PENMANSHIP

[‘According to Cocker’: Edward Cocker, calligrapher, engraver and arithmetician.] Engraved calligraphic Copy Slip in his customary exquisite style, with text beginning ‘No Instrument of Musicke’.

Author: 
Edward Cocker [Edoardus Coccerius] (1631-1676), English calligrapher, engraver and arithmetician (‘Philomath’), whose name became proverbial because of a work of arithmetic attributed to him
Cocker
Publication details: 
Without date or place. [London, mid-seventeenth century.]
£220.00
Cocker

See his entry in the Oxford DNB. He published two dozen works on calligraphy, and Pepys described him as ‘the famous writing-master’, and employed him to engrave his slide rule, but it is as an arithmetician that he is remembered: two works published shortly after his death, purportedly from his manuscript, gave rise to the expression ‘according to Cocker’. It has not been established which one of Cocker’s works the present item comes from (his earliest, ‘Pen’s Experience’, is lost). In black ink on one side of a 17 x 11 cm piece of laid paper.

Autograph Letter Signed to J. Dixon Spain.

Author: 
Charles Chabot (1815-82), author and handwriting expert
Publication details: 
27. Red Lion Square | London. 3. Novr. 1881.'
£100.00

One page, octavo. Very good. Neatly written, as one might expect. 'My usual charge for comparing writings is 2 Gnas and for deciphering MSS. according to the time occupied therein'. He will be 'in Town week after next but as I have to attend at the Courts at Westminster it is uncertain at what hour you would find me here unless you made an appointment beforehand.' Chabot was the author of 'The handwriting of Junius professionally investigated by Charles Chabot, expert | With preface and collateral evidence by the Hon. Edward Twisleton' (1871).

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