A calligrapher on forty years of ink
Agnes Ruddle has lettered certificates, gravestones and one royal charter. She still practises the alphabet every morning before she answers email.
gnes Ruddle keeps her quills in a jam jar and her deadlines on a slate. We talked at her kitchen table in Ludlow, between batches of ink.
Why the alphabet every morning? “Because your hand forgets overnight. It’s like tuning an instrument. The first ‘a’ of the day is always a bit drunk.”
On mistakes
“You can’t undo a stroke. On vellum you can scrape it back with a knife, very carefully, but mostly you learn to plan the line before you start it. That’s the whole craft, really. Deciding.”
On the work that lasts
She has lettered more than two hundred memorial stones. “People think lettering is decoration. It isn’t. It’s the part of a thing that tells you who it was for.”
Before I left she wrote my name on a scrap of card, in one breath, and it was better than my signature has ever been.
¶ Written by
Maud Ellery
Editor
Maud founded The Wendmere in 2019 after twenty years editing trade journals nobody outside the trade ever read. She writes about industry, bells and the things towns forget they made.
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¶ The Thursday letter
One letter, every Thursday.
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