Talk:Round hand

Copperplate

I think it would be helpful to mention (or at least link to) Copperplate, also known as English round hand. Probably Spencerian, too. Kate (talk) 17:16, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Origins of the Round Hand

It is true that the Round Hand is English but merely by default of the English Language itself and the spelling of round. In the mid 1600s French officials were flooded with documents written in various hands and varied levels of skills, never mind artistry. As a result the officials complained that many such documents were beyond their ability to cipher and this led to the Office of the Financier restricting all legal documents to three hands. Namely the Coulee, the Rhonde, and a Speed Hand sometimes simply called the Bastarde. While there were many great French Masters at the time the most influential in proposing these Hands was Louis Babedor, who published his Les Escitures Financieres Et Italienne Bastarde Dans Leur Naturel circa 1650.

In fact with the destruction of the Camera Apistolic during the sack of Rome in 1527 the capitol for Writing Masters moved to Southern France and by the turn of the century the Italic Chancery Circumflessa began to replace and was a technological refinement of the Italic Cursiva. It is this Italic Circumflessa that directly fathered the Rhonde and later English Roundhand.

In England, Ayres and Shelly popularized the Round Hand while Snell is noted for his reaction to them, and warnings of restraint and proportionality. Still Edward Crocker began publishing his copybooks 40 years before the aforementioned.

See Joyce Irene Whalley: The Art of Calligraphy, Western Europe & America circa 1980.

--MicPowell (talk) 10:12, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

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Change into article style

The Round Hand is English but merely by default of the English Language itself and the spelling of round. In the mid 1600s French officials were flooded with documents written in various hands and varied levels of skills, never mind artistry. As a result the officials complained that many such documents were beyond their ability to cipher and this led to the Office of Finance restricting all legal documents to three hands. Namely the Coulee, the Rhonde, and a Speed hand sometimes simply called the Bastarde.

While there were many great French Masters at the time the most influential in proposing these Hands was Louis Babedor, who published his Les Escitures Financieres Et Italienne Bastarde Dans Leur Naturel circa 1650.

In fact with the destruction of the Camera Apistolic during the sack of Rome in 1527, the capitol for Writing Masters moved to Southern France and by the turn of the century the Italic Chancery Circumflessa began to replace and was a technological refinement of the Italic Cursiva. It is this Italic Circumflessa that directly fathered the Rhonde and later English Roundhand.

In England, Ayres and Shelly popularized the Round Hand while Snell is noted for his reaction to them, and warnings of restraint and proportionality. Still Edward Crocker began publishing his copybooks 40 years before the aforementioned.

References

--MicPowell (talk) 10:12, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Metal nibs not invented until 1828

This claim from the article must be incomplete if not incorrect - metal nibs weren't common until the early 19th century (Seymour 1985), and the intro says Round hand was introduced in the 1660s. "Characterised by an open flowing hand (style) and subtle contrast of thick and thin strokes deriving from metal pointed nibs in which the flexibility of the metal allows the left and right halves of the point to spread apart under light pressure and then spring back together, the popularity of round hand grew rapidly, becoming codified as a standard, through the publication of printed writing manuals."

Howard, Seymour. “The Steel Pen and the Modern Line of Beauty.” Technology and Culture 26, no. 4 (October 1985): 785. https://doi.org/10.2307/3105619. Lijil (talk) 11:13, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Expanding the Range of Cited Works in the Footnotes and Fixing Citations

The same source ("Joyce Irene Whalley (c. 1980). The Art of Calligraphy, Western Europe & America.") is cited for each footnote, and the citation style is unclear: there is missing information about the work, such as its publisher and date of publication, or its edition, as accessed by the writer (of this interesting and good start for an article on a relatively niche topic) or available to other users.

I found the missing information and put it into the template for the long-form bibliographic reference:

Whalley, Joyce Irene (1980). The Art of Calligraphy: Western Europe & America. London: Bloomsbury Books. ISBN 0906223644.

And here's the shortened citation wikicode:

The page numbers for the bits cited will be available here: The art of calligraphy : Western Europe & America : Whalley, Joyce Irene : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

I can start the process of having the full reference formatted properly across the article and will have a look at page numbers too.

Help:References and page numbers - Wikipedia

Further sources

The References section at the bottom of the article is a great way to start finding further avenues to diversify the citations and widen the article as a starter class.

"References

• Carter, Rob, Day, Ben, Meggs, Philip. Typographic Design: Form and Communication, Second Edition. Van Nostrand Reinhold, Inc: 1993 ISBN.
• Fiedl, Frederich, Nicholas Ott and Bernard Stein. Typography: An Encyclopedic Survey of Type Design and Techniques Through History. Black Dog & Leventhal: 1998. ISBN.
• Macmillan, Neil. An A–Z of Type Designers. Yale University Press: 2006. ISBN.
• Nesbitt, Alexander. The History and Technique of Lettering Dover Publications, Inc.: 1998. ISBN. The Dover edition is an abridged and corrected republication of the work originally published in 1950 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. under the title Lettering: The History and Technique of Lettering as Design.

External links

• Folger Shakespeare Library web page on round hand manuscripts
• Columbia Exhibition Chronicles The Evolution Of Handwriting Over Four Centuries"

User Lijl provided a brilliant source in the last comment made here, (Howard, Seymour. “The Steel Pen and the Modern Line of Beauty.” Technology and Culture 26, no. 4 (October 1985): 785. https://doi.org/10.2307/3105619), while those before them have expanded the coverage and brought new ways of making the subject stand up well as an article here.

My thinking is to incorporate Lijl's commented section from the scholarship as referenced and look to those works in the references section, which can be formatted as needed, and potentially more recent works on the subject which are available on IA or open access.

Let me know what you all think, I will fix those citations and make a start on the page numbers before reading anything else for now.

cheers

Ne quid nemis (talk) 00:10, 8 September 2026 (UTC)