Writing 1540

If you’re anything like me, you just think of Palatino as a font on a drop-down menu, but actually Palatino (Giovani Battista Palatino) was an early scholar of the technology of writing. He was fascinated by the different forms of writing systems and those used in other languages at various times in history. This is his rendering of Arabic. In 1540 he published a writing manual in Italian called The New Book of Learning to Write. Was this literacy sponsorship? Anyway I suppose that it was his version of new literacies!