Handritten Medieval-styled Dark Fantasy Manuscript

[Justyna Plichta-Jendzio]

Hi. Few years ago I scrolled images of Ancient and Medieval books and thought, it would be nice to have a fantasy book published this way. So I decided to create one myself. You can see results on my FB: Handwritten Fantasy Manuscript.

Looking to hear your opinions!

 

[Chasejxyz]

Not everyone is on Facebook, so that's not a great way to share your work. Also there's no link to it, so even then it's going to be hard for anyone to actually look at it.

One of the reasons why fonts are so great is because they've been designed to be incredibly readable in all sorts of conditions. Not everyone has perfect vision, dyslexia and other conditions that make reading difficult exist, and handwriting in general can be really difficult for someone to read. Illuminated manuscripts in ye oldene dayse were pieces of art and incredibly expensive, along with the average person wasn't literate* so making the text readable was at the bottom of everyone's priorities. Things were PRETTY and that's what mattered.

So what exactly are you trying to achieve with your book? Are you trying to tell a good story that has some pictures with it? Or do you want it all to be one cohesive piece of art? If you're making an in-universe book then it would be a great way to show off worldbuilding (like the opening cinematic for Wind Waker) but you're also making it incredibly difficult for people to access it. What are your goals? Why did you choose to tell your story this way?

*People weren't like cavemen and couldn't read anything. They probably knew their letters and could read the sign that said YE OLDE TAVERN SHOPPE and could write spelling things out phoenetically. So they could read, but they didn't have access to a lot of things to read most of the time, so it wasn't a critical skill. This is, of course, speaking about western European cultures, which English-language things tend to do, but this isn't always the case. The king of Korea made a new alphabet to make literacy more obtainable by the lower class, as up until then they were using Chinese characters and that's incredibly difficult. I think to be considered literate in China you need to be able to read 10k+ characters, so most people in ye olden days weren't doing that.

 

[Justyna Plichta-Jendzio]

First, so sorry for my late reply, I'v been busy working.
To be honest: I didn't have any specific goal. I just had a good time crafting this book. Recently I discovered book binding art and decided to create one my own. Most of handmade book creators make mini books with empty pages, to serve as mini notebooks. But what kind of book it is with no text. I asked few authors to allow me to make such book with their texts but they refused due to publishers rights. So I made a book with my own story. My mistake is that I wrote the text in reduced size fonts, which gave no good effect. Next book I'm currently crafting is written and illuminated in regular size and both will be reduced during copying the pages.