What is Round hand script?

By the 1600s, italics were swamping the writing space. French officials said, “enough is enough!” and helped develop the “round hand” style of handwriting. In round hand, the letters were full and rounded. It spread to England and the American colonies. The Declaration of Independence was written in a form of round hand by a professional penman, Timothy Matlack.! Ah, but round hand too is difficult to the 21st century eye. It is beautiful, but ornate, like a drawing.

The Universal Penman illustrates more than just English round hand, but that is by far the dominant style. Its pages demonstrate how this kind of writing can be used in the most ordinary of business documents (though none of them looks the least bit ordinary in these tour-de-force examples). The book includes Bickham’s own invitation to his contributors, and in some cases their replies to him. It also features blackletter and a remarkable kind of blocky but elegant roman caps — John Baskerville’s roman capital letters come closest in contemporary type design — along with a somewhat slimmer style of cursive script, with more elegant blobs on the ends of many of the extending strokes, that harks back to the look of 17th-century handwriting.

 

Picture Credit : Google