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Johnston's influence was transmitted, as is well known, not only by teaching, but also by lecturing and publication. Johnston's book 'Writing & Illuminating, & Lettering' has had vast influence in the field of calligraphy. The first edition of the book was produced at a time when Johnston based his teaching on a 'formal hand' that took English half-uncials of the eighth century as their model. This upright round hand was to be written with a square-cut flat pen. Johnston was able to emulate the skill of late medieval professional scribes who could write in a variety of hands. He had developed his foundational hand, written with a slanting pen and oblique nib by this time. It was based, as is well known, on tenth century Winchester manuscripts.1 Johnston produced a spectacular demonstration of this and a number of other scripts the following year in a work written out for Sydney Cockerell, 'The House of David, His Inheritance: A Book of Sample Scripts'. The colophon identifies the scripts as 'foundational hand,' 'black italic,' 'small Roman,' 'Roman capitals,' and 'modern half-uncial,' the latter 'based on round skeleton forms approximated to Uncial character used by the writer as an educational hand since 1900 A.D. There are also some Greek uncials in the manuscript. Johnston reveals his source as the third-century Ambrosian Homer reproduced in the Palaeographical Society's publications. His mastery of this script goes back at least to 1910, the year in which he produced a folio containing an extract from the 'Odyssey'. Johnston's use of Roman capitals in the manuscript of 1914 is of some significance: in 1913 he had undertaken to produce for London Transport, at the instigation of Frank Pick, an alphabet for the underground railway based on the sans-serif letter used in Victorian times for commercial purposes, but with the vigour and proportion of the great Renaissance scripts. The result, still in use today, is one of Johnston's greatest achievements. Johnston began to develop his cursive gothic hand in 1924 when he was asked to complete a fourteenth-century English manuscript of Chaucer. It was this script that Johnston used for an extract from the 'Canterbury Tales' presented to Louisa Puller by the Society of Scribes and Illuminators in 1927. Graily Hewitt's approach to his work is perhaps summed up in the work he did for the Ashendene Press. Charles St. John Hornby prevailed upon Hewitt to provide manuscript initials in red, blue and burnished gold for the version of 'Song of Songs' that he printed in 1902. This was an edition that was also luxuriously illuminated by one of Edward Johnston's pupils, Florence Kingsford. It is worth remarking that Johnston too had been involved in the design of books. His design of italic type for the Cranach Press is well known, his designs for titling in Doves Press books perhaps less so. Typography was certainly a secondary interest for Johnston, but his draft lettering and trials for the titling of the Doves Press edition of Milton's 'Areopagitica' (1907) show his meticulous study of the problems of layout and design. What he was producing here was, of course, a design to be printed rather than a manuscript element to be added to each copy of the book as in the case of Graily Hewitt. 1 The term 'foundational' first appeared in 1913 in the magazine 'Imprint
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Calligraphy >
Historical Notes
If
modern calligraphy begins with Edward Johnston, but it was William Lethaby,
founder of the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, who started
the process whereby calligraphy became an essential part of teaching
in art schools throughout the England when he appointed Johnston to
teach the subject in 1899.
Johnston
certainly formed an 'English' school of modern calligraphy, one whose
tradition is carried on by the Society of Scribes and Illuminators.
His influence can be followed throughout the greater part of the National
Art Library's modern calligraphy collection. An early and celebrated
pupil of Johnston was William Graily Hewitt. Like Johnston, he was a
student of medieval calligraphy and especially of gilding techniques,
a virtuoso display of which was done in platinum and gold on purple
vellum for Sydney Cockerell in 1903. As early as 1904 Hewitt contemplated
setting up a cooperative scriptorium on medieval lines, an aim which
seems to have been fulfilled in his work to produce memorials for the
fallen in World War I. His aim was to produce work that was technically
perfect rather than artistically inventive. Thus we find in the library's
collection three copies of the poem Princess Chloris in identical format,
apparently all done in 1919, or some ten years later a lovely copy of
'The Tempest' illuminated by Ida Henstock, with whom he collaborated
regularly to produce manuscripts. 
There
are many notable scribes who studied under Johnston and who promoted
his teaching. These range from early pupils, such as Florence Kingsford,
Louise Lessore and Percy John Smith, to people like M. C. Oliver, Thomas
Swindlehurst. and Irene Wellington. The latter was a major figure in
modern British calligraphy. She acted as Johnston's student assistant
at the Royal College of Art between 1928 and 1930 and taught at the
Central School until 1959; she was the teacher of such contemporary
scribes as Ann Hechle and Donald Jackson. Other
notable calligraphers such as Ann Camp, Joan Pilsbury, Ann Hechle
and Heather Child were taught by Johnston's early pupils.
