Modern Scribes and Lettering Artists – Calligraphic title, Martin Jackson, 1983

Calligrapher Martin Jackson was born in Sheffield, England, and emigrated to Canada in 1966. With over 60 years of experience as a graphic designer and calligrapher, he has lectured and taught widely across Canada, the United States, Japan, and Europe.

For this cover, Jackson used a classic foundational hand in all caps to create bold letterforms that, with the addition of white inlines and thin flourishes, take on a distinctly decorative quality. The double-stroke effect would traditionally be achieved with a broad-nib pen split at the center, producing two parallel strokes in a single movement. Here, however, Jackson forgoes the split nib and instead creates the effect manually with two separate strokes – a remarkable feat of precision and consistency. He further shapes the free-flowing humanist forms into a tightly composed rectangular block, producing a piece of calligraphy that feels at once hand-wrought and architecturally intentional – perfectly suited to the more formal, mechanical frame of the book’s cover.

Modern Scribes and Lettering Artists belongs to a long lineage of international compilations dating back to the 1930s. Published infrequently and often under similar titles, these volumes serve as periodic surveys of contemporary calligraphy and lettering from around the world. They remain valuable resources for anyone working with letterforms – and many can still be found in used bookstores or online. – Rod McDonald