There are a lot of different guides out there for how to get started doing Calligraphy. Some will just provide examples of the different "hands" (styles of writing), some will also go over a variety of techniques and tools available. The list below provides descriptions and links to the guides on Calligraphy held in the University Library's collection.
The Calligrapher's Bible by
This comprehensive guide to the art of fine penmanship is the ultimate easy-to-use reference book for anyone interested in creating these elegant letterforms.
The Complete Guide to Calligraphy by
Handbook to the ancient art of lettering in the key scripts of the world: Roman, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese and Japanese. Includes information on techniques, tools and problem-solving tips and projects.
Calligraphic Styles by 
Calligraphy a Guide to Hand Lettering by
This book offers the chance to learn various calligraphic styles through alphabets, letterforms and small projects. Readers will learn how to choose the best paper, pens, ink and how to practice the basic scrips.
The Art of Calligraphy by
Acquaints novices with necessary calligraphic tools and materials and techniques for mastering the Roman and italic alphabets and presents guidelines for the layout, decoration, and binding of manuscript books.
Learn Calligraphy by
Offers step-by-step lessons on the techniques of calligraphy, providing historical information while suggesting advice for choosing alphabets for different messages and selecting the best materials.
Calligraphy for the Beginner by
Providing an introduction to calligraphy, Tom Gourdie, himself a past master of the art, supplies many different alphabets and shows how each may be applied by drawing, painting, carving, or writing with a broad lettering pen. He also gives advice on materials that are most suitable. This is one of the classic books in the field.
Getting Started in Calligraphy by
Our instructor of calligraphy has an absolutely infallible method of showing you how to form 5 different Italic and Black Letter styles. Illustrations, photos, texts, and exercises guide you as you learn to use the pen. "Detailed instruction, simple enough for children to follow."--"Book-of-the-Month Club News." "The simplest, most straightforward attempt to teach Ýcalligraphy¨ yet in print."--"School Library Journal."
Great Calligraphy by
Brightly-illustrated and pocket-sized, this valuable resource is packed with advice from choosing pens and inks to mastering special techniques.
Lettering Tips by
Drawing letters quickly, accurately, and gracefully is an essential skill for artists and designers, even in the computer age. Bill Gray shows how to make the basic strokes for capitals and lowercase forms; get letter and word spacing right; reproduce the characteristics of any alphabet; produce extended, condensed, and outline versions of a type family; and more. Dozens of specimens serve as models of fine lettering. Timesaving techniques for producing well formed, good looking lettering in all the major styles.
Left-Handed Calligraphy by
From an award-winning calligrapher and well-known arts educator and author: a generously illustrated text offering full coverage of the art of calligraphy from the left-handed writer s point of view, presenting every facet of the subject, from correct hand, pen and nib positions to composition"
Encyclopedia of Calligraphy Techniques by
Easy-to-use, full-color, A-to-Z reference guides to basic and advanced techniques.
There are a lot of different ways to do illumination, from creating fancy initials (the big letter at the beginning of a block of texts) to fancy borders, to page length images. Illumination can include portraits, landscapes, fanciful animals, or abstract, geometric patterns, which are common in both some Celtic and most Islamic examples of illumination. These books go over some basic tools and techniques of illumination, but you are not limited to the tools and materials of the the medieval illuminators, brush markers and gel pens can create illuminations every bit as beautiful as those done with gouache and gold leaf.
Celtic Design by
A study in the CELTIC DESIGN series of all the simplest forms of Celtic design, with instructions on how to draw and decorate letters in an authentic Celtic style as well as how to create illuminated manuscript pages.
Celtic Design the Tree of Life by
This book adds to the series of practical, step-by-step guides on Celtic design for designers and craftspeople. The tree of life is one of the most popular and enduring motifs in Celtic art, found on Pictish sculpted stone slabs, Celtic and Northumbrian crosses and illuminated manuscripts. This book explores the symbolism and history of the motif and demonstrates its versatility as a design today.
101 Celtic Borders by
A comprehensive design source book of various types of Celtic borders, this work covers the history of Celtic design. The introduction gives a brief history of the Celts and an explanation of the birth and development of their artistic style with particular relation to border designs.
Animated Alphabet by
Letters have a mysterious and cabbalistic quality that has been recognized at least since Roman times. The illuminated initials of medieval manuscripts, ranging from Romanesque exuberance to Gothic excess, paved the way. Here were not only biblical scenes, but mythical beasts and human figures that were the direct precursors of the zoomorphic and anthropomorphic alphabets of the Renaissance and later. The invention of printing led to ornamented letters presenting historical and mythical events, romantic landscapes, trees, flowers, buildings, clowns, devils, naked figures, children and animals."
The books in this section are intended for those seeking inspiration for their own work, or looking to learn more about the history, and techniques of illuminators and the creation of illuminated books and manuscripts. In Medieval Europe, the majority of literate individuals were members of the Clergy and the majority of publishing (or the hand lettering of the period) was done in Monasteries. It is therefore probably not surprising that almost all the examples we have of medieval illuminated manuscripts are religious in one sense or another. You will find a few different examples of illuminated work here:
The History of Making Books by
A history which includes information on ancient writing, parchment, the invention of paper, printing machines, reproducing images in color, bookbinding, booksellers, and censors.
The Bible in Pictures by
The complete 117 images that triggered a religious revolution Martin Luther's Bible, published in 1534, was the first complete German Bible and a pivotal event in the history of Christianity. Luther's revolutionary translation, modern in vernacular and interpretation, made the Bible accessible to laypeople, fueled anger and revulsion toward Rome and the Papacy, and begat a new religion: Protestantism. The most desirable copies came with shockingly graphic and politically-charged illustrations, such as those depicting the Whore of Babylon riding a seven-headed beast while wearing the Papal crown, or the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse led by a Turkish soldier. TASCHEN is publishing the 117 hand-colored woodcut illustrations, created in the workshop of Lucas Cranach. Each is meticulously reproduced from a rare and sumptuous original copy, belonging to the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek in Weimar. Stephan Füssel provides a scholarly overview of Luther's life, the historic context and cultural significance of his Bible, and detailed descriptions of the illustrations and their iconography.
A Book of Hours for Engelbert of Nassau (Reproduction) by
Near the end of the fifteenth century, a Flemish artist known only as The Master of Mary of Burgundy painted one of the last illuminated manuscripts for ENgelbert of Nassau, a member of the courts of rulers of the Netherlands from Charles the Bold to Philip the Fair. This edition reproduces this magnificent book, now in the Bodlein Library, Oxford, as closely as possible to the original.
Bibles and Bestiaries by
Using examples of illuminated manuscripts from the Pierpont Morgan Library as illustrations, Wilson describes how a book was crafted in the Middle Ages...Magnificent...The volume is as elegant and special as its subject.-Boxed review/Booklist A glorious book, both fascinating and gorgeously presented.-Pointer/Kirkus Reviews
The Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen by 
The Red Book by
The most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology. "The years, of which I have spoken to you, when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then." These are the words of the psychologist C. G. Jung in 1957, referring to the decades he worked on The Red Book from 1914 to 1930. Although its existence has been known for more than eighty years, The Red Book was never published or made available to the wide audience of Jung's students and followers. Nothing less than the central book of Jung's oeuvre, it is being published now in a full facsimile edition with a contextual essay and notes by the noted Jung scholar Sonu Shamdasani and translated by Mark Kyburz, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani. It will now be possible to study Jung's self-experimentation through primary documentation rather than fantasy, gossip, and speculation, and to grasp the genesis of his later work. For nearly a century, such a reading has simply not been possible, and the vast literature on his life and work has lacked access to the single most important document. This publication opens the possibility of a new era in understanding Jung's work. It provides a unique window into how he recovered his soul and constituted a psychology. It is possibly the most influential hitherto unpublished work in the history of psychology. This exact facsimile of The Red Book reveals not only an extraordinary mind at work but also the hand of a gifted artist and calligrapher. Interspersed among more than two hundred lovely illuminated pages are paintings whose influences range from Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East to the native art of the new world. The Red Book, much like the handcrafted "Books of Hours" from the Middle Ages, is unique. Both in terms of its place in Jung's development and as a work of art, its publication is a landmark.
William Blake by
The nature of William Blake's genius is most completely expressed in his Illuminated Books. As poet/artist Blake invented a method of printing that enabled him to create works in which words and images combine to form pages uniquely rich in content and beautiful in form. It is only through the pages as originally conceived and published by the poet himself that Blake's meaning can be fully experienced. Blake's hope that his books would obtain wide circulation was unfulfilled: some exist only in unique copies and none was printed in more than very small numbers. Now some 400 plates, drawn from The William Blake Trust's acclaimed six-volume Collected Edition, and reproduced under their supervision, provide for the first time ever in one volume what the London Review of Books hailed as "Sumptuous facsimiles . . . glorious colored pages . . . like peeping into a furnace of light through a crack in the door".
Five Illuminated Manuscripts of Giangaleazzo Visconti by
Five Illuminated Manuscripts of Giangaleazzo Visconti is an in-depth study of several illuminated manuscripts commissioned by a major 14th-century Italian patron of art and learning. Edith Kirsch in this book reveals how a group of manuscripts commissioned by Giangaleazzo Visconti (and, in one instance, by his immediate family) reflect not only his dynastic concerns but also the development of his inclination to express these concerns through works of art establishing both his classical heroism and his Christian piety. Considered as a group for the first time, these manuscripts document one of Giangaleazzo's most innovative activities as a manuscript collector-the commissioning of lavish manuscripts to commemorate major dynastic events. In their richness and in the extraordinary verisimilitude and historical specificity of their decoration, these manuscripts document the self-image of a prince who set out to record his unprecedented accomplishments in unprecedented fashion. Like his politics, however, Giangaleazzo's patronage of the arts was shaped by the practices of his ancestors, and his accomplishments as a patron are best understood in the context of family tradition. Giangaleazzo's library rivaled even that of his brother-in-law, King Charles V of France, reputed to be the greatest collector of manuscripts in late fourteenth-century Europe. Kirsch's study rests on the premise that Giangaleazzo's patronage of manuscripts was marked by certain characteristic features: execution of the work by exceptionally gifted scribes and illuminators, unusual fullness and richness of both text and illumination, unusual combinations of texts, unusual conjunctions of text and image, and iconographical manipulation of miniatures and borders to fit certain historical circumstances and to express particular devotions. This study enriches our understanding of each of the manuscripts in the group and traces the development of a distinctive pattern of patronage that influenced the visual arts in Milan for over a century.
Manuscript Painting at the Court of France by 
Early Spanish Manuscript Illumination by 
Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Painting by 
In the Beginning: Bibles Before the Year 1000 by
Michelle Brown, former curator at the British Library, gathers together seventy fragile biblical treasures in this sumptuously illustrated volume that captures the development of both Bible and book, as well as a formative period of early Christian history. The book features a number of rare parchments, codices, illuminated manuscripts, and jeweled bindings, including new finds from the Monastery of St. Catherine's at Mount Sinai, Egypt, and the Niketas Bible of the 10th-century CE, one of the greatest examples of Byzantine illumination. Leading authorities in the field explore the early history of the Bible in the accompanying essays, revealing its transformation into the complex symbol of faith that it is today.
The Hours of Catherine of Cleves by
Illustrating one of the great art treasures of the world, The Hours of Catherine of Cleves is a fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript containing a series of some of the most beautiful illustrations of the Bible ever made. Many of the great scenes from the Old Testament and many more from the New Testament are included, besides the Stations of the Cross and portraits of the saints. The work of an unidentified Dutch master painter, the manuscript was made for Catherine of Cleves on the occasion of her marriage to the Duke of Guelders. All the 157 surviving miniatures are reproduced to actual size and in exquisite color with gold, together with three samples of pages containing the Latin prayers. Page after page reveals the elaborate program and rich illumination of the original. The progression from beginning to end shows an artist increasing in skill, relying in his earlier work on tradition and later emerging as an independent artist of bold, clear colors, dynamic brushwork, and lively imagination. He stands as one of the supreme painters of fifteenth-century Northern Europe. Each page is accompanied by a descriptive and explanatory commentary by John Plummer. His introduction discusses the development of the Book of Hours as a liturgical form in general, and the history of the Cleves Hours specifically, and describes the place it holds in the history of Northern painting.
The Golden Age of English Manuscript Painting, 1200-1500 by 
The book of hours of the Emperor Maximilian the First. (Reproduction) by 