Quill and Quire

Manuscript culture had a close relationship with pen and ink.  How then to connect current students with little affinity for handwriting to the painstaking craft of lettering by hand? In October 2018 Special Collections hosted a visit from Farshid Emami's Art History class: "Paintings, Portraits, and Prints: Arabic and Persian Book Arts" where we discussed the work of Islamic scribes, the geometric design principles behind Islamic decoration, and the structure of the Islamic book.  Given the students' lack of familiarity with the scribal arts, we also arranged for students to scribe in Arabic on papyrus using authentic reed pens and carbon black ink that was mixed for dipping.

The students were able to experience for themselves the process of writing out Arabic letters in the traditional manner working from right to left across the page, learning the calligrapher's way of measuring distances by pen strokes.

This class was followed in November 2018 by a set of three smaller workshops where the students tried their hands at gilding with gold leaf and painting a copy of a marginal ornament taken from our 16th century Qur'an. 

Original scan on the left, reproduction on the right.

Students were also able to try Turkish marbling to decorate sheets of paper.  Not only are they receiving a kinesthetic learning experience that they'll remember, they were also having a lot of fun.  The "lab" approach to learning in Special Collection has proven so welcome to both faculty and students that calligraphy may somehow need to be added to the hands-on instruction in making papyrus sheets, print identification, letterpress printing, papermaking and binding.