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Letter Cutting
Letter cutting is a form of inscriptional architectural lettering closely related to monumental masonry and stone carving, often practised by artists, sculptors, and typeface designers. Rather than traditional stone carving, where images and symbols are the dominant features, in letter cutting the unique skill is "meticulous setting out and skilled cutting of the lettering style, in terms of design, angle and depth of the lettering". "However, the majority of letter cutting is now manufactured using methods such as sand blasting and laser etching". Notable practitioners include: *Nicholas Benson *Eric Gill *Ralph Beyer * Michael Harvey *David Kindersley *Richard Kindersley * John Shaw *Reynolds Stone *Macdonald Gill Leslie MacDonald Gill (6 October 1884 – 14 January 1947), commonly known as MacDonald Gill or Max Gill, was a noted early-twentieth-century British graphic designer, cartographer, artist and architect. Biography Born in Brighton, Gill was the ... Refe ...
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Coventry Cathedral
The Cathedral Church of Saint Michael, commonly known as Coventry Cathedral, is the seat of the Bishop of Coventry and the Diocese of Coventry within the Church of England. The cathedral is located in Coventry, West Midlands, England. The current bishop is Christopher Cocksworth and the current dean is John Witcombe. The city has had three cathedrals. The first was St Mary's, a monastic building, of which only a few ruins remain. The second was St Michael's, a 14th-century Gothic church later designated as a cathedral, which remains a ruined shell after its bombing during the Second World War. The third is the new St Michael's Cathedral, built immediately adjacent after the destruction of the former. The ruined cathedral is a symbol of war time destruction and barbarity, but also of peace and reconciliation. St Mary's Priory Coventry had a medieval cathedral that survived until the Reformation. This was St Mary's Priory and Cathedral, 1095 to 1102, when Robert de Limesey m ...
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Ralph Beyer
Ralph Alexander Beyer (6 April 1921 – 13 February 2008) was a German letter-cutter, sculptor and teacher. He was most noted for his work on Basil Spence's new Coventry Cathedral where Beyer carved ''Tablets of the Words''.Ralph Beyer Obituary ''Times Online''Archived
25 May 2010. Retrieved 10 May 2011


Early life

Ralph Beyer was born in Berlin in 1921. His father Oskar Beyer was a well known art historian. During his early childhood his family lived with relatives on an island near

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Arts Occupations
The arts are a very wide range of human practices of creative expression, storytelling and cultural participation. They encompass multiple diverse and plural modes of thinking, doing and being, in an extremely broad range of media. Both highly dynamic and a characteristically constant feature of human life, they have developed into innovative, stylized and sometimes intricate forms. This is often achieved through sustained and deliberate study, training and/or theorizing within a particular tradition, across generations and even between civilizations. The arts are a vehicle through which human beings cultivate distinct social, cultural and individual identities, while transmitting values, impressions, judgments, ideas, visions, spiritual meanings, patterns of life and experiences across time and space. Prominent examples of the arts include: * visual arts (including architecture, ceramics, drawing, filmmaking, painting, photography, and sculpting), * literary arts (includin ...
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Artisans
An artisan (from french: artisan, it, artigiano) is a skilled craft worker who makes or creates material objects partly or entirely by hand. These objects may be functional or strictly decorative, for example furniture, decorative art, sculpture, clothing, food items, household items and tools and mechanisms such as the handmade clockwork movement of a watchmaker. Artisans practice a craft and may through experience and aptitude reach the expressive levels of an artist. History The adjective "artisanal" is often used in describing hand-processing in contrast to an industrial process, such as in the phrase ''artisanal mining''. Thus, "artisanal" is sometimes used in marketing and advertising as a buzz word to describe or imply some relation with the crafting of handmade food products, such as bread, beverages or cheese. Many of these have traditionally been handmade, rural or pastoral goods but are also now commonly made on a larger scale with automated mechanization i ...
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Masonry
Masonry is the building of structures from individual units, which are often laid in and bound together by mortar; the term ''masonry'' can also refer to the units themselves. The common materials of masonry construction are bricks, building stone such as marble, granite, and limestone, cast stone, concrete blocks, glass blocks, and adobe. Masonry is generally a highly durable form of construction. However, the materials used, the quality of the mortar and workmanship, and the pattern in which the units are assembled can substantially affect the durability of the overall masonry construction. A person who constructs masonry is called a mason or bricklayer. These are both classified as construction trades. Applications Masonry is commonly used for walls and buildings. Brick and concrete block are the most common types of masonry in use in industrialized nations and may be either load-bearing or non-load-bearing. Concrete blocks, especially those with hollow cores, offer va ...
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MacDonald Gill
Leslie MacDonald Gill (6 October 1884 – 14 January 1947), commonly known as MacDonald Gill or Max Gill, was a noted early-twentieth-century British graphic designer, cartographer, artist and architect. Biography Born in Brighton, Gill was the younger brother of Eric Gill, one of the leading figures of the Arts and Crafts movement. In 1914 his "''Wonderground Map''", commissioned by Frank Pick, and hung at every station, helped to promote the London Underground by presenting an accurate map which also had a humorous side in cartoon style. Produced in poster form, it was also made available for sale to members of the public and proved to be very popular. Elder brother Eric, who at that time was engaged in a commission for Westminster Cathedral, was included at the bottom of the map. Gill showed three works at the first annual exhibition of the newly formed Society of Graphic Art in 1921. He was the designer of the standard upper-case lettering used on headstones and war memori ...
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Reynolds Stone
Alan Reynolds Stone, CBE, RDI (13 March 1909 – 23 June 1979) was an English wood engraver, engraver, designer, typographer and painter. Biography Stone was born on 13 March 1909 at Eton College, where both his grandfather, E. D. Stone, and father, E. W. Stone, were assistant masters.Kenneth Clark, ''Reynolds Stone: engravings'' (London, John Murray, 1977), . He was educated there and at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he obtained a degree in history in 1930. He had no clear idea of his future, and, at the suggestion of Francis Scott, a young don at Magdalene, almost drifted into a two-year apprenticeship at the Cambridge University Press, where he came under the influence of Walter Lewis and, more importantly, F. G. Nobbs, the overseer of the composing department. Nobbs, to quote Stone, 'whisked me out of the hand-composing room into his office' where he taught him to appreciate letter design. A chance encounter with Eric Gill on the London to Cambridge train led to ...
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John Shaw (stone Carver)
John Shaw, MA FRSA (b. 1952) is a British stone letter-carver, based in Saxby, Lincolnshire, England. Education Shaw was educated at Derby College of Arts from 1970–71 where he was the Earp Legacy Award winner. He graduated from Camberwell School of Art and Crafts, in 1974 with a BA in Fine Art. A PGCE followed from Brighton Polytechnic in 1975, and then an MA in 1983 from Birmingham Polytechnic. Shaw has had Workshop experience with Seán Crampton, David Kindersley and Ieuân Rees. He is also a member of the Art Workers Guild. Exhibitions Shaw has had solo exhibitions in the Royal Society of Arts, Derby Museum and Art Gallery, Sam Scorer Gallery (Lincoln), Monnow Valley Arts Centre (Herefordshire),John Shaw. Texts that have taken my Fancy, A Personal Statement in Carved Lettering. Monnow Valley Arts Centre, 2008. Harley Gallery and Foundation at Welbeck Abbey. List of works *Sir Frank Whittle in Westminster Abbey *Accrington Pals for St John’s Church Accrington *Bi ...
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Richard Kindersley
Richard Kindersley is a British typeface designer, stone letter carver and sculptor. Career Kindersley studied lettering and sculpture at Cambridge School of Art and in the workshop of his father David Kindersley, who was also a noted stone carver. His major public work is the ''Seven Ages of Man'', a sculpture outside Baynard House in the City of London. He has also constructed a modern stone circle called ''The Millennium Stones'' created during 1998 to 1999 in Gatton Park Surrey, to mark the double millennium from AD1 to AD2000. The first stone in the series is inscribed with the words from St John's Gospel The Gospel of John ( grc, Εὐαγγέλιον κατὰ Ἰωάννην, translit=Euangélion katà Iōánnēn) is the fourth of the four canonical gospels. It contains a highly schematic account of the ministry of Jesus, with seven "sig ..., "in the beginning the word was". The subsequent nine stones are carved with quotations contemporary with each ...
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David Kindersley
David Guy Barnabas Kindersley Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, MBE (11 June 1915 – 2 February 1995) was a British stone Letter cutting, letter-carver and typeface designer, and the founder of the Kindersley Workshop (later the Cardozo Kindersley Workshop). His carved plaques and inscriptions in stone and slate can be seen on many churches and public buildings in the United Kingdom. Kindersley was a designer of the Octavian font for Monotype Imaging in 1961, and he and his third wife Lida Lopes Cardozo Kindersley, Lida Lopes Cardozo designed the main gates for the British Library. Early life Kindersley was born at Codicote near Hitchin, the son of Major Guy Molesworth Kindersley (a stockbroker and Member of Parliament, MP) and the grandson on his mother's side of the Arts and Crafts movement, Arts and Crafts potter Sir Edmund Elton, 8th Baronet, Sir Edmund Elton. He was educated at St Cyprian's School, Eastbourne, where "he had a wonderful time", becomin ...
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Michael Harvey (lettering Artist)
Michael Harvey MBE (11 November 1931 – 18 October 2013) was an English lettering artist, teacher and writer specialising in lettering, type design and letter cutting. His work appears in many English cathedrals and on the National Gallery, London. Originally inspired by reading Eric Gill's ''Autobiography'', he worked as Reynolds Stone's assistant between 1955 and 1961. He then became a freelance, producing some 1500 hand-lettered book jackets over the next twenty years for major publishers such as Heinemann, The Bodley Head and Cambridge University Press. As technology changed he developed his interest in type, producing designs for Adobe Systems and The Monotype Corporation and later, with Andy Benedek for his own foundry, Finefonts. His inscriptional work included a long collaboration with Ian Hamilton Finlay. He gave talks and demonstrated widely and taught for a number of years at Poole Art College and later ran the Letterforms course at Reading University with James Mosley ...
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Eric Gill
Arthur Eric Rowton Gill, (22 February 1882 – 17 November 1940) was an English sculptor, letter cutter, typeface designer, and printmaker. Although the ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' describes Gill as ″the greatest artist-craftsman of the twentieth century: a letter-cutter and type designer of genius″, he is also a figure of considerable controversy following revelations of his sexual abuse of two of his daughters. Gill was born in Brighton and grew up in Chichester, where he attended the local college before moving to London. There he became an apprentice with a firm of ecclesiastical architects and took evening classes in stone masonry and calligraphy. Gill abandoned his architectural training and set up a business cutting memorial inscriptions for buildings and headstones. He also began designing chapter headings and title pages for books. As a young man, Gill was a member of the Fabian Society, but later resigned. Initially identifying with the Arts an ...
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