Grand was Lloyd Reynolds’ vision of writing, according
to Chuck Bigelow ’67, an associate professor of computer
science and art at Stanford University and a noted type designer.
Many of Bigelow’s fonts and those of his design partner
Kris Holmes ’72 appear in every Macintosh computer. “Calligraphy
has its beautiful aspects,” he says, “but that is
hardly where Lloyd’s classes started or stopped. Lloyd
saw calligraphy as the visible means of literate expression and,
through that, as a gateway to the history and lore of civilization.
Moreover, it is a link between one’s own simple, utilitarian
practice of handwriting and the accumulation of knowledge and
scholarship through the ages. When you write in an italic hand,
you are making the same kinds of motions that Queen Elizabeth
I made when she practiced Chancery Cursive as a teenager; the
same motions as Poggio Bracciolini, a fifteenth-century chancellor
of Florence; the same motions as Michelangelo. And if you write
a Carolingian hand, you are making the same moves as the notable
scribes that Charlemagne assembled in his court in the late eighth
century: Alcuin of York, Peter of Pisa, Theodulf the Visigoth,
Paul the Deacon, and Dungal the Irishman.”
class was not your basic arts and crafts course.