Calligrapher, stonecutter, illustrator, and type designer, Stephen Harvard's art and craftsmanship were rooted equally in the history of the book and the natural world. At his untimely death in 1988, Harvard left both a collection of graphic works and a body of prose that explored his dream of an ideal alphabet, "a perfect, proportionate set of images that shine with a pythagorean light," a dream that Harvard found as compelling and impossible "as the search for perpetual motion." David P. Becker's lovingly edited and sumptuously illustrated catalog, which won the American Library...

After the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, the art of writing in manuscript took on fresh meaning. Printed manuals for the teaching of lettering and handwriting quickly appeared, marketed to a growing literate readership anxious to express humanistic values through fine writing. Mixing the aesthetics of calligraphy with innovative means of printing, writing manuals reflect both the proliferation of print technology and the growing social value of a fine hand. Philip Hofer, Founding Curator of Printing and Graphic Arts in Houghton Library, was long fascinated with the...