The Calligrapher's Bible: 100 Complete Alphabets with Step-by-Step Hand Lettering Guides

This book is a gold mine! As a complete beginner, I appreciate the diversity of fonts, the clarity of instructions, and options/tips for getting started. Things are laid out so simply, I don't feel intimidated by any of the styles or concepts

To be up-front, the '100 alphabets' counts minuscules and majescules separately, so its closer to 60 complete alphabets (Some are majescule-only or minuscule-only, like Unciel), but this does absolutely nothing to negatively impact my opinion of this text. Each hand is prefaced with a blurb about when the hand came to be, and occasionally points out the text that defines or exemplifies the hand (ex.: Insular Majescule, or the Insular Half-Unciel, originated in the British Isles in the 7th century. The Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels are prime exemplars of this text), which I find fascinating as a study of the actual art of calligraphy, as opposed to just learning to copy the letters in the right shapes. Each hand is presented on facing pages, with one side showing the alphabet and stroke-order, and the opposite page demonstrating defining characteristics of each hand, by letter group. Each hand has letters grouped differently, based on how the letters are formed in that hand, instead of having a blanket grouping system that may not apply everywhere. Before the hands begin, too, there is a section on materials, pens, papers, and illumination materials, as well as a section in the back about gilding with both gum ammoniac and gesso. Overall, it is a solid resource for someone who already has some experience with calligraphy, but who would like to learn more hands. I don't recommend it as a first book, because it has few warm-up exercises, and only a few pages in the beginning about learning how the pen feels in your hand and makes strokes. It' s best if you've already gotten comfortable with a pen, perhaps through italic or roundhand calligraphy, and use this as a resource for adding fonts to your repertoire.

I’m interested in learning calligraphy and after looking at various books, I decided on this one- so glad I did! The book is smaller than I expected (7” x 8”) and spiral bound- which makes it easy to handle. The book is well-made and includes many images with clear instructions. I’m very happy with this book, highly recommended

Nice, compact book with helpful spiral binding, but I am going to be returning, nonetheless. The historical notes on each of the scripts is very interesting and the book has positive features. However, the dimensions are quite small and as a result, some of the font inside is rather tiny, especially for the page that details the strokes for each letter. I needed readers to be able to see it clearly. Squinting at something you need to study carefully is tough. The other thing is, although it would be a great reference material, I wouldn't recommend it for someone who is just getting started (unless they use it purely for historical interest) because the large number of fonts covered could be overwhelming, especially if the person has not really decided what kind of script (or scripts) they want to focus on. There is such a thing as having too many options or decisions to make. Although the book does cover the historical spectrum, so there is everything from Roman to modern scripts, I think a book that narrows down the focus to maybe a dozen or fewer would be preferable, depending on how advanced you are, of course. If you are buying such a book as a gift for someone (as I am) maybe look at some of their writing samples and see the type of script they tend towards using or learning (Gothic? Modern? Brush script?) Personally, I found Molly Suber Thorpe's "Mastering Modern Calligraphy" to be a better fit. She offers a slimmed down number of options and the flowing nature of several of her scripts is a bit more accessible and still contains the lovely flourishes that seem to draw many people into calligraphy in the first place.

One of the only Kindle unlimited books on calligraphy actually written by humans. Everything I'm finding is useless AI slop. This is a solid resource. I have the physical version with a bunch of booksmarks for different hands I like.

I learned calligraphy when I was a kid, and I've always been on the lookout for a good calligraphy book with a complete alphabet to give me some more guidance and ideas on how to make my letters. I also have bought several calligraphy books, only to be disappointed. I finally found this book, "The Calligrapher's Bible", and I have to say that I am completely impressed. This is a little spiral bound book, and it shows numerous fonts with the complete alphabet (with the entire set of uppercase and lowercase letters) and the complete set of numbers. For each letter, this book also shows you the exact strokes that you need, and it numbers them in the order in which you should make the strokes (1, 2, 3, 4, etc). Additionally, from this book, I figured out that the type of calligraphy I learned as a kid was Italics-Renaissance, and so it gave me lots of suggestions... there was even a special section that gives you ideas on how to add flourishes to specific letters. All I can say is that I really love this book. I did the calligraphy for my friend's wedding invitations several years ago, and I am currently doing the calligraphy for my own invitations-- I am so glad that I found this book.

I originally found this book pirated somewhere. I ended up picking up and learning from it so quickly that I wanted to properly buy a physical copy to both respect and support books of this level of instructional quality. If you're looking for a comprehensive start and reference book for calligraphy, this should be a must-have.

Très utile pour avoir les références de nombreuse polices d'écriture. pour les exercices vous pouvez faire des copies en agrandissant le formats.

Lots if script choices. Good instruction and a bit of history too

Great book with a lot of examples and fonts. Excellent quality printing and binding.

I like that the book describes where to start and end strokes for any alphabet. The book came as a bind which makes it easy to make reference to

Ho da poco iniziato a interessarmi di calligrafia, e questo manuale, interamente in lingua inglese, si è rivelato utilissimo. Gli argomenti trattati sono chiari e semplici, ci sono circa un centinaio di stili calligrafici da cui imparare o prendere spunto, per i quali l'autore fornisce cenni storici, varianti stilistiche e indicazioni più che esaustivi sulla formazione dei tratti.