Like other authors before them, Brown and Lovett have attempted to create the ultimate general guide to historical writing. And, like other authors before them, they've met with modest success.

Modest, because like anyone else who tries to break the ductus of a given hand down for the use of modern calligraphers, the scripts in this book (about 16 hands, Medieval and Renaissance, are presented) suffer from the simplification that occurs when a calligrapher attempts to blend many, many historical examples into a generalized, modern hand. Now, on the whole, that's not bad. It all depends on your purposes, of course, but for most people, a generalized and simplified hand is just the ticket. If, like me, you would prefer to see a specific example of a specific hand broken faithfully into an exemplar, though, you'll be disappointed. Even the hands in this book that imply the use of a specific example in creating the exemplars suffer from modification.

However, there is a truly splendid feature in this book. Each hand presented contains a detailed breakdown of the angles and spacing of a specific historical example. This is a real boon.

The text is primarily concerned with the history of the presented scripts. If you are looking for a beginners manual, this book is probably not for you. While it doesn't require intermediate or advanced skills to use this book, it does concentrate on presenting historical detail rather than step by step instructions for selecting the best materials, et cetera. There is, of course, some basic, general instructional material, but, again, this is not the emphasis of this book.

I'd probably put this book about halfway between Drogin's Medieval Calligraphy and Harris' Practical Calligraphy. The Drogin is text heavy, and works as an introductory book on paleography as well as it works as an instructional manual on making historic scripts. Harris, on the other hand, works extremely well as a visual teaching tool, and probably does the best job of presenting the ductus because of the use of color, but it is light on text. Brown and Lovett do a nice job of walking down the middle.