On Calligraphy or The Great Encyclopedia of Hand-Lettering: introduction and review

The first volume of The Great Encyclopedia of Hand-Lettering, titled The History of Codicology and Calligraphy, written by Ali Asghar Moqtadai, published in two volumes in 1394, is a collection that deals with the history of calligraphy in Iran and other countries of the world. According to the author, this book was the result of years of research and writing and analysis, and has been compiled using more than 100 Iranian sources and dozens of foreign sources and articles in various journals, resulting in the publication of a volume that consists of twenty chapters. But unfortunately, this work is not structured in the familiar Encyclopedic form and the most significant disadvantage of it is the disorganized arrangement of the entries. Also, some of the material collected from different sources were used in the discussions in the book without having been thoroughly reviewed and evaluated. The failure to observe the alphabetical order or historical order in the list of names, the need to re-examine some of the concepts discussed, the lack of in-text references and the disorganized manner of footnote presentations are among other short comings of this work.