Featured on PDR in the collection The Proper Art of Writing (1655)

Meditating on the wonders of Creation (a cricket’s stridulations, the waxing moon), the author of Kunstrichtige Schreibart, a seventeenth-century German calligraphy book — whose full title translates to The Proper Art of Writing: A Compilation of All Sorts of Capital or Initial Letters of German, Latin and Italian Fonts from Different Masters of the Noble Art of Writing — compares beautiful writing to tending a farm. The paper is our field; it propagates the crops of teaching, knowledge, and business. But letters are the plow, which create the furrows out of which all matters of the mind can spring. Even memory fits into this analogy: reading “dries up the brain’s moisture”; writing irrigates knowledge for future generations. And to write properly — with calligraphic skill…