Arthur Baker (calligrapher)

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This article is about the calligrapher and typeface designer. There is a separate article on the DJ and music producer.

Arthur Baker is the creator of a distinctive and dramatic style of brush and pen calligraphy.

Arthur Baker was born on the West coast of the United States.

He studied letter forms and historical calligraphic styles, about which he wrote many books. Baker designed his own pens and brushes.

Baker lives in Andover, Massachusetts. His hobbies include designing, making and flying paper airplanes.

Sample from Calligraphic Alphabets.

The following paragraphs are from Baker's book, The Calligraphic Art of Arthur Baker, and were written by William Hogarth, an assistant professor of art and communication arts at the C.W. Post Center of Long Island University who designed and illustrated numerous books and wrote on the popular arts:

"Arthur Baker is the most innovative and accomplished master of letters working today. He published his first book, called, simply, Calligraphy, in 1973. In that ground-breaking work, the late Tommy Thompson, himself a master scribe, wrote, "Baker weaves his script on a fanciful and magic loom from his personal and endless patterns...In his art he's a natural...In this most beautiful calligraphy, rhythm, letter design, and disciplined composition are accomplished without showing human effort. Character refinement in the person of the writer will always be evident in this expression of art and joy."

"Arthur Baker has had a lifelong curiosity about the form and structure of our letters. It led him to investigate the origins of the great Roman capitals -- those cold, pristine, carved letters still to be seen on monuments in the Mediterraniean world -- which, after two thousand years, are still the basis of all our writing and indeed, all our transmitted learning. Baker wondered how the ancient scribes created the letters before the cutters V-shaped them into marble and limestone. Working backward from manuscripts of the third century and studying the written letters on the walls of Pompeii, he deduced the system of manipulated pen and brush strokes that gave shape and proportion to the great capitalis monumentalis of the first century. Only a hand as sympathetic to letter strokes as that of Arthur Baker could have made the discovery. He found what Leonardo and Durer had sought during the Renaissance: a pattern and method of manipulating the pen and brush to create a rhythmic series of strokes. The Renaissance masters had clouded the issue with attempts to prove that the Roman letters were formed with compass and square, and their drawings continue to befuddle novice scribes today.

"To teach the original formation of these letters, Baker has created a series of instructional manuals, each demonstrating stroke-by-stroke, one letter to a page, the pen manipulation needed to convey the humanistic genius of the historic alphabets. This is in keeping with his own rigorous discipline at capturing a gestural line. He has also been responsible for designing hundreds of typefaces based on calligraphy, beginning with his prize-winning Baker Signet -- a perennial favorite of architects, art directors and commercial designers. His credentials as a master of letterform are impeccable, his manuals are unique, and his imagination has no boundaries. If Arthur Baker has no peers, it is largely due to the failure of other calligraphers to follow him in his quest for excellence, to go beyond craft into serious innovative creativity.

"Baker's influence is prodigal, and he is generous with appearances at lecture/demonstrations, gathering admirers as loyal as those who know his ideas only from books. The excitement, the creativity, and the art of Arthur Baker are all uniquely American. His adherents form a group practicing what can truly be called the New American Calligraphy, recognized as such throughout the world."

[edit] Some of His Many Typefaces

Amigo
Baker Sans—Eddie Bauer catalog logo and text.
Baker Signet—designed in 1965.
Calligraphica
Cold Mountain
Collier Script
Daybreak
Duckweed
Fish Face
Hiroshige
Kigali
Kigali Block
Kigali Decorative
Kigali ZigZag
Marigold
Mercator
Oak Graphic
Oxford
Pelican
Sassafras
Signet—Coca-Cola used Signet Bold for the word 'Coke' and Fleet Bank uses it for its logo.
Tiepolo—Lipton foods.
Visigoth

[edit] A Partial Bibliography

Arthur Baker, Calligraphic Alphabets, (Dover, 1974) ISBN 0-486-21045-6
Arthur Baker, The Roman Alphabet, (Art Direction Book Co., 1976) ISBN 0-910158-23-1
Arthur Baker, Dance of the pen, (Art Direction Book Co., 1978) ISBN 0-910158-45-2
Arthur Baker, New Calligraphic Ornaments and Flourishes, (Mineola: Dover, 1981)
Arthur Baker, Chancery Cursive: Stroke by Stroke, (Dover, 1982)
Arthur Baker, Cut and Assemble Paper Airplanes That Fly, (Dover, 1982)
Arthur Baker, Celtic Hand Stroke by Stroke (Irish Half-Uncial from "The Book of Kells"), (Dover, 1983)
Arthur Baker, Calligraphic cut paper designs for artists and craftsmen, (Mineola: Dover, 1983)
Arthur Baker, Calligraphic Swash Initials, (Dover, 1984)
Arthur Baker, Arthur Baker's Historic Calligraphic Alphabets, (Dover)
Arthur Baker, Encyclopedia of Calligraphy Styles