Description
With the advent of printing at the end of the fifteenth century the medieval penman’s skills were not needed for such work and so they turned their attentions to the teaching of writing which, by the mid sixteenth century, had spread to the middle classes in the form of the secretary and humanist italic hands.
Every writing master would own a collection of exemplars of common hands (both book and court) for teaching purposes. A Newe Booke of Copies is one such a collection, collated and published by Thomas Vautroullier in 1574. It was a printed book containing:
divers sorts of sundry hands, as the English and French secretarie, and Bastard Secretarie, Italian, Roman, Chancery and Court hands. Set forth by the most Excellent Wryters of sayd hands for the instruction of the vnskilfull.
Only one copy of the book has survived and currently resides in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
A New Newe Booke of Copies is Crazy Diamond Design’s revision of this sixteenth century book. Extrapolating from the original designs, and with reference to historically-contemporaneous documents, we have produced six high quality typefaces for Apple Macintosh and PC computers.
The New Newe Booke of Copies typeface collection contains the following six fonts from our single typeface range; the price of the collection reresents a 50% saving on the summed individual prices of the constituent typefaces.
1. Formal Text Hand
2. Italic Hand
3. Chancery Hand
4. Bastard Secretary Hand
5. Secretary Hand
6. Common Pleas Hand
