Rob Dobi created the freebie font Killigraphy. It never had a lowercase — or numbers or punctuation, for that matter.

Killigraphy was apparently copied from page 129 of Arthur Baker’s book ’Calligraphy’, which was published in 1973. The illustrations in the book are meant as examples for other calligraphers to follow and usually don’t include full “character sets”. Often, only a lowercase is shown with, perhaps, a capital ’A’. Dobi apparently did not have the skill to create an uppercase to go with Baker’s lowercase (not many would).

If you search for “arthur baker” on MyFonts (or elsewhere) you will find lots of fonts designed by him, some of which are similar to Killigraphy, although they are generally less spontaneous and more polished in appearance.

http://www.myfonts.com/search?search%5Btext%5D=arthur+baker

“some of which are similar to Killigraphy, although they are generally less spontaneous and more polished in appearance.”

Arthur never intended to have the pages from this book be digitized. In fact there was no “digital” work being done when this book was published. This guy really did “kill” Arthur’s graphy. Arthur and I are in the process of bringing some of this work to digital reality. Matador was one of the first. There are four others in the process. And Arthur is exploring other venues for previously badly digitized fonts that have been hacked by others. There is so much there after decades of work that he has relented, and is now interested in doing them right rather than having them done slipshod. FULL CHARACTER sets. Not junk by people who have software that want to make money off of some one else’s intellectual property.

Arthur and I just spoke and he is in full agreement with this statement.

I on the other hand find this practice bereft of any values! The book is protected by copyright laws.

Michael

Thank you for saying this, Michael.

I was rather disturbed that this Killigraphy font existed. What I hoped I was implying when I said that the fonts are “less spontaneous and more polished in appearance” was that a font is necessarily going to be less spontaneous than calligraphy. On the other hand, a font created by simply lifting forms from a piece of calligraphy will only have a mechanical kind of spontaneity. For the real thing you need a calligrapher, somebody like Arthur.

I almost left the thread as it was because of the name of the font... kind of summed it up. But being a blabbermouth I ranted on! Sorry

If Anthony wants a similar font then I suggest he simply check Adobe, Linotype, MyFonts, etc...

Michael