⏳ PRINTED ON DEMAND — Please allow 2–3 weeks for delivery

This book is printed one copy at a time when you order it. There is no warehouse shelf of these — your copy goes on the press after you check out. Please allow 2–3 weeks from order to delivery.

About this book

Gustav F. Herhold's Compendium of Modern Penmanship (1894) gathers the penman's art of the 1890s between two covers: business writing and ornamental writing, the plain hand and the flourished hand, taught as one complete system. A compendium in the true sense — everything the student of penmanship needed, assembled and ordered. The compendium form is Herhold's great service: instead of hunting through a shelf of specialized manuals, the student finds the whole art — plain and ornamental — organized in one progressive course.

The business section trains the rapid, legible hand of the counting house; the ornamental section takes up shaded script, flourished capitals, and offhand flourishing — the display work of diplomas, certificates, and presentation pieces. Herhold's exemplars give the student models to copy stroke by stroke, in the 1890s manner at its most confident.

For the modern calligrapher the compendium is a rich source of period exemplars outside the familiar copybook canon; for the historian it is the American penmanship of 1894, preserved whole — the decade when the art stood at its height. Its exemplars reward close copying: the shaded strokes and flourishes are drawn with the precision of a master who expected his plates to be studied, not skimmed.

For calligraphers, students of business and ornamental penmanship, pen-and-ink artists, and collectors of 19th-century writing manuals. The complete penmanship of 1894, compendium-style.

Details: 6×9" paperback, black and white interior, cream paper.

⚠️ Please read before ordering — about print quality

This is a print-on-demand reprint of a scanned historical document. The pages were scanned from an original 1894 printing, and the print quality of your book reflects the condition of that original scan.

What that means in plain terms: you may see faded text, uneven inking, age spots, show-through from the back of pages, and other imperfections that were in the 1894 original or introduced by the scanning process. These are preserved as-is — they are not printing defects, and they are not something we can fix.

We are not responsible for the condition of the original source material. If you want a pristine modern typeset book, this isn't it. If you want the actual 1894 book with all its character intact, you're in the right place.

Printed on demand by IngramSpark. One copy at a time — no inventory, no waste.