History TH E CR E AT I O N O F B ICKHAM
Bickham Script was based on English round hand, which is a style of handwriting that developed in the 18th century, primarily in Great Britain. This incredibly ornate lettering style was in fact developed for practical commerce; useful for everyday mercantile documents such as contracts, bills of sale, and accountants’ ledgers. (Berry, “A History”). The most famous collection of this flourishing English handwriting was The Universal Penman. This was the work of the calligrapher and engraver, George Bickham the Elder, who had the best calligraphers of his time provide their handwriting to be engraved, published, and sold as a series. The round-hand scripts displayed in The Universal Penman feature many flamboyant flourishes and decorative extensions.
When type designer, Richard Lipton, found a copy of the George Bickham’s The Universal Penman in a Harvard Square bookstore, he was struck by its seductive and intensely romantic rhythms. He sat with it for a while, hypnotized, wondering, “how such marks could have been made by mere mortals” (Berry, “Creating Bickham”). He purchased the book, kept it in his studio, and came back to it in 1994, when he began working on a digital font inspired by English round hand. Rather than directly copy the examples in The Universal Penman, Lipton wanted to create a typeface that would embody the spirit of those pages while still working as a practical digital font. After nearly two years of intermittent work, his script typeface, Bickham Script, was fin-
An example of English round hand on an 18th century bill of sale.
20 Typeface: Volume 1