Society of Scribes, Ltd.
P.O. Box 933
New York, NY 10150
Tel: (212) 452-0139
Weekdays 10AM-7PM
E-mail: info@societyofscribes.org


©2007 Society of Scribes. All rights reserved.

BETWEEN PAPYRUS AND PAPER: MANUSCRIPT TREASURES OF THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM

Presentation by William M. Voelkle
Monday, May 19, 2008, 6 p.m.
at the Grolier Club
47 East 60th Street
New York NY 10022
R.S.V.P. to info@societyofscribes.org or 212.452.0139

The Grolier Club and the Society of Scribes are pleased to offer a slide presentation and lecture by William M. Voelkle, Curator and Head of the Department of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts at The Morgan Library & Museum.

Mr. Voelkle will provide a brief history and survey of the finest illuminated medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in The Morgan Library & Museum, one of the most important depositories of such manuscripts worldwide. Covering the Carolingian, Ottonian, Romanesque, Gothic, and Renaissance periods, Mr. Voelkle will trace the chronology of manuscript illumination on vellum, beginning with its sources in antiquity (which witnessed the transition from papyrus to vellum and the role of the codex) and ending with the Renaissance (when paper began to replace vellum). Slides will include miniatures relating to religion, astrology, and medicine as well as a series of pages illustrating some of the stages in the decoration of a manuscript.

Mr. Voelkle has been studying and caring for the Morgan's medieval and Renaissance manuscripts for over forty years. A man of erudition and wit, Mr. Voelkle is uniquely qualified to bring to life for us the finest examples of the collection.

 
Images above: Nativity. Single leaf from a Gradual. M.653. Italy, Florence, 14th c. (details) ©The Pierpont Morgan Library.

2008 ANNUAL MEETING
Thursday, March 6, 2008
6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Type Directors Club
127 West 25th Street, 8th Floor
New York, NY 10001

We are very fortunate this year to hold our Annual Meeting at the Type Directors Club. There will be a short reception before Karen's lecture, followed by our annual meeting. Admission fee for Guests: $10.00. Please R.S.V.P. to director@tdc.org or 212.633.8943. Please make every effort to attend and participate. We hope to see you there.

LECTURE by KAREN CHARATAN
Calligraphic Abstraction

Lettering artist Karen Charatan will get verbal about the non-verbal dialog of the group called Art of Ink in America.

The members of the Art of Ink in America are Asians and Westerners, and calligraphers in various languages, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, European Languages and English. These calligraphic artists, all working abstractly, find there is unity in their diversity as well as the experience of a non-verbal dialog. Karen will describe her approach to creating and understanding this work.

Although her work for many years has been traditional Western calligraphy and lettering for advertising, with this group Karen's abstract calligraphy work has traveled to some exciting venues. Last April the exhibition was held in Paris and of course the opening was one she was certain not to miss! The exhibit traveled to Korea and will next be featured in Irvine, CA before this tour comes to a close. The group mounts exhibitions on a two year cycle and the shows have traveled to galleries and museums in several cities in the USA and in Asia. One of the venues on the previous tour, the beautiful and spacious Mobile Museum of Art in Mobile, Alabama, made a large purchase of 29 works from that exhibition, a serious start to a collection of their own. Three of Karen's abstract works are now part of their permanent collection. Attending the openings whenever possible, Karen enjoys the practice that the artists in attendance are asked to perform a demonstration. She will describe her experiences and her thoughts on the abstract art of the East and West.

2007 EXHIBITION OF MEMBERS' WORKS
September 5—October 31, 2007

LECTURE by BOB BOYAJIAN
Bob Boyajian at the Donnell Library
Tuesday October 16th, from 6pm to 8pm
Story Hour Room (2nd Floor)
No reservation: first come, first served.
No Fee
Download pdf of this event

Donnell Library Center
20 West 53rd Street
New York, NY 10019-6185
212.621.0618
www.nypl.org/branch/central/dlc

In conjunction with the SoS Members' Exhibition, our president, Eva Kokoris, has invited Bob Boyajian to give a talk at the Donnell Library, on Tuesday, October 16, from 6 to 8 p.m. The renowned calligrapher will be presenting his program the old fashioned way: no PowerPoint, no slide show. This also allows little opportunity to nod off in a darkened room (his thought!). Undaunted by the prospect of his work being handled by others, he intends to circulate his original pieces through the audience. We are in for a treat! Upon arrival at the Donnell, please go to the Information Desk and ask to be directed to the Story Hour Room on the second floor. Someone will be there to further assist you.

[We asked Bob to write a bio for NewSoS. We know you will enjoy his hand written page reproduced below, along with the painted flower, above, which graced the envelope.]




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The Letters From New York (LFNY) Publication Party will be held on Wednesday, October 24, 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. (Bookstore closes at 10 p.m.).
Morningside Bookshop, 2915 Broadway at 114th Street, New York City.
Peter Soter, proprietor
Tel: 212.222.3350
www.morningsidebookshop.com.
Closest subway stop: #1 to 116th Street / Columbia University

An address by LFNY series editor and designer Christopher Calderhead will be followed by select readings from LFNY authors. Come and meet them!

Issue number 4 will make its debut, with Bradford Winters writing on VPointz: "Calligraphy's Streetwise Cousin"; "Scribe on Scribe" where various calligraphers discuss calligraphic objects in their personal collections, and Christopher Calderhead's article "Hidden Treasures: Visiting the Latse Library".

All LFNY Issues will be for sale. The event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.

Bring your friends and help us celebrate!

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HOLIDAY FAIR 2007
December 2, 2007
11 am to 4 pm
Brotherhood Synagogue
28 Gramercy Park South
New York, NY 10003

Download pdf of this event

It's time again for our Holiday Fair, held this year at the historic Brotherhood Synagogue,
28 Gramercy Park South, New York, New York 10003. This is a great opportunity to meet up with old friends, view demonstrations by our very accomplished calligraphers and lettering artists and see what new products and materials are available to spur our imaginations. We'll be listing the demonstrators and vendors as names become available.

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For those of you who have never taken part in a calligraphy show, this may be your moment to get your talent out there. For those of you with more experience, this may be an opportunity to show what NY Calligraphers can do to make snail mail move! The Washington DC Guild had a fabulous exhibit of fanciful envelopes withThe Graceful Envelope Contest, which inspired us to try our hands.

If you missed the flyer in the last SoS mailing sent with LFNY3, please contact
Nan De Luca at (212) 452-0139 for details.

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The Grolier Club and the Society of Scribes are pleased to present an illustrated lecture by Bernard Maisner – custom and retail fine stationer, handletterer, calligrapher and artist.

"I was born with a brush in one hand and a pen in the other."

Originally self taught in the art of calligraphy, Bernard Maisner, who has referred to himself as the "Zelig" of hand lettering, will present an illustrated review and lecture of the various directions lettering has taken him over the past thirty years. Mr. Maisner graduated from the Cooper Union College of Art, New York, in 1977, where he majored in painting and calligraphy. Lettering has played an integral part in Mr. Maisner's commercial work as well as in his career as a fine artist. Maisner's work has simultaneously overlapped many categories over the years, and he will discuss various aspects of his career, including:

• Creative hand-lettering for the advertising, editorial and publishing fields. Wild, loose and experimental lettering for ad campaigns, record albums, magazine articles and book covers ... from writing with lipstick and whipped cream to lettering on nude bodies.
  
  
• Bernard Maisner Calligraphy & Fine Stationery. Maisner, known for his elaborate flourishing and design, creates calligraphed and engraved custom stationery for weddings and social events. The current issue of the bi-annual "New York Magazine/Weddings" has a feature story and profile on Mr. Maisner. Bernard will also show work made for his installation in the windows at Tiffany's, and work used in the Bergdorf Goodman Holiday window displays.
  
  
• Lettering for Film & Television. Maisner is a Screen Actors Guild (SAG) member and specializes in writing and lettering live-on-camera as well as in creating props in many historical lettering styles for feature films. Credits include writing on-camera as Daniel Day Lewis in Martin Scorsese's "The Age of Innocence," as Johnny Depp's hand in Tim Burton's "Sleepy Hollow," as Sean Connery's writing in "Finding Forrester" by Gus van Sant. Maisner created props for Scorsese's "Gangs of New York" and the soon to be released "P.S. I Love you" starring Hilary Swank and Gerard Butler. Mr. Maisner's hand has appeared in television commercials writing as a doctor, a business executive, a medieval monk and most impressively – as Ronald McDonald – in full yellow dress including wearing the red wig. Mr. Maisner appeared as a featured guest on the Martha Stewart Living show in 2001.
  
  
• Medieval & Renaissance Manuscript Illumination. Bernard Maisner founded and taught a materials and methods program for six years at the Cloister's Museum beginning in 1977. He has also lectured and conducted workshops on the subject at the Getty Museum, The Pierpont Morgan Library and the St. Louis Museum of Art, among others.
  
  
• Fine Art – Paintings and Contemporary Illuminated Books & Pages. Maisner has incorporated the use of lettering and text in his artwork since 1974. His paintings and modern illuminated pages have been exhibited nationally in galleries and museums since 1977. A 25-year retrospective survey exhibition of his work entitled "Entrance to the Scriptorium" toured the country for three years. A book of the same title, with an essay by Art Historian Dore Ashton was published in 1999. Maisner's work is in the permanent collections of the Pierpont Morgan Library and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
  
  
• The Bernard Maisner Retail Line of Fine Stationery. The creation and scope of Maisner's year-round and holiday line of stationery products, available at Bergdorf Goodman and other fine stores.

This is Mr. Maisner's first public lecture discussing his career as a calligrapher and hand-letterer.

FOUNDED IN 1884, the Grolier Club of New York is America's oldest and largest society for bibliophiles and enthusiasts in the graphic arts. Named for Jean Grolier, the Renaissance collector renowned for sharing his library with friends, the Club's objective is to foster "the literary study and promotion of the arts pertaining to the production of books."

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FRIDAY NIGHT LECTURES AT THE MORGAN

LECTURE BY KAREN GORST — Friday, June 8, 2007, 6:00 p.m.
LECTURE BY CHRISTOPHER CALDERHEAD — June 15, 2007, 6:00 p.m.

This Spring, The Morgan Library & Museum has scheduled three distinct exhibitions presenting an exceptional selection of manuscripts ranging from the 10th to the 16th centuries. For a very short time, these three exhibitions will overlap, thus offering the largest collection of manuscripts presented at the Morgan in a long time.

In Highlights from the Morgan's Collections (opens May 25), sacred and secular manuscripts have been chosen to represent the scope and depth of the collection. They range from the 12th to the 16th centuries and include items as diverse as an Italian veterinary treatise for the care of horses and the prayer book that French Queen Anne de Bretagne commissioned court artist Jean Poyer to design for her young son Charles-Orland.

Federico da Montefeltro and His Library, (June 8-September 30, 2007) presents a group of lavishly illuminated manuscripts from one of the greatest libraries of the Italian Renaissance — that of Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino (1422-1482).

In Apocalypse Then (through June 17) the Book of Revelation is seen through the eyes of some of the greatest medieval illuminators. At the center of this exhibition is the Las Huelgas Apocalypse, the largest and latest (1220) of a five-hundred-year series of medieval illuminated commentaries on the Apocalypse by the monk Beatus of Liébana.

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LECTURE BY KAREN GORST — Friday, June 8, 2007 - 6:00 p.m.

Karen Gorst will conduct a tour of the manuscripts focusing on the materials and techniques used to produce the various manuscripts. If you are paying close attention, by the end of the evening you will be able to visually identify the different kinds of animal skins used to make the parchments, dye-based versus stone-based inks and paints, and identify many of the art production techniques used by the scribes and illuminators. This promises to be a rare opportunity to see over six centuries of manuscripts at the same time and ask the questions you always wanted to ask.

Karen Gorst, has a Certificate in Art from North Carolina School of the Arts and a BFA from Cooper Union. President of SoS from 2001 to 2003, she is a freelance calligrapher/manuscript illuminator. Her passion for medieval/renaissance art materials and techniques led her to do extensive research to reclaim these techniques for contemporary artists. She has conducted workshops the Cloisters, The Pierpont Morgan Library, The Huntington Library, The Medieval Institute at Kalamazoo, professional societies and teaches regularly at the Center for Book Arts. Her work is in collection in the US, Europe, and Japan.

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LECTURE BY CHRISTOPHER CALDERHEAD — June 15, 2007, 6:00 p.m.

Christopher Calderhead will select five samples of calligraphic hands from the Morgan's display and discuss scribal techniques and the construction of each script. We will look at methods of page layout and design, techniques used by the scribes for ruling lines, and ways different scripts are combined in each manuscript. We will discuss how the five selected scripts were written, concentrating on basic features - pen angle, weight, slope, stroke sequence, pen lifts, and pen manipulation — and we will look at the way the tools used (generally quills) informed the making of the letters. Join us for a lively discussion of these wonderful historical manuscripts and the ways they can inspire contemporary calligraphic practice.

Christopher Calderhead has been a professional calligrapher for twenty years. He studied at London's Roehampton Institute and was elected a Fellow of the (English) Society of Scribes and Illuminators in 1988. He is the author of Illuminating the Word: the Making of The Saint John's Bible, and editor of Letter Arts Review and the Society of Scribes Journal, Letters from New York. See his website at www.calderhead.org.

Please note that the lectures will be presented in two parts. First, Karen/Christopher will give the tour to half the group while Board Member Marie Trope-Podell, Manager of Gallery Programs at the Morgan, takes the second group for a tour of Pierpont Morgan's historical library, thus making it more manageable to view the manuscripts being presented. We will then change groups/lecturers and reverse the presentation.

R.S.V.P. Registration will be honored on a first-come first-served basis (limited to 40 participants per lecture). Please e-mail Marie Trope-Podell at podells@verizon.net or, for those who do not have email, please call Eva Kokoris at 516.707.9926. We will email or call you to confirm your attendance.

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