Tag Archives: scribal adornments

DRBR 15: In which the Years are Marked

March 5, 2013 – 14:14

DR8-R12b is a Tribute to Nathan Marcus Adler, from the Jewish community of Hanover. (Check out Wikipedia; he has an epic hat, and even more epic sideburns.) The Tribute is dated 1879, the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination (according to the JTS catalogue). As well as the numerical date, it has a nice Hebrew chronogram: […]

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from the Torah repair mines

May 19, 2011 – 21:58

Isn’t this sweet? It’s the little letter aleph in “Vayikra,” but it’s a particularly tiny version, where the height of the whole letter aleph is same as the width of the quill used for the other letters. The regular letters in this sefer, by the way, were 7mm high. Huge!

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Responsible fonting: scenes from the inbox

May 18, 2011 – 16:19

A question from someone typesetting a ketubah: “I’m using typefaces that have a hand-done feel to them, but obviously they are mechanical. There are some typefaces (Guttman Stam and Guttman Stam 1) that recreate a sofrut look. One of these uses taggin and one is plain. I have no pretension to be following sofrut laws, […]

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Letter nun – visual halakha

December 31, 2010 – 09:05

This is one of my favourite letter-halakhot, from the rules of how to make straight nun: אות נו”ן פשוטה תואר צורתה כמו זיי”ן וג’ תגין על ראשה אך שהיא ארוכה כשיעור שתהא ראויה להעשות נו”ן כפופה אם תכפפנה Its form is like a zayin, with three tagin on its head, but it is long, such […]

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Little Letters in Eicha, part 1

September 16, 2010 – 13:40

I’ve not posted much on the Big and Little Letters in Torah, have I? And now I’m posting on the Little Letters in Eicha – well, I’m between Torahs at the moment, and indulging in a spate of megillot, Eicha amongst them, which has something to do with it. 1:12 (Sofer Boyfriend wrote this one.) […]

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