Paul Shaw Letter Design » Tours & Talks

Detail of doorway sign for Ninth & Broadway Building (1929) in downtown Los Angeles. Designed by Claud Beelman.

Detail from a cutting from a 15th c. Italian chorale, a large manuscript intended for use by a choir. The script is Rotunda, a rounded form of blackletter mostly found in Italy and Spain. The music notes are square and rhombic.

Detail of an inscription (c. 1462) on the facade of S. Anastasia in Verona.

Neon sign for Crown Caterers Deli Restaurant in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. The sign dates from the 1930s or 1940s.

Tombstone of Stefano Giuseppe Brion (d.1906) in the Cimiterio Brion-Vega, San Vito d’Altivole, Italy. Designed by Carlo Scarpa (1970–1972). The name is hidden in the “keys”.

Tours & Talks

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15 May 2013

La dolce vita dei caratteri: looking back at Legacy of Letters 2012

In preparation for Legacy of Letters 2013 I was looking through the over 1300 photos that Alexander Trubin sent me from last year’s tour and workshop. I had failed to organize them and last night I found myself bogged down in the tedious task while watching the New York Rangers demolish the Washington Capitals. The tedium was relieved by the opportunity to enjoy and relive the tour afresh: rubbing inscriptions in the courtyard of Sant’Ambrogio in Milano, viewing the moulds …
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14 March 2013

Legacy of Letters 2013 Tour and Workshop Options

For the ﬁrst time Legacy of Letters is offering shorter options to its full ten day tour and workshop. Here are the various choices:

Full Tour and Workshops with Tony Di Spigna and Lucio Passerini
Sunday, June 23 through Thursday, July 4
$3775 / €2900 regular price
$3500 / €2690 student discount
Details at http://www.paulshawletterdesign.com/category/tours-talks/legacy-of-letters/

Punches for swash capitals by Giambattista Bodoni.

Optional Post-Tour trip to Parma (Museo Bodoniano)
Thursday, July 4 through Friday, July 5
$360 / €275 single-room occupancy
$300 / €230 …
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25 February 2013

Legacy of Letters 2013 profile—Tony Di Spigna

Tony Di Spigna has been creating gems of Spencerian script—his term for drawn lettering derived from roundhand and other forms of pointed-pen writing—for over forty years. He learned the skill from Tom Carnase while working for Herb Lubalin & Associates, though I believe he has surpassed his mentor. There are two things that have always impressed me the most about Tony’s Spencerian script: 1. the gracefulness and naturalness of his curves; and 2. his ability to make compositions that hold …
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17 February 2013

2013 Legacy of Letters Tour Leaders and Instructors

Meet the Legacy of Letters staff for 2013: Paul Shaw and Alta Price, tour leaders; Lucio Passerini and Tony Di Spigna, instructors; and Sandro Berra, coordinator of the Tipoteca Italiana Fondazione.

Paul Shaw is widely known and respected as a guide to urban lettering.With Garrett Boge he co-founded and led the original Legacy of Letters tours of Rome, Florence and Tuscany from 1997 to 2000. On his own he has led regular walking tours of lettering in New York City since 2005 for …
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9 February 2013

Designing with Letters in Chicago: the aftermath

January 16–17 · Indiana University / Bloomington, Indiana
My January trip to the Midwest began with a stop in Bloomington, Indiana to visit Paul Brown, Tom Walker and the Department of Art at Indiana University. Tom and Paul had invited me to do a one-day workshop on calligraphic tools. But ﬁrst Tom took me to the Lilly Library to see manuscripts, incunabula and material accumulated by the Chicago engrosser Coella Ricketts. Tom and librarian Erika Dowell had ordered up a ton …
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9 February 2013

Legacy of Letters: “I loved it and would do it every year if I could.”

“I loved that it was a small group, as we got to meet one another. The tour allowed for us to explore the city we were in. The tour included so much I was surprised we managed to ﬁt in everything. I LOVED IT and would do it every year if I could. Thank you for the most enjoyable, informative and exciting 3 weeks. I have met friends that will last a lifetime.
Diana Pasovski, graphic designer, Australia

Diana Pasovski printing …
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9 February 2013

Bastard Calligraphy: a workshop

I will be doing a workshop on bâtarde, otherwise known as bastarda, a calligraphic hand that emerged from medieval documents to become a formal style for Books of Hours in northern France, Burgundia and Flanders in the second half of the 15th century. The class will take place over the course of two consecutive Sundays, April 28 and May 5, and is being sponsored by the Society of Scribes, Ltd., the calligraphic society in the New York City metropolitan region. …
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9 February 2013

Los Angeles Lettering Walk

I am leading a lettering walk of Downtown Los Angeles on Saturday, March 2 from 10 am to 1 pm. It will be a reprise of one that I did during TypeCon 2010. The walk will take in the usual range of urban lettering sights—carved inscriptions, metal letters, painted signs, plastic signs, vinyl signs, terrazzo letters, vernacular writing, grafﬁti (maybe)—but most of all we will see lots of neon signs, both active and dead.

Dancing Girls (detail) neon sign.

To register …
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2 February 2013

“Grab life by the typographic tail!”

There is still time to sign up for the 2013 Legacy of Letters Tour & Workshop at the early bird discounted price. Join Alta Price and me in Italy this summer and see how much fun you can have with letters. It is the experience of a lifetime.
Paul Shaw

Alexander practicing Cyrillic calligraphy.

“This ten-day immersion in the world of Latin letterforms, in their native environment, was an unforgettable experience. It was such an amazing time, filled with lots of impressions …
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7 January 2013

The Lettermaniac or Literaphiliac Proﬁled: A Day with Alexandra Horowitz

On Looking: Eleven Walks with Experts. Jacket design by Tal Goretsky.

Alexandra Horowitz, Professor of Psychology at Barnard College (Columbia University) and author of Inside of a Dog (a no. 1 New York Times bestseller) has just written On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes (Scribner). One of the eleven “experts” is me, a literaphiliac—someone suffering from a malady that “makes one seek, and see, letters”—in Horowitz’s view. Guilty as charged, though I would have used the term lettermaniac. Anyway, …
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19 December 2012

Designing with Letters

In January I will be traveling to the Midwest to teach, ﬁrst in Bloomington, Indiana and then in Chicago. The workshop at the School of Fine Arts, Indiana University, organized by Paul Brown and Tom Walker, is not yet determined. However, the workshops in Chicago have already been announced. They will both be on the topic of Designing with Letters. The Society of Typographic Arts, in conjunction with the School of Media Arts, Columbia College Chicago, is hosting a one-day …
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3 December 2012

Legacy of Letters Tour and Workshop 2013

Legacy of Letters participants at Il Buon Tempo, Lucio Passerini’s letterpress studio in Milano

Alta Price and I have decided not to wait until 2014 as originally announced to reprise our Legacy of Letters Tour and Workshop but to go ahead with one in 2013. We have been spurred to this decision by the urgings of colleagues in Italy and the wonderful time we had in 2012. (See Imprint for just one aspect of the 2012 tour and workshop—the making …
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