Calligraphy ‘artists’ give a bad name to proper artists.  Being able to write fancy wedding invitations does not make you an artist.  What it actually makes you is the slowest note taker in the world, I bet they would be rubbish at taking the minutes.

“Did you get all that Maude?”

“Not quite, what did you say after ‘I’?”

Surely this ’skill’ must have died out by now?  My Mac has absolutely loads of fonts built in, so I can make my dreary prose look as fancy as I like.  In seconds.  I even have a font that lets me write like the lettering Back to the Future, it is ace.

At no point would I consider getting someone else in to write something down for me.  Being able to do something that a computer can do, only doing it slower and more expensively, does not offer a strong career path.

Don’t get me wrong, I am sure that back in the nineteenth century it was quite popular, mainly as Helvetica and Arial had not taken off among the word processing community.  It was probably a lucrative career at that point.  But so was sticking leeches to people to cure them of the bad Aids (or whatever the Victorian equivalent was; the good Aids?), and that skill soon died out.  Apart from the mentals who believe in ‘alternative’ medicine, but you can’t count them as proper people.

I remember a girl at school who was very good at calligraphy, which at the time was her single redeeming feature.  Getting her to spend her lunch hour writing “Dale sucks balls” on the blackboard in two feet high calligraphy lettering was quite amusing at the time.  If she offered to do it today I would say no, not because Dale doesn’t suck balls, he might well still do, but because I can do it myself in moments on a computer.

All calligraphists should learn a proper skill, like plumbing or contract killing.