The Italic Way to Beautiful Handwriting: Cursive and Calligraphic

by Fred Eager

Provides instructions and exercises for learning the formal calligraphic mode and the functional everyday cursive mode of the early Renaissance handwriting style, combining beauty, legibility, and speed

Genres: Reference, Art, Nonfiction, Writing, Self Help, Crafts, Design

128 pages, Staple Bound

First published October 1, 1974

Reviews

[Issendai]

This book is thorough about teaching the Italic hand. This book is DEDICATED about teaching the Italic hand. This book will teach you the Italic hand WHETHER YOU WANT TO LEARN OR NOT. Just having it around will cause you to develop Italic curves through osmosis. Your handwriting may improve just by reading this review. This book is THAT serious.

It starts with lessons in regular Italic handwriting, using a normal marker or thick-tipped ballpoint pen. Once you've mastered the basic forms, you move to learning Italic calligraphy with a calligraphic pen. The lessons are interleaved with inspirational samples of Italic writing from both modern and historical sources, and there are a couple of sections of letters that students wrote to the author using first their normal handwriting, then their Italic hand. It's a great way to judge how far you've come and see how much farther you'll go.

So why did I give this book a mediocre star rating? Because the author is SERIOUS about having you learn Italic. DEDICATED. He wants you to commit to at least an hour of practice a day and study for several months, if not years. He wants you to do exactly the right thing with exactly the right form and exactly the right tool, exactly exactly exactly--there was a hard-to-pin-down judgementalness about the lessons. I always put down the book feeling that I was letting down the side, that my lackadaisical I-just-want-to-write-pretty ways were a disappointment to the calligraphers of the world.

So I got a calligraphy book written by someone with amazing handwriting who understood that sometimes, people with lousy handwriting and not much spare time want to write pretty, too, and took this book back to the library. Ah, well.

If you prefer a comprehensive approach and are looking to seriously overhaul your handwriting, this may be the book for you. If you're more of a casual hobbyist, I suggest moving on.

[gudetamama]

I found it useful to have a hardcopy of the book as reference (which I bought from Book Depository), and separate copies on loose sheets (either photocopied from the book, or printed from the PDF, which I acquired through a kind Redditor) on which to do the exercises on. Some pages I made multiple copies of, and did again and again, when I felt that I didn't get the hang of them yet.

You will need a 1.1mm and 1.5mm italic nib sizes. Pilot Parallel has good ones. I used Hero and Manuscript pens, which I just manually filed/ground (with nail files/buffers) to make the italic more crisp.

I'm not done with this book yet, but I regard it as my main reference for learning italic, and will try to finish it before looking at others.

[Dylan Leifer-Ives]

I have been working on my handwriting for over a decade. This is the single best resource I’ve come across in this venture. If you want beautiful handwriting pick up a physical copy somewhere.

[Krzysztof Smigrodzki]

In my opinion this is the best manual of italic handwriting. Eager delivers consistent tutorial leading “by hand” from learning basic shapes of italic, through beauty of calligraphic “formal” italic script to the joy of legible and visually attractive everyday hand.
If you are serious about fixing your handwriting, get this book. Any way you can.

[Alejandro Caycedo]

The basics are well covered. This book expanded my appreciation for calligraphy.

[Leslie]

This is my eternal primer for all my calligraphy students. Elegantly simple, hard to find at times, but worth it.

[Ben]

Some great techniques. I enjoyed working on using these with my fountain pens.

3/5