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What is the title?

What does it tell you about what the essay is about?
What do you already know about the subject?
What do you expect the essay to say about it--especially given when it was written and who the author was (see next questions)?

When was the essay written?

Do you know anything about the state of the historical literature on the subject at that time?
If so, what do you expect the essay to say?

Who wrote it? What do you expect him or her to say?

What are the author's credentials, or affiliations?
What are his/her prejudices?
Are you familiar with the authors' other work related to the subject?

Read the essay, marking the information that is crucial to you.
When the text gives you crucial information, mark and note it:

What exactly is the subject?
How does it correspond to the title?
What are the main points--the theses?
What is the evidence that the author gives to sustain the thesis or theses?

What is the factual information that you want to retain?

Is there a good description of something you knew, or did not know, that you want to remember its location? If so, mark it. If for research, make out a research note on it.

Does the author cite some important source that you want to retain for future reference?
If so, mark it. If for research, make out a bibliographic note either now or on reviewing the article for such citations.

Once you have finished the article, reflect on:

What have you learned?
How does it relate to what you already know?
Did you find the argument convincing on its own terms?
Given what you know about the subject, do you think the main point(s) might be correct even if the argument was not convincing?
Can you think of information that makes you doubt the main point(s), even if the essay argued it well?
How does the essay relate to other things you have read--that is, how does it fit in the historical literature?

Make out a summary sheet on the essay

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Introduction

Writing papers may well be the opportunity for you to learn more about the subject you are studying than any other aspect of a course. It is worth doing well. You not only learn more, you also think more deeply about a topic when you have to put words on paper. Finally good grades depend on good papers.

I. Collecting Information
II. Recording Information
III. Thinking About the Topic
IV. The Plan
V. Writing and Editing
VI. Finishing Touches

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High quality translations - from experienced native speaking translators. Whether it is a one-page personal letter or 200-page technical manual, we deliver you the same superior quality. We entrust translating your documents to the expert native speaker with a competence in your subject area. Say, you hire us to translate a legal contract from English into French, and then it will be done by a native French speaker with an extensive expertise in translating legal documents.]]> PapersForCollege 2010-06-21T20:54:14+00:00 http://www.ejf.org.uk/EEC/index.php/wikipedia/Archetype_as_Letterform%3A_The_Dream_of_Edward_Johnston/ http://www.ejf.org.uk/EEC/index.php/wikipedia/Archetype_as_Letterform%3A_The_Dream_of_Edward_Johnston/ by Brian Keeble

Category:Edward Johnston

During the many hours I have spent in conversation with calligraphers and lettercutters over the years, I have always been struck by the way in which the practicalities of achieving the ‘perfect’ letterform and its appropriate spacing in a given context is at the root of their preoccupation and effort. No doubt this is as it should be. What scribe or lettercutter worth his salt would take up this exacting craft and not be haunted and challenged by the idea of perfection.
But what one rarely comes across, if at all, is a serious consideration of where the notion of perfection comes from. For it has also been my experience that calligraphers and lettercutters, whilst pursuing their craft as if some notion of perfection was at least tacitly motivating them, are all too ready to deny that the perfect letterform exists.
What I would like to attempt here, then, is an exploration of the idea that the perfect letterform must be a reality, since if it were not, then it would not have the power to inspire the hand, the eye and the mind of the craftsman as often as it obviously does. Perhaps it would be better to say that the perfect letterform has a reality, even if it is never manifest in a material substance, such as ink or stone. To use more scholastic terms, that it has being even if it does not exist. But to make this distinction between being and existence presupposes that reality is much more complex and multi-layered than our everyday consciousness reveals to us.
You may be familiar with the old adage that ‘to work is to pray’, which saying gives some indication of the fact that the crafts were traditionally practised as if they possessed a spiritual dimension and that they acted as a support for contemplation. I believe the writings of Edward Johnston indicate that he exercised his vocation as if this was still a possibility. Even though Johnston’s practical example has inspired inummerable scribes to take up calligraphy and lettering, so far as I know, no one has previously examined this aspect of his work. If it is time to re-examine the legacy of Johnston, then this rather more ‘hidden’ aspect ought to be fundamental to that re-examination.
If calligraphy is to be understood and practised as if it were more than a skillful game of shape-forming – albeit a very sophisticated game – then we might look to the example of Johnston to learn more of the depths of this ancient, universal skill. Johnston’s was an example that prompted one of his pupils to claim of his inspirational teaching that it came as if out of ‘eternity and infinity’. ()
That is a very pointed description by someone carefully choosing his words. Speaking of the ultimate objective of his craft Johnston himself said: ‘Life is the thing we all want and it is the desire for life that is behind all religion and all art…. Our aim should be…to make letters live…that men themselves may have more life’. () Again, we note the carefully chosen words. This does not sound like someone advocating the practice of ‘art for art’s sake’, or even ‘craft for craft’s sake’.
If you look at your copy of Writing and Illuminating, and Lettering, that is if you have an earlier edition, you will find three quotations given prominence on a page facing the Author’s Preface. (I have a copy of the rd edition of this book in which this page was still included. At some later date it was quietly dropped.)
Now from all that we know of him we can certainly agree with Eric Gill’s assessment that Johnston was ‘deliberate of speech and equally deliberate of thought’. We know that Johnston was a deeply religious man, and it is therefore impossible to believe that he lived his life keeping his vocation as a calligrapher and his religious experience in separate compartments. So we must believe that these quotations were chosen with great deliberation by a man who claimed that the ‘one thing I care most about’ is ‘to search out and live the truth’ (). We must also remember that Johnston thought sufficiently of the following passage to writeit out at least twice in , one of these for presentation to no less a master craftsman than Alfred Fairbank. Of this Johnston said ‘in many ways the  is yet my best’. () The last of the three quotations reads as follows:
…in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become a friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may.’ (x)
This extraordinary passage, taken from Plato’s Symposium and given such prominence by Johnston, needs to be examined carefully. I say extraordinary because it is by no means representative of the habits of mind and thought that have shaped and which energise the modern world, referring as it does to the intelligible realm of archetypal Ideas. Indeed, it is precisely because Johnston placed at the head of his treatise a quotation that does not underwritemodern assumptions about the nature of reality and the mind that makes it necessary we look at the quotation in some detail.
The passage occurs in Plato’s dialogue at a section where Diotima is speaking to Socrates in the context of her teaching that Love is ‘a great spirit between divine and mortal’ (as Johnston annotates it in his footnotes to the inscription). Diotima is speaking about the possibility of men gazing on Beauty’s very self, unsullied and in the words of Johnston’s notes, ‘not dogged with the pollution of mortality and all the colours and varieties of human life. Diotima insists that, only when men discern heavenly beauty itself – face to face – through what makes it visible will they have hold of the true.
The quotation begins, ‘in that communion’ – that is to say, in the mind’s contemplation of beauty, and continues, ‘beholding beauty with the eye of the mind’. When he speaks of mind here, Plato means not, as might be assumed, the rational mind – that part of our common-sense consciousness that makes a reasoned judgement about things on the basis of empirical observation and logical calculation. And the ‘eye’ referred to is not the eye of sensible apprehension – for Plato, like Heraclitus before him, held that the senses are unreliable witnesses of what is unchangingly true. The ‘eye of the mind’ is an intuitive faculty of the soul, capable of grasping metaphysical and spiritual realities that are not subject to change, as is every reality conditioned in whatever way by time and space. ‘To bring forth’ means to grasp and hold with unwavering stability a truth of the mind beyond the world of the senses. It is to grasp ‘a reality’ as opposed to ‘an image’ (or representation) of beauty, as the passage continues. Plato is pointing out that external appearances, because they are the very fabric from which transient reality is woven, have something illusory or deceptive about them. He is making the distinction between things that possess true, permanent Being as opposed to things that are subject to change and which are only in the mind as mental abstractions. So, when he speaks of ‘bringing forth and nourishing’ he is referring to the archetypal truths that enter into one’s very being and become part of our identity, rather than truths of a more ephemeral nature that are temporarily registered in the imagination through the senses. When the contemplator is truly absorbed into these archetypal truths or Ideas, he or she becomes, as the quotation continues, ‘the friend of God and be immortal’. That is to say, assumes or takes on the identity of the archetypal, to identify oneself with the Divine within in the measure the contemplator is able to shed the grosser demands and predilictions of the empirical ego.
We might take it as an indication that Johnston was familiar early on with the idea that an approach to the Divine within entails the sacrifice of one’s ego, that in , at the age of , he wrote on a parchment, ‘The best way to see Divine Light is to put out your own candle’. ()
Now, all this may seem a far cry from the practice of calligraphy, but that it was important to Johnston we cannot doubt. What we must keep in the forefront of our minds is that this contemplation of, and entering into objective beauty, is the grasping of a reality that is never materially embodied. It is an intuitive, unanalysable experience that is known directly without the intervention of mediate, mental activity – that is without any sort of mental calculation that effectively puts a distance between or makes a distinction of the knower and the known. It may be difficult for the modern mind, with its rational and materialist training and bias, to see that such archetypal Ideas are more true and more real than the products of mental calculation on the one hand and physical realities on the other. But Johnston’s belief that this is so becomes evident from a careful reading of the relevant passages of his writings. That he was more a Platonist than a modernist also goes a long way to explain why he was increasingly at odds with the progressive, industrial world that surrounded him.
To help us get an idea of how this archetypal reality might apply to letterforms we can turn to a passage in Johnston’s Writing and Illuminating, and Lettering. He says: ‘the mere taking to pieces, or analysing, followed by ‘putting together’, is only a means of becoming acquainted with the mechanism of construction, and will not reproduce the original beauty of a thing’. (wxix) In other words, that part of the mind that calculates, measures and co-ordinates what the interaction of the hand, the eye and the mind must apply in the making of a letterform does not go deep enough in its self to touch upon the ‘original beauty’ of the perfect letterform that is none the less sought, whether implicitly of explicitly, in the craftsman’s pursuit of excellence. This impalpable, archetypal letter (as we might call it), experienced intuitively in the deep recesses of the ‘eye of the mind’, is what actually underpins the perfect unity of that physical and mental action required to shape palpably beautiful letters in whatever substance. When a manifestly beautiful letter is fully realised by the craftsman, then the archetype is, as it were, sounded so that what results is a letterform whose beauty reduces the observer to silence, unable to describe or quantify in what its perfection consists. I would suggest that whenever we look at a letter that appears insufficient in some way, even though all its elements are ‘correctly’ present, then in that experience of impoverishment we are sensing intuitively the absence of any reverberation of the archetypal ‘original beauty’ Johnston refers to.
Here, in parenthesis, it is interesting to note that in a Report on Art Schools that W.R. Lethaby prepared for the L.C.C. in , a few months before meeting Johnston, he wrote: ‘Lettering of all kinds is almost without exception bad. Such students as endeavour to apply lettering harmoniously to their designs seem to endeavour to invent new and contorted forms out of their heads. Of all things the form of letters has been shaped by tradition and in most cases the effort to be original is an effort to be bad’. ()
Lethaby is surely noting that such bad letterforms arise from the use only of that superficial part of the rational mind (if that!) that takes to pieces, analyses and puts together the basic elements of letters on the basis of personal preference. And in saying that the forms of letters have been shaped by tradition – with the implication that such forms are ‘good’ and ‘beautiful’ – it would surely be in bad logic to interpret Lethaby as meaning that such forms are arrived at simply on the basis of habits of past precedent. An ugly or bad letterform does not acquire beauty or legitimacy in the process of being copied and repeated, for however long. Beauty is of another order than the mere passage of time.
Johnston himself, early in his career defined ‘Beauty’,as ‘obedience made manifest to the Laws of Truth’ () – we note the use of capitals on the words Beauty, Laws and Truth. He did not significantly change his mind in later life, even though he went on to investigate those laws exactingly , testing them again and again against vigorous thought and assiduous practice. He never lost sight either of the earthly/heavenly axis along which, traditionally, the practice of any craft proceeds. Speaking of the old scribes at their work, he remarked that even more than their skill and the speed with which they wrote – as if writing an ordinary letter – and even though they were ‘engaged on serious work’ and were not concerned with ‘art’ as we think of it, ‘they had in their hearts a kind of dream of divine beauty that they were seeking …[and] …note how much that dream was fulfilled’(). Let us look a little closer at this ‘dream’.
All that we know of Johnston presents us with a picture of an entirely practical man. There was nothing ‘abstract’ or ‘airy-fairy’ about him, nothing ‘arty’. Indeed, we might doubt whether there was anything about him that was superficial. ‘Preoccupied’, certainly, as the notice he made for his study door proclaimed, aimed at repelling unwelcome visitors. His daughter Priscilla said of him: ‘for all his lassitude he was extremely forceful, indeed dominant. It was not an active forcefulness of vitality but a kind of latent forcefulness of character’.()
But his was no utilitarian practicality. Johnston’s vision of his craft begins at the beginning. Literally the beginning of all things – his testing of his ideas took him that far. Noel Rooke reports of him that ‘he related his subject to everything in heaven and earth’ because he saw it as essentially part of a whole. Even when it came to describing a single element of letter formation – ­that of contrast – he took the comprehensive view: ‘contrast is at the very root of formal penmanship. So is harmony. That is why our work, when well done, is so sparkling. It has that unique possession, the best of both sides; the idea of Heaven and Earth is there, harmony and contrast.’ ()
And Priscilla Johnston relates that her father once spoke to her of his taking a class, ‘of how he was able to give (the students) the feeling that it really was worth doing and a little of his vision, also, the spirit of it, over and above the technical side. He quoted Man shall not live by bread alone and spoke of the excitement of the vision’. () Can we not sense in this passage Johnston’s desire to communicate the idea that the perfection of work which is the aim of the true craftsman must involve more that the mastery of practical skills, if indeed the craftsman is to become ‘a friend of God’ as the quotation from Plato puts it?
Since man is created in the Divine Image (as Johnston believed), it follows that in the exercise of his vocation the craftsman, by analogy, shares in the actions of the making of the world by its Creator. Johnston thought of the process of creation as involving three stages: ‘embodying , animating and inspiring’. The three stages must be understood and actualised in the context of man’s origin and place in the fabric of the Creation; ‘in a book for craftsmen’, Johnston wrote, ‘the primary order is Genesis :: And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul’. () Also, in connection with man’s being created in the Divine Image Johnston asks us to consider Genesis :, of how God formed every beast and bird and how Adam named every living creature. That is to say, the word by which each thing is named establishes the unique and permanent reality of that thing. In the naming by Adam of each thing inheres the archetypal essence or Idea of that thing as it exists in the mind of God: as it exists in the Word, that is, the logos – the eternal reason of things. The scribe, in making in manifest form, true and beautiful words, recapitulates the Adamic action of giving each thing God’s signature. Thus, named things and meaning co-inhere. And in this co-inherence is the very ligature that binds man to Truth itself. Johnston, with life-long insistence that the scribe pay attention to the meanings of the words he writes, is reported as having worn out his Dictionary.
How Adam’s giving God’s signature to each thing is, in Johnston’s mind, an analogy of the scribe’s action is clearly seen in the following passage:
All his [the craftsman’s]works express Idea [note the Platonic capital, denoting a pre-existing, immaterial potentiality]..by substance brought to [material] life – like Adam made of Earth. Each of his [man’s] work – like every son of Adam – bears a human touch and is seen to be unique. All things are unique, but the craftsman’s works show this –each one [each manuscriptof ours] is an autograph. ()
As each man bears the signature of God in his deiformity so each work from the hand of the scribe bears the signature of its creator. Thus, each work is, infallibly and authentically, a thing brought materially to life from a pre-existing idea in the mind. This analogical wisdom is surely what resonates in Johnston’s assertion that the proper task of the scribe is ‘to make letters live…that men themselves may have more life’ ().
Finally, in a letter quoted by Priscilla Johnston, Johnston himself spoke of the final creative act as one in which God saw of the Creation that it was Good –‘in fact, a thing is not completely created until it has been appreciated…I believe it’. () Here Johnston is at his most profound, for he is drawing upon the idea that the final justification for the Creation of the world by God is in the realisation of the necessity that it is completed by being known.
It is the responsibility of the craftsman’s share in the Divine Creation to see that his work is good, that it is true, for it is the Truth, ‘both immanent and transcendent’ () that prevails. And of Truth, Johnston wrote: ‘its other names are goodness and beauty, the way and the Life, the Light (of the world), the Word, and many more.’ Which brings us to the question of beauty.
We can only correctly understand Johnston’s view of Beauty if we keep it in the context he himself placed it in: Beauty is approached and found indirectly in the search for Truth, through the discipline of a proper utility of human needs. Priscilla Johnston reports her father as holding: ‘Beauty is an ultimate Grace which will be conferred upon the craftsman’s work if it be well done. If Truth…has been served, the result will be Beauty’. ()
Can any one look at the best of Johnston’s works and not see that it is beautiful? However that may be, it perhaps takes a more trained eye to see that the beauty of his forms arises out of their construction. It remained axiomatic for Johnston that ‘unless the design arises out of the actual construction of a thing it is reduced to the level of extraneous ornamentation. Design is inherent rather than applied…’.()
In connection with this principle we might incidentally note that Johnston’s reluctance to have his work reproduced was precisely because of the resulting inauthenticity in this respect. As he pointed out, ‘nothing is reproduced, something different is produced’. ()
As with design, so with the ‘original Beauty’ of a thing. It is not a surface application but comes out of workmanship honestly and straightforwardly undertaken. What, then, does such workmanshop entail?’
Like Gill, Johnston anchors his answer to all questions that have to do with the validity of the craftsman’s activity by going back to the nature of the agent doing the work. What is man? Man is a creature, a body – ‘the flesh is a sine qua non for the spirit of man’ () – who looks to God for the answers to the primary questions: What, How and Why. Why should one, why ought one, why must one, make a thing? And by a ‘thing’ Johnston meant both ‘what we make and what we do’.() Moreover ‘things are His [God’s] will’. () In asking these questions man is searching for Truth and by asking he is tacitly proposing that an answer can be found. Other names for Truth are Goodness and Beauty. And Truth ‘is that against which we sin’. () (This thought – that the workman can sin in his actions – may go some way to account for Johnston’s lassitude.)
In making a thing, the scribe ‘works in substances …with special tools and special methods. He also thinks in substances and in things, and in methods…, which direct the tools and form the thing out of the substance’. The ‘prime purpose of writing is to be read’. ‘His direct objective is to writewell’ so that the work produced is useful. In his primary duty to the author ‘the words are of the first importance’ and with this in mind the scribe aims at a presentation that is beautiful. Such beauty for formal penmanship is achieved by ‘Sharpness, Unity and Freedom’. In this, his direct purpose, ‘the scribe keeps the idea of usefulness constantly before him’.
‘Usefulness in this context, consists in legibility, fitness for purpose and perfect presentation. The scribe follows after usefulness since, in the final analysis, the ultimate objective of usefulness is beauty. (–)
So, given that the scribe has mastered all the necessary practical skills, this alone will not suffice to achieve the ‘original beauty’ that must be sought by indirect means. ‘Original beauty’ comes intuitively through concentration upon and contemplation of the archetypal Ideas that letterforms embody. The fact that Johnston wrote little on the subject of beauty is itself an indication of the fact that, by its very nature, it is a subject all but unteachable in any direct sense. The pursuit of beauty in isolation from its necessary alignment with truth and legitimate human needs has always been recognised by the wisest minds as being liable to lead men astray, into folly and self-indulgence. Nevertheless, something of what is involved in achieving the original beauty of living letters can be glimpsed in words Johnston addressed to an audience in Dresden in . The passage occurs in the context touched upon earlier regarding the scribe’s aim to ‘make letters live’. The relevant words are: ‘I think I can claim that, poor as they are, the letters on the blackboard are alive: that is not due to myself – I am only a superior kind of motor or engine – it is due to the pen (which brings life to letters)’. () It is ‘not due to myself’ – this attributing his achievement in giving life to letters to a higher agency, gives a hint, I believe, of what is meant, in the passage from Plato’s Symposium, by ‘nourishing true virtue to become a friend of God’.
So, to come back to Johnston’s ‘dream’ and to end with a question. Priscilla Johnston, in her memoir of her father, quotes him as saying: ‘I see no successor who will put his life and heart into the work I love. There are plenty of good scribes to whom it is an occupation and a profession but apparently not a preoccupation and a dream’, () our emphasis. His daughter was inclined to dismiss this remark, but given its pointed wording can we be so sure? Does not another interpretation offer itself? To any one with a deep religious conviction such as Johnston possessed the scribe’s vocation must be more than an entertaining and diversionary activity of mere shape-making, however sophisticated. The whole man must be engaged. Could it be that Johnston found no one willing to attempt, through the craft of the pen, that degree of contemplation, beyond the empirical ego, that engages those ‘realities’ – and not their semblances – that enable the craftsman to ‘bring forth and nourish true virtue’; that coincidence of being and knowing that is a gazing upon the heavenly beauty face to face in so far as ‘mortal man may’?


■ .The reference throughout to a perfect letterform is more a matter of convenience that a dogmatic assertion. This same perfection is operative in a whole collection of letters that, cumulatively, have an organic unity, each single letter being in some way modified in accommodation of the whole context of its presence
■ .The abbreviations used throughout are an initial followed by the page number of the following books by Johnston: =Lessons in Formal Writing edited by Heather Child and Justin Howes (London), ; =Formal Penmanship and other papers, edited by Heather Child (London), ; =Writing and Illuminating, and Lettering (London), , but reprinted many times; =Priscilla Johnston, Edward Johnston (London), second edition .
■ . It might be noted that Robert Speaight, in his biography of Eric Gill, records Johnston reading Plato aloud to Gill in his workshop when they were close neighbours in Hammersmith.]]> Archetype as Letterform: The Dream of Edward Johnston 2010-04-13T12:42:50+00:00 http://www.ejf.org.uk/EEC/index.php/wikipedia/Research_Paper/ http://www.ejf.org.uk/EEC/index.php/wikipedia/Research_Paper/
Thanks]]> Research Paper 2010-04-13T12:29:37+00:00 http://www.ejf.org.uk/EEC/index.php/wikipedia/Edward_Johnston_and_Wood_Engraving/ http://www.ejf.org.uk/EEC/index.php/wikipedia/Edward_Johnston_and_Wood_Engraving/
Category:Wood Engraving
Category:Calligraphy


Edward Johnston’s achievement in renewing the art of the scribe and the understanding of letterform sprang from the quality of his mind – his quietly insistent logic, and devotion to first principles in everything from mathematics to making toast. This was not without other consequences. In its origins the technique of wood engraving owes everything to its association with the written and printed word. From humble beginnings it attained artistic respectability in the hands of Thomas Bewick (1753–1828), and helped to create an expanding market for illustrated literature. But in service to this and to commercial demands accelerated by the Industrial Revolution, it became itself an industry, and largely a reproductive rather than a creative skill. With the advent of photographic ‘process’ engraving in the 1880s it faced a crisis of identity. A few artists began to see more personal possibilities in the medium, but their approach was confused by its reproductive heritage and by an awe of the Renaissance woodcut, technically and otherwise a different animal.

Among Edward Johnston’s earliest students were, of course, Eric Gill and Noel Rooke. In Writing & Illuminating, & Lettering some Bewick engravings are reproduced, with a note by Rooke suggesting them as possible models for a student-illuminator.¹ Elsewhere in the book Johnston commends ‘The splendid effect of Title and Initial pages engraved in wood... seen in the books of the Kelmscott Press’. Though generally favouring ‘ordinary typography’ for ordinary purposes he says ‘If special forms or arrangements of letters are required, for which type is lacking or unsuited, they are best cut in wood or metal. The engraver leaves the mark of his tool and hand upon, and so gives character to, such lettering; while, if he has some knowledge of letters, he may give fresh beauty to their forms’.² In a lecture on 30th November 1906 he said ‘I commend wood engraving to you for its simplicity & its direct educational value... you will find the wood & the graver will teach you at once things about form that are new to you & wonderful’.³ This reflects the excitement of very recent discovery; his work diary for the same year and month records:

Nov 16 Fri. Bt. Wood Engraving matls.
17 Sat. My 1st Wood Engraving
18 Sun. 2nd Wood Engraving
3rd Wood Engraving
20. Tues. Gill abt. 9.pm till 2am (21st)
(trying engraving)
(EJ’s 4th wood-engraving)⁴
The latter entry matches one in Eric Gill’s diary for the same date: ‘Tried wood Engraving a little in evening’ – clearly the two sat down together that night (and characteristically into the small hours of the next morning) to share their adventure. Proofs of Johnston’s efforts survive – not masterpieces, but one is thoroughly Johnstonian in its humour. Noel Rooke had already made his own start. He had been drawing for illustration since 1900; but, dissatisfied with ‘the Zincograph Process’ which had ousted wood engraving from its purely reproductive role and ‘Inspired by the thought of Johnston’s calligraphy I started in 1905 to make wood engravings on the same basis’, i.e. Johnston’s definition of formal writing as ‘the characteristic product of a special tool’. ‘I concluded that wood-engraving offered the best web hosting services of book decoration and illustration for the future, but on condition that it was done from a new point of view. All the attempts to revive it had failed because they followed the error which had caused its destruction fifty years ago, i.e. making engraving a method of reproducing drawings, instead of making it the chance of creating designs which could not be brought into existence in any other way.’⁵ These were the principles on which wood engraving would be redeveloped in the twentieth century. Rooke was not quite alone in pursuing them – Edward Gordon Craig, Sydney Lee and one or two others were working independently on similar lines – but his claim that this was the start of a movement was essentially justified.

Johnston had been rubricating books by hand for the Doves Press, run by his Hammersmith neighbour T.J. Cobden-Sanderson. Soon both Rooke and Gill were engraving initial letters, headpieces and the like not only for the Doves Press but the German publishers Insel Verlag, through the agency of Count Harry Kessler, from Johnston’s originals. Though this was in fact reproductive engraving, both moved on quickly to work which was their own in all ways. Johnston himself engraved a Christmas card in 1913, but does not seem to have pursued the medium further after this – no doubt calligraphy as such, and teaching commitments, were proving a sufficient tax on his never-abundant energy. Gill’s engraving developed steadily into a major part of his output, especially after his and Johnston’s mutual friend Hilary Pepler had started the St Dominic’s Press at Ditchling. Though he never taught engraving formally Gill was always a powerful example, articulate in his view of the medium and encouraging to others. Noel Rooke was a tutor in book illustration at the Central School from 1905, but overcame unaccountable opposition to the teaching of wood engraving only in 1912. Two years later he became Head of Book Production, which no doubt restricted his own output but was a position from which he could exert unrivalled influence. The mark of his teachings can be seen in the work of many wood engravers who emerged over the next generation. One of the earliest and most energetic, Robert Gibbings, seems first to have mooted the idea of a group which would draw together the somewhat scattered activities of artists working in the medium. But the catalyst for its realisation was Philip Hagreen, self-taught as an engraver though his early work suggests Rooke’s influence. On the initiative of these two the Society of Wood Engravers was formed in 1920. Rooke and Gill being at once invited to membership. Hagreen’s encounter with Eric Gill transormed his artistic outlook – he worked at Ditchling Common then and much later, becoming among other things an engraver of lettering too little appreciated even now.

A further circle, as it were, was completed when Gibbings took over the Golden Cockerel Press in 1924, commissioning engravings (as well as a proprietary typeface) from Gill. The summit of their collaboration, the Four Gospels of 1931, is a supreme realisation of that ideal of ‘the Book Beautiful’ which had inspired Cobden-Sanderson, and Johnston’s association with him, years earlier. Around 1930 Johnston was working on typefaces, and Gill was engraving, for Count Kessler’s Cranach Press; both were involved in Kessler’s editions (German and English) of Hamlet with woodcuts by another pioneering figure, Gordon Craig. About this time, too, the young Reynolds Stone, fresh from Cambridge and the University Press (where Stanley Morison’s typographic authority ensured that Johnstonian principles were honoured) met Gill and was effectively launched on his own engraving career. He was to demonstrate further that, in Johnston’s words, the engraver with a knowledge of letters ‘may give fresh beauty to their forms’.

Reynolds Stone was also one of those who kept wood engraving in the public eye when the excitements of the ‘revival’ – actually of course an entirely new movement – cooled down. The principles enunciated by its founders had sometimes been carried to extremes but a body of original and vigorous work had been created. Noel Rooke taught at the Central School until 1947, being succeeded by another distinguished ex-pupil, John Farleigh, founder in the same year of the Crafts Centre of Great Britain. In a lecture shortly before his retirement Rooke foresaw the developments – changes in fashion and the uses of graphic media, in art education and printing technology – which would combine to make the future of wood engraving again problematical. Symptomatic and maybe symbolic was the decline of the Society of Wood Engravers, even to apparent extinction in the 1970s – and its rebirth in 1984 (it was good that one of its principal founders, Philip Hagreen, should have lived long enough to receive the news of this). Continuity has been maintained, new talents continue to come forward and the spirit of exploration is alive and well. In this renewed vitality there is still a fundamental debt to the perceptions of Edward Johnston and those he inspired a hundred years ago.


FOOTNOTES
1 Writing and Illuminating, and Lettering, pp 189-193.
2 Ibid, pp 328-330.
3 Lessons in Formal Writing, ed. Heather Child and Justin Howes, 1986, pp 96-7.
4 Edward Johnston’s Work Diary, held at the Crafts Study Centre, Farnham, Surrey.
5 Quoted in ‘Noel Rooke: the early years’ by Justin Howes, Matrix 3, 1983.]]> Edward Johnston and Wood Engraving 2010-04-07T19:40:58+00:00 http://www.ejf.org.uk/EEC/index.php/wikipedia/Energy_Saver_Tips/ http://www.ejf.org.uk/EEC/index.php/wikipedia/Energy_Saver_Tips/ Heat pumps are the most proficient form of electric heating in restrained climates, providing three times more heating than the corresponding amount of energy they put away in electricity. Heat pumps are classified into three: air-to-air, water source, and ground source. All of them accumulate heat from the air, water, or ground outside your home and deliberate it for inside use. Heat pumps do two duties as a central air conditioner. They can also chill your home by collecting the heat inside and efficiently pumping it outside.

There are some tips that you can use your heat pump and save your energy at the same time.

First, do not set the heat pump's thermostat yourself if it causes the electric resistance heating to come in. This kind of heating that is mostly used as a back up to the heat pump is more expensive.

Second, sanitize or change the filters at least once a month or as needed and preserve the system as per the manufacturing instructions. For long term saving tip, if you will be using an electricity to warm your home and live in a moderate climate, consider the idea of installing an energy-efficient heat pump system.]]> Energy Saver Tips 2010-04-07T07:22:03+00:00 http://www.ejf.org.uk/EEC/index.php/wikipedia/Stan_Knight/ http://www.ejf.org.uk/EEC/index.php/wikipedia/Stan_Knight/ Category:Calligraphers

STAN KNIGHT first encountered writing, illuminating, and lettering half-a-century ago when he was a student at Leeds College of Art with Thomas Swindlehurst. (Tom himself was a student of Edward Johnston.) It has been a life-long obsession ever since, surfacing most recently in trial designs for computer fonts based on his own calligraphic forms.

While an art student, excited by Tom’s teaching, Stan became intrigued by the history of calligraphy, and he is now an acknowledged authority on the subject. In addition to his highly-acclaimed survey, Historical Scripts, he has written extensively about historical manuscripts, especially for Letter Arts Review.

Stan has been an Art College teacher for more than thirty years – enthusing his students about drawing,writing service,painting, lettering, typography,resume CV, illustration, printmaking, bookbinding, and life.

Since moving way-out-west to Idaho, he has quickly developed skills with a chain saw and a toy hand gun.]]> Stan Knight 2010-03-29T22:39:48+00:00 http://www.ejf.org.uk/EEC/index.php/wikipedia/Brian_Keeble/ http://www.ejf.org.uk/EEC/index.php/wikipedia/Brian_Keeble/ Category:Writers

Brian Keeble is a book designer and a publisher. He founded Golgonooza Press over thirty years ago with the aim of publishing works that explore the arts and crafts in their relationship to the sacred traditions. He has edited the writings of Eric Gill, Cecil Collins and Kathleen Raine among others and has written a book in collaboration with the composer Sir John Tavener.
Brian Keeble is also an occasional lecturer and is the author of many articles as well as the book Art, For Whom and For What? which has chapters on Eric Gill, David Jones and Michael Cardew and the philosophy of the crafts. His Conversing with Paradise (studies in poetry and traditions) will has recently been published
With Kathleen Raine, Philip Sherrard and Keith Critchlow he founded the journal Temenos. He was a founder member of and is a Fellow of the Temenos Academy and currently serves on its Council.

References : buy research papers essay writing services]]> Brian Keeble 2010-03-29T22:38:06+00:00 http://www.ejf.org.uk/EEC/index.php/wikipedia/Calligraphy_as_a_Basis_for_Letter_Design/ http://www.ejf.org.uk/EEC/index.php/wikipedia/Calligraphy_as_a_Basis_for_Letter_Design/ by Tom Perkins

Category:Calligraphy


The purpose of this article is to provide a method of constructing letters which is rooted in calligraphic principles, and is suitable for a wide range of uses, e.g. signwriting, letter carving, other forms of letter engraving, type design, etc. By calligraphy or calligraphic I shall mean throughout the influence of the formal broad-nibbed pen. The problem with using calligraphic forms as a basis for letter design is the tendency for them sometimes to retain too strong a calligraphic image with the resulting associations 'of some pleasing archaeological reconstruction'¹, interesting in itself but with little relevance to contemporary needs. In contrast one need only instance the typography of Jan Tschichold or the type designs of Hermann Zapf to show that a thorough grounding in calligraphy, far from being an over- riding influence, can in fact make available a far wider range of options given by resume writing services in the design and use of letterform.

Most contemporary lettering is a product of drawing and nearly all of the lettering around us will have originally been produced in this way. 'Today the pencil is the universal lettering tool'.²

Unfortunately, the pencil on its own provides us with no information as to how a letter is formed. Edward Johnston, writing in Formal Penmanship and commenting on 'the value and uses of the formal pen' states: 'The broad nib was the principal formative tool in the development of writing. From early stylus- made skeleton letters, it produced the conventional finished shapes and varieties which we now use (familiar to most of us mainly in print and after custom writing paper). The finished shape-and- structure of the common alphabet is, in fact, bound up with the shape and action of our pen'.³ This suggests, and suggests strongly, that a thorough working knowledge of these calligraphic prototypes would greatly enhance our appraisal of modern adaptations and give our own adaptations a greater authority.

It is not possible to consider a wide range of letterforms here so I have used only Roman capitals. 'Nearly every type of letter with which we are familiar is derived from the Roman Capitals'⁴ and these capitals form an excellent basis to demonstrate certain visual principles. These principles combined with a thorough understanding of freehand
]]> Calligraphy as a Basis for Letter Design 2010-03-29T22:36:40+00:00 http://www.ejf.org.uk/EEC/index.php/wikipedia/Eiichi_Kono/ http://www.ejf.org.uk/EEC/index.php/wikipedia/Eiichi_Kono/ Category:Type Designers
Category:Typographers

Eiichi Kono began his working life in the photo optical industry in Japan, and became fascinated by the universality of the Latin alphabet. This brought him, in 1974, to study at the London College of Printing and on to the Royal College of Art for Information Graphics, linked with the Readability Print Research Unit resume CV. His first paid job was a White Paper diagram for the London Clearing Banks! Then the redesign of Johnston Underground, known as New Johnston for text setting as well as display use, and the BT telephone directory space saving and legibility feasibility study. He has taught typography at Middlesex, and been engaged in much graphic design work after essay writing assistance, corporate identity, publishing design (Pearson, The Economist). He is currently directing a team developing optimal legibility for Japanese onscreen fonts, for Microsoft.]]> Eiichi Kono 2010-03-28T18:09:35+00:00