THE SMELL OF THE PEN

[
Royal Academy Art, The Hague, 1998
]

“How do they come up with such a schedule?”
First, that wild painting lesson: paint in all colours, all over our hands, our sleeves, our faces, and then four full hours of serious calligraphy. And it’s Friday... We’ve already got one foot in the bar.

I scrub my hands under the cold water. Scrub off the wildness because what comes next is__control.

Okay, that red nail is actually quite cute. I’ll leave it. Besides, time is up. I grab my A2 black folder. At least 20 sheets of practice inside. Do I have my pen? My gouache? Enough empty papers?

Calligraphy was a different world. The moment you stepped in, the temperature dropped ten degrees.

Breath held differently. No chatting, no jokes. Just the sound of metal nibs meeting paper and that one cough someone tries to swallow.

Our teacher was strict and exact.

[
Serious in the way a compass is serious: clear, unfazed, precise.
]

Large sheets of 50×70 cm ‘Bankpost’ paper. Gouache, Windsor & Newton Lamp Black and Cadmium Red, a broad nib, and a small brush to load the paint onto it.

Master the lowercase first. It’s the foundation. Only write downstrokes. Watch your rhythm.

Next step: writing the capitals into the text. Watch your spacing.

And if there was even a single stain, you started over. No mercy. You learned to breathe only when dipping your brush. You learned to steady your heartbeat.

I lived for that class.

All week, I counted down to those rigid rules. There was something monastic about it. Just you, a letter, and the space between the two.

Not everyone did.

For some, calligraphy felt like meditation. Quiet. Calming. Like folding laundry in silence. These students just had it. From day one, their strokes danced.

For others, it was pure torture. Hours spent hunched over, muscles locked, breath held, hands cramping. They tried and tried, yet never managed a single steady stroke.

But that didn’t matter. Not to our teacher. And eventually, not to us.

All that mattered was focus.
And patience.
And noticing.

You had to look. At where the curve began. Where the weight settled. How the thick melted into thin.

I still remember my janky ‘g’, the too-wide ‘e’, the ‘n’ that always leaned like it had one leg shorter than the other. But I wasn’t trying to become a perfect calligrapher. That wasn’t the point.

The point was: I started to FEEL letters.

I understood why the counter of a ‘b’ feels heavier than a ‘d’. I could sense when a stroke had been rushed. I could feel how the contrast in the letter changed with the slightest turn of the nib.

That’s the gift of calligraphy. It slows you down until you can hear the rhythm inside a letterform. You stop thinking of ‘A’ as a letter and start seeing it as a dance move. You notice how thin lines bow to thick ones, how curves carry weight, how space becomes structure.

[
It’s anatomy class for typography.
]

There are many books written on calligraphy, but only few I find good. To me, the most valuable one is ‘Writing, Illuminating, and Lettering’ by Edward Johnston. Every year, I reread it, by copying it out by hand. Putting my money where his mouth is.

And every year, I discover something new. A detail I missed. A sentence that suddenly clicks. He makes you understand how letters are built.

Try finding that kind of book today.

“Do you sell a book about calligraphy?”

—“Yes, of course madam. There, in the hobby section.”

HOBBY SECTION? As if calligraphy is just a relaxing Sunday activity! As if it belongs next to scrapbooking. Next to making scented candles.

The word ‘calligraphy’ literally means ‘beautiful writing.’ But what I find beautiful, you might find ugly. And vice versa. That makes it subjective. For many calligraphers, beauty means writing without any flaws.

They take it as a compliment when someone says their work looks printed. To me, that’s not praise. That’s a problem. I find ‘perfect’ boring. Life is out.

Johnston’s work isn’t perfect either. Zoom in and you’ll see it: awkward curves, uneven pressure, wobbly joins. Zoom out, and you’ll see a brave composition. It’s in the margins, the rhythm, the tension between letters.

[
Sometimes I think he invented wabi-sabi himself__the beauty of imperfection.
]

One day, as I took the book from the bookcase to show someone, I noticed something odd.

The title. Johnston left ‘calligraphy’ out.

And that was deliberate.
I think.
I hope.

Because the book isn’t about calligraphy.
It’s about typography.

[
Calligraphy was the tool.
Typography was the subject.
]

So no, you don’t need to become a perfect calligrapher. But if you want to REALLY understand type, you should at least get your hands dirty once.

Touch the paper. Drag the nib. Ruin sheets. Breathe too hard and watch your curve go the wrong way. Curse. Try again. Ruin ten more. And somewhere, in the middle of that mess, you’ll start to see letters differently.

[
They’ll stop being things and start being creatures.
]

Let me share two simple, practical tips that I’ve followed ever since reading his book. Maybe they’ll mean something to you, too.

He writes:

“In acquiring a formal writing, the penman should always have two paper books constantly in hand; one for the study of the forms of letters, the other for both the letters and their arrangement.

The first should contain large and very carefully made writing__with perhaps only one word to the line; the second should have smaller and quicker writing, neatly arranged on the pages, with four or five words to the line.”

So that’s what I do: zoom in, zoom out. Both equally important. The essence of typography.

Also, there’s something he calls ‘coupling’: connecting letters as you write. It might feel a bit awkward at first, but it’s a powerful way to make your words look more balanced. Just as you want in typography.

I love art supply stores. The smell of paper and ink instantly takes me back to all those late nights spent in quiet conversation with Edward.

I run my fingers over the paper. Not too rough, or my strokes bleed; not too smooth, or my writing will slip.

Then come the pens. I try them all, leaving little handwritten notes behind for whoever is next.

There’s just one thing that they don’t sell. The charm of Edward’s writing. Bummer.