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Getty-Dubay Italic began in 1979 as the collaboration between two like-minded educators. Both Inga Dubay and Barbara Getty are artists, calligraphers and educators. They recognized the need for an alternative to the then-traditional system for learning handwriting. Getty and Dubay set about creating instruction books for children — all handwritten — that were soon widely adopted by schools. A handwriting book for adults came in 1991, as well as two instruction books on calligraphy. Today, Getty-Dubay Italic is in use in business and education throughout the United States and internationally.

Getty and Dubay have offered 170 Rx for Handwriting Success seminars for medical professionals across the United States, and also have presented at the World Health Organization in Copenhagen, Denmark and the International Patient Safety Conference in Florence, Italy. Each, as an artist in her own right, has taught handwriting and calligraphy as faculty in schools and colleges in the Pacific Northwest.

Getty-Dubay Italic has been featured in more than 75 journals and on television & radio including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine and NBC’s “Good Morning America”.

Getty and Dubay have written eleven books to bring beauty and ease to the everyday act of writing. They began their mission in 1979 to provide a new, viable handwriting system for children with the seven developmentally appropriate workbooks that make up the Getty-Dubay Italic Handwriting Series.  These books and accompanying Instruction Manual are now in use in many schools and thousands of homes in America and abroad. From their decades of experience helping adults change or improve their handwriting, they created the self-guided instruction book, Write Now: the Getty-Dubay Program for Handwriting Success.

The legacy of their mentors in calligraphy, including that of Lloyd J. Reynolds, is in evidence in all their books, especially in their calligraphy instruction book for adults, Italic Letters. Dubay has also authored a calligraphy book for students, Getty-Dubay Italic Calligraphy for School & Home as a companion to the Getty-Dubay Italic Handwriting Series. Italic Calligraphy is the product of an unique program by Reed College to bring calligraphy into elementary school classrooms. 

Celebration of the 40th anniversary will include a vendor exhibit at the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development 2019 Conference in Chicago, Illinois, and many more events to come!

We’ve just launched a new resource tool: an online do-it-yourself worksheet creation tool for joined letters. As far as we know, it is the first of it’s kind — and it’s free! You can use it to extend the life of your Getty-Dubay Italic book to suit your needs. Teachers and students can create PDF worksheets for both basic italic and cursive italic practice. Use it for informal acceleration, to support other curricula (e.g., via vocabulary lists, definitions, poetry, etc.), and to personalize your handwriting practice.

Type in your text. “A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” becomes…

a basic italic practice model

or a cursive italic practice model.

How is this different from the Blackline Masters CD-ROM? The Blackline Masters CD-ROM provides hundreds of additional practice sheets that target specific letters or joins. Each instruction page in the Getty-Dubay Italic Handwriting Series Books A – G has additional practice sheets on the Blackline Masters CD-ROM that provide writing cues such as stroke sequence and starting point. With the DIY Worksheets, you get to choose your own text, but stroke sequence and starting point are not displayed. To use a musical analogy, the Blackline Masters CD-ROM is your scale book and the DIY Worksheets can be your etudes.

Here’s how it works:

(1) Go to our teacher resource page to register and login in using your Getty-Dubay Italic book UPC. If you don’t own a Getty-Dubay Italic book, no problem — you can sign up for a free trial.

(2) Select the size of the writing you want to practice: 9mm lines for larger letters (as in the Getty-Dubay Italic Handwriting Series Books B and C), or 5mm lines for smaller writing (as in Books D through G and Write Now). 

(3) Enter the text you want to see on each line of your worksheet.  Each line you type will show up on your worksheet with a practice line after it. (In other words, your text entries are on odd-numbered lines). Under each text box, select if you want that text to appear as basic italic or cursive italic.

(4) When you’re done entering the text, click “Submit” at the bottom of the entry page. In a few moments, your practice sheet will appear in the same window. Just print it out or download as you would any other web PDF.

The joins represented on the cursive italic DIY Worksheet are the standard Getty-Dubay Italic joins. But there are options! On the blank lines of the worksheet, please practice any of the numerous cursive italic join options that you prefer. (See your Getty-Dubay Italic book for details).

Tips: If you didn’t get the result you wanted, use your web browser’s “back” button to make changes to your text and try again. If you want to produce many copies of a single DIY Worksheet for a classroom, print out the master copy and make duplicates from that (the watermark will fade away).

Our Latest Book —

After three years in the making, our new book, Getty-Dubay Italic Calligraphy: for School and Home is now available!

Fall in love with letters with this handsome, hands-on introduction to calligraphy for students of all ages. Renowned calligrapher Inga Dubay leads beginning calligraphers stroke-by-stroke to a mastery of beautiful handwriting. With the aid of online instructional videos and DIY worksheets, you’ll learn everything from proper pen hold to artful greeting card design. This book is also a companion to the Getty-Dubay Italic Handwriting Series.

Here’s more information about this exciting addition to our catalog!

Now you can bring Getty-Dubay Italic into your classroom for every subject. Perhaps you want your students to learn a vocabulary list, memorize a poem, practice writing homonyms or synonyms. Previously only available for our new book, Getty-Dubay Italic Calligraphy, now the Italic Handwriting Series has DIY worksheets. Just enter the text you want to practice in our online tool and then print the PDF it generates — it’s that simple, and it’s free! Visit the DIY Worksheets and Videos page to get started.

Oblation Papers and Press — the perfect place for Getty-Dubay! Here’s a fun video about Getty-Dubay’s book signing at this venerable Portland store.