working with all art media.

• About this Book 6Tools and Materials 8Preparing to Write 10The Alphabets 16Foundational hand 18Unical hand 40Carolingian hand 64Gothic hand 94Italic hand 126Bâtarde hand 158Versal hand 190Diacritics 220Glossary 222Credits and Resources 224

Entering the world of calligraphy seems, to me, a very 'Zen' activity: concentrating on the angles of our lines, defining their height and width, calculating the spacing and the distances between letters.Mary Noble and Janet Mehigan have devised a manual that, after introducing the ideal tools as well as solutions to the most frequent errors, offers us numerous chromatically classified pages on which to practice, letter-by-letter, 7 different fonts. Their guides indicate, with arrows, the trajectories and angles that we must execute step-by-step.After the practice sheets, the book features double pages with inspiring decorative frames that invite us to unleash our creativity by writing our own texts.Invitation cards, scrapbooks, recipe books, diaries, photo albums, there are examples of them all in the 244 pages of this manual that has fallen into our hands.