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A Perfect Script

By The Reverend Christopher Calderhead

The Word takes Flesh

Donald assembled a team of skilled scribes to write The Saint John’s Bible. They expected to have an exemplar of the script, a pattern or model they could follow. But there was no exemplar. They arrived at the Scriptorium to find a script in development, a work in flux. This was not just an omission. There was a method in it.

The calligraphers came together in February 2000 in order to form a working team. This visit has been dubbed ‘the Master Class’. Everything else was put to one side as Donald and his scribes studied the script together. The whole process of writing was examined, tested, pulled apart, and put back together again. The script would gel along with the group.

“It’s not a question of copying a shape,” Donald said, “but adopting a shape as your own child—nurturing it—making it your own. It should be open for the scribes to do what they’d hoped they’d do with it.”

The challenge he was setting them was enormous. What was this script he presented to them? It was a complex creation.

Brian Simpson described it. “It was more different from other scripts than I thought. I looked at it at first and said, ‘Oh, it’s a rounded italic.’ But it’s not. It is difficult.”  Sue Hufton had a stab at describing it. “It is not conventional. Not roundhand, italic, or foundational. I got myself in a muddle early on with these terms. It’s not even a mixture of these terms. It’s not easily defined. It’s to do with the movement of the pen. It’s rounded, but not a wide round. It’s based on an oval rather than on a circle. The action is similar to round letterforms, and to cursive, italic, whatever.”

This was a script which challenged the easy classification the scribes might have been used to. I asked Sally Mae to describe it: what was the pen angle; what were the proportions?

“It’s not to do with that.” None of the classic calligrapher’s vocabulary applied. “No pen angle, no x-height, no exemplars. At the end of the day, I had to throw all that out the window. You have to trust yourself, and you have trust DJ.” Sue echoed Sally: “I was presented with a script that in a funny kind of way made me set aside everything I knew about letter forms, the relationships between letters—put to one side all my preconceptions about letterforms. And yet, this is the thing—I needed every scrap of knowledge and experience I could draw from.”

The notes for the master class appear alarmingly casual. A block of eighteen lines of Bible script appears at the top of the first page. It is a loose, even casual, version of the script. It is dotted with small annotations. Below this, enlarged letters and parts of letters give evidence of a detailed discussion of the Bible script. These, too, are marked with small checks and xs. This is not an exemplar. It looks like the kind of thing you see on a blackboard in school after a long and complicated lecture. Donald told me he had to stop doing the large demonstration writing; it altered the motion of the pen, so didn’t reflect the subtleties of the writing at the smaller scale of the actual text.
 Sue remarked, “I would not have done it this way. This is what I am required to do. But then it becomes my own.” She paused for a moment before correcting herself. “No. It becomes ours.”

The team aspect quickly became important. Sue said, “When we go down there, we feel part of a team, even if we haven’t met all the team members—especially the illuminators. We refine the script together. Donald doesn’t have any one set way. You want security of an exemplar. But it’s good we never had one. The evolution has been allowed to happen.”

Now that they’ve been writing for the better part of two years, Brian said to me, “Two years in, and we’re just beginning to understand the script. It feels better, it looks better.”

Sue agreed. “It amazed me how much we’ve been pushed to our limits.  ”Brian said on their last visit to the Scriptorium, “It got quite exciting—we laid our pages all out, like a book—we could see the thing as a whole. It came to life. The weight, texture, appearance of the script all held together. It was all from the same book. Personality is important. It does not stifle personality. It’s a harmony: The individual struggles fade away.”

When they step back from their work, they can enjoy what they have made. I asked him about how the ink sat on the page. “The ink dries well. It’s almost shiny. You can see that it stands just proud on the vellum.” He paused for a moment. “It’s a lovely thing,” he said with a sigh.

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