Books by Hand is a calligraphy and bookbinding workshop held in Arezzo, a beautiful medieval art city in Tuscany, near Florence. This unique course offers students the opportunity to rethink the relation between form and function. Having access to the historical sources, we will study directly from a manuscript written in a clear Carolingian hand, kept at the Arezzo Public Library.
The hand shows very well the strength and clarity of the lowercase forms that have influenced the Humanists, the Renaissance typographers and the font designers all the way to the present. We will study the structure, the spacing, the rhythm, the page design and we will then see how small and simple changes can modify the visual perception of lettering. We will discuss the old ways of
producing texts and compare them with the modern experimentation of words in art. Students will develop their own personal script. If you are a designer, with this script you can develop your own font (the font design part will not be included in the class); if you are an artist or you have a passion for handwriting this class is a great opportunity to know a fundamental script in depth and to develop your own script.

BOOKBINDING: Before starting the in depth study of letter-forms, marks and texts, students will learn how to make a folded book which is also a case, with pocket-pages, that later will contain all their calligraphy works. They will learn how to measure, mark, fold, glue and use the right papers.
A number of easy solutions for small useful book structures will also be shown.