Too many years ago to count, I was lucky enough to attend St. Albans School in Washington, DC. It's a great school with a rich history and an association with the National Cathedral and the rich cultural heritage of the Episcopal Church and many of the traditions of the English public schools. It's a school with a lot of character and a reputation for shaping future leaders in politics and the arts.
This year St. Albans is celebrating its 100th anniversary, and as part of that celebration they decided they wanted to spruce up the school. One of the things which drew their attention was the sad state of the hand-lettered lists of graduates on the walls of the upper school refectory. The tradition of putting the names of each graduating class on the walls began in the 1920s, and at first the quality of the calligraphy was excellent, but eventually the original calligrapher retired and his replacements were less skilled, until by the 1960s the quality of the lettering had declined to an embarrassing level and looked nothing like the early examples.
St. Albans contacted a local interior designer and wall artist named Raea Jean Leinster (Wall Transformation Designs) to find a way to improve future lettering and replace the old names which were poorly done with new lettering of higher quality. She decided that the best way to do that would be with a font, and using a thermal transfer system that would create perfect letters every time. The problem was that the style of the original lettering was so unusual and idiosyncratic that no existing font would even come close to matching it.
So Leinster went looking for a font designer,and in a bizarre example of synchronicity she stumbled onto our site and discovered the only font designer to have actually attended St. Albans and who already had a familiarity with the lettering. My interest in calligraphy began at St. Albans and I did a lot of my first lettering in my notebooks while paying very little attention in class, just a few yards from the lettering on the walls of the refectory. Undoubtedly that lettering had an influence on me. Many of my first calligraphic designs fall into the same gothic black letter category like Froissart and Franconian.
Article comments
1 - John Lake
You seem a very humble man to fill us in on your pastimes. And you have included a final version of your "Glastonbury Font" able to be downloaded.
"The Unigue gothic fraktur style of the original lettering" - quick research:
fraktur:
"German black-letter text, a style of type."
combined with
Gothic -(from architecture):
"noting or pertaining to a style of architecture, originating in France in the middle of the 12th century and existing in the western half of Europe through the middle of the 16th century, characterized by the use of the pointed arch and the ribbed vault, by the use of fine woodwork and stonework, by a progressive lightening of structure,..."
And now we know about the Glastonbury Thorn.
2 - Dave Nalle
Gothic ought to have more than one definition there. It refers to more than just the architecture of the time period you mention, but also to other design output of that period, including calligraphy and early type, especially in Germany. Strangely it also applies to some calligraphy from the much earlier period of the Ostrogothic Empire and to much later type of an entirely different style called gothic but bearing no resemblance to gothic period calligraphy.
Dave