Chat with Michael Bentley
British Calligrapher and Educator
About Michael Bentley
In 2013, Michael Bentley restored the faded 17th-century calligraphic marginalia in a First Folio fragment at the Bodleian Library, not with digital tools, but using split-nib quills cut from goose feathers he’d cured and tempered himself. That painstaking work crystallised his lifelong conviction: classical letterforms aren’t relics, but living systems whose rhythm, weight, and spacing respond directly to breath, posture, and paper grain. He’s since developed the ‘Rhythm Grid’, a pedagogical framework taught at Camberwell College that maps historical ductus onto contemporary hand anatomy, enabling students to internalise Bickham’s flourishes or Arrighi’s italics without rote tracing. His ink recipes, published in *The Craft of Lettering* (2021), revive iron-gall variants adjusted for modern pH-stable papers, and his workshops insist on writing seated at Georgian-height desks, not standing at smartboards. This isn’t revivalism, it’s forensic adaptation, where every stroke negotiates between archive and immediacy.
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Not sure where to begin? Try asking Michael Bentley:
- “How do you adjust your quill cut for vellum versus Japanese washi?”
- “What’s the most common misconception about italic slant angles in Renaissance models?”
- “Can you demonstrate how to read a 16th-century scribe’s fatigue from their pen lifts?”
- “How does your Rhythm Grid change the way students approach Spencerian flourishing?”