American Calligraphy #26: The spaces

I'm blessed with beautiful letters to see in my neighborhood. But this means I can't avoid seeing the un-beautiful letters too, or more often the awkward spaces between the letters. When Boston threw itself into the Gothic Revival in the later 19th century, its Roman lettering suffered. Shown here is a cautionary example of all the inscriptions that could have been better spaced. 

The spacing looks good enough until you focus between T and M; U and A; E and R. 

I like to keep in mind the artistic principle, variously attributed to Mozart and Debussy among others,"The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between them." Calligraphers too know that the spaces between the letters are where the beauty lives. 

Enjoy the letters around you and the spaces between them. 

American Calligraphy #25: The Declaration of Independence

 ABCs of the USA: The stories behind America’s most distinctive calligraphy styles. 

Because the text refers to the
colonies as the "united States
of America," I have used a
small u above rather than
making a capital U. 

When the drafters of this document met in Philadelphia to declare their independence from England's King George III, they commissioned fellow delegate Timothy Matlack (1736-1829) to pen the final copy because he had the best handwriting. 

The Declaration was read aloud the next day, but the 200 typeset and printed copies, printed immediately and distributed to the other colonies, were what really spread the word. Some 26 of the first printing still survive. The second printing was typeset by Baltimore postmaster Mary Katharine Goddard. A later version was distributed in German, still the first language of many immigrants. The delegates' signatures were gradually added to the original document over the next month, and completed on Aug 2. (See my blog post #4, about John Hancock, from January 26, 2021.) 

The handwritten, signed Declaration of Independence is preserved in the National Archives Museum in Washington DC.