The 11 Best Calligraphy books (2023 reviews)

There are several advantages of having a calligraphy book. Let’s take you step by step, type by type, and find the best calligraphy book for you.

Our review process: Show/Hide

Our Top Picks:

Best Overall: Buy: Modern kid press Calligraphy Book READ REVIEW

Best For seasoned letterers: Buy: Calligraphy Book READ REVIEW

Best For children: Buy: June Lucy Calligraphy Book READ REVIEW

Best With marker: Buy: Whitney Farnsworth Calligraphy Book READ REVIEW

Best With watercolor: Buy: Paper Peony press Calligraphy Book READ REVIEW

Best For experienced calligrapher: Buy: Margaret Shepherd Calligraphy Book READ REVIEW

Best With color: Buy: Jane Sullivan Calligraphy Book READ REVIEW

Best For self: Buy: Eleanor Winters Calligraphy Book READ REVIEW

Best For Everyone: Buy: Calderhead Calligraphy Book READ REVIEW

Best For someone: Buy: Grebenstein Calligraphy Book READ REVIEW

Best For Excellent instruction: Buy: Younghae Calligraphy Book READ REVIEW

Best Overall: Modern kid press Calligraphy Book

Buy on Amazon

The latest modern kid press calligraphy book is an absolute beast in terms of its features, and rightfully takes the top spot with ease. It is a great book to inspire little writers. It teaches great basic skills that they can build off of. It's great for both teens and adults. They love how pretty and fancy it looks and it’s inspiring them to learn cursive. It is easy to follow illustrations for kids. It is great for your creative kid. It's great for both Kids and adults. It is great for both teenagers and adults.

• Very cool and unique product for young writers
• Highly recommend, for kids or adults interested in calligraphy
• Makes a great gift with some flair pens

Best For seasoned letterers: Calligraphy Book

Buy on Amazon

Best part: calligraphy book costs comparatively low and it is available to ship in 24 hours. It is a perfect guide for aspiring calligraphers. It covers basic and important drills, letters forms, and it goes into each letter of the alphabet providing different ways to do them. It includes 3 official ways of writing each letter in lowercase and uppercase. It's really easy to follow the guides.

The guide is ready to use from day one, including a calligraphy pen and high quality practice paper in the guide, making learning possible without even stepping into a stationary store. There is a practice page for each uppercase letter and another for each lowercase letter, plus a few pages to practice numbers. It is simple and elegant. It would definitely recommend this book for any beginner who wants to take up a fun new hobby.

• Lots of room to practice writing in different styles
• Has easy and clear product recommendations such as paper and what pens to get
• Excellent book for beginners and intermediate

Best For children: June Lucy Calligraphy Book

Buy on Amazon

This book is a great starter book to practice modern calligraphy. Put together some pencils, pens, calligraphy pens, brush markers and felt tipped pens and you have the perfect calligraphy starter kit. It is great book for beginners, a lot of good information, and a great resource for modern calligraphy.

It comes with just over 100 pages of easy to follow content, this book is perfect for anyone beginning their lettering journey no matter where you are starting from. There are easy to follow directions, pages to practice, tools to use and extra fun stuff in the back of the book to show you ways to embellish your work. It is easy to understand instructions on techniques. The step by step and practice pages are perfect for beginner or advanced calligrapher. It is great book for referencing back as well as to refresh your skills.

• Provides plenty of exercises and very precise
• The ultimate guide to modern calligraphy and hand lettering
• Good for learning to write differently

Best With marker: Whitney Farnsworth Calligraphy Book

Buy on Amazon

The whitney farnsworth calligraphy book's material feels more premium than its price would suggest. It is a good learning tool for basic lettering principles. Whitney makes hand-lettering accessible to beginners, but also incorporates unique ways to sharpen veterans skills. It is easy to learn ten different alphabet styles, with lowercase and capital letters, connectors, flourishes, and more. It is so much fun and helpful to go step by step and learn the ropes from a pro.

The book is super easy to follow (including recommendations on tools/posture) with lots of room to practice. There are many fonts to learn tutorial on pen strokes and lots of practice pages. The book is well-made, sturdy, and includes free, extra gifts with purchase.

• Great resource for beginners and veterans alike
• Easy modern calligraphy & hand lettering workbook
• Shows you all different styles of calligraphy writing
• Perfect for a beginner entering into the world of calligraphy

Best With watercolor: Paper Peony press Calligraphy Book

Buy on Amazon

We know from years of feedback from readers, customers and amazon sellers, what most people want in a convenient and appropriate book. The paper peony press calligraphy book is exactly that - it's a simple book that hits all the right notes. This book coupled with felt calligraphy pens are a great gift for all ages. It is easy to follow and gives you a few different styles to learn. It is good for beginners and those wanting to learn more about hand lettering/modern calligraphy.

The book captures writting all the alphabets in certain calligraphy style. It gives you a background and practice pages along with some designs. It’s just cursive writing. There are several styles that are good for a variety of pens. It is a good gift for somebody who has shown interest in lettering/calligraphy.

• Great training and workbook style makes it even better
• Caligraphy is super relaxing and pretty therapeutic
• Great for beginners and experienced hand writers

Best For experienced calligrapher: Margaret Shepherd Calligraphy Book

Buy on Amazon

Margaret Shepherd line of book come in a pretty wide variety of styles, so you can definitely find one that suits your individual preferences and needs. Calligraphy is much more elegant and entail so much of your soul and style in the writing. In a world of computers and fonts, this is a great way to relieve stress. If you are thinking of learning calligraphy on your own, this is one of the books to have. It’s meant to teach you the movements and habits that make calligraphy possible. It works well for short, unpunctuated passages, while the italic alphabet is more suited to informal everyday communication.

It is easy to hold, find on a shelf, and lay open on a table when you want to use it. The entire book is hand written in calligraphic style, it is easy to read and follow. It is good for the beginner and the experienced calligrapher as well.

• Advances to detail explanations on forming specific hands
• Simple, step by step, and in plain enough language
• Great for beginners or for refreshing your writing
• An art form for those of use who aren't very artistic

Best With color: Jane Sullivan Calligraphy Book

Buy on Amazon

This is a great book for beginners to learn calligraphy and fancy writing. It is looking for an beginners book and this is really good. It has a lot of calligraphy examples in it. It is a very helpful and full of expemplars.

This is a large-format book, 8 3/4" x 11 1/2", so the images are presented in full color and large size. There are practice pages to work on tracing and drawing the letters. The book has several different styles and examples of full alphabets with variations and stroke order. It is a great book for beginners to learn calligraphy and fancy writing.

• An excellent book for hand lettering with good examples and illustrations
• Include guides to illuminated lettering, calligraphy, and drawing fantastical beings
• Excellent book and guide into the world of calligraphy

Best For self: Eleanor Winters Calligraphy Book

Buy on Amazon

This book will teach you italic calligraphy. It offers an abundance of eye-catching alphabets, numerals, ribbons, borders, flowers, banners, and other easy-to-trace embellishments. It shows the correct way to hold the pen, angle the alphabet, and exercises to improve flow and uniformity. It has large print and lots of illustrations of the strokes, so it is very usable without personal lessons.

This practical guidethe only book that teaches the basic italic hand ( also known as chancery cursive) in ten easy stepsoffers comprehensive instructions for beginners. It is perfect for a self taught calligrapher. If you have the discipline to teach yourself something from a book, this is the book. It allows practitioners to develop their own styles. It is great book on calligraphy lettering, and this one is excellent.

• Good investment for long term
• One of the new comers and featured product

Best For Everyone: Calderhead Calligraphy Book

Buy on Amazon

Best part: calderhead calligraphy book costs comparatively low and it is available to ship in 24 hours. It covers all there is to know about calligraphy. While perhaps not truly a "world" encyclopedia of calligraphy, this is a superb volume, with many illustrations, explanations and descriptions of numerous calligraphies. It is written and assembled so well that one coming from any background may enjoy it at some level.

This book is great especially if you have an understanding of calligraphy already and want to step outside of the English language. It could be enjoyed solely as a fine art book, but also as a handbook, manual and reference. It is a well researched and beautifully presented work that is worthy of a place in every calligraphers library.

The book presents a wide variety of letters and symbols for different languages, along with many instruments used in calligraphy around the world.

• Truly encyclopedic in a delicious manner
• Great book for the lovers of calligraphy
• A great spirit who has an extensive knowledge of calligraphic arts

Best For someone: Grebenstein Calligraphy Book

Buy on Amazon

Next on the list, we've got yet another book that manages to win our hearts. It's the grebenstein calligraphy book and it's widely considered as book that has the most suitable features. This book has everything you need for a long time to come and is an excellent value. It has design ideas and layouts included, they show how to make your design on graph paper first and you need to keep the design lined up with the letter or other parts of the design. This section you can follow completely or easily determine how much, how little and what you do or do not need for your personal needs. There are 10 alphabets to choose from to learn one or all and concise instructions on how to make each letter, ie, pen placement and stroke order.

The exemplars in the Workbook pages could fit on two pages easily and could be a little larger too. This book also gives ideas and how to's on making pretty borders around your paper, or just in one corner of the paper, or up one side of the paper. It is perfect for a beginner or someone looking to refresh.

• New and hot release
• One of the new comers and featured product

Best For Excellent instruction: Younghae Calligraphy Book

Buy on Amazon

If you are preparing for a wedding or event, you can potentially save a lot of money with this book. This book will teach you the ESSENTIAL STEP-BY-STEP TECHNIQUES for Copperplate and Spencerian Scripts. It is fantastic for beginners and includes so many step-by-step examples. It is full of detailed instructions on letterforms, as well as beautiful projects one can create with the skills taught in this book.

This book gives two styles of writing and how to add flourishes. The second half of the book are examples of arts and crafts projects you can use your new-found calligraphic skills on. It's a way to gain some perspective and possibly even inspire you to develop some creative ideas of your own. There are also very cute projects in this book to use your new skills.

• A thorough intro to calligraphy and a pleasant read
• Beautiful, with high quality and thorough instruction
• Very nice introduction with practical projects
• Enthusiastic author and simple projects make it a good starting point