George Bickham the Elder was a handwriting specialist, but he also produced mediocre portraits (“Sir Hugh Middleton’s Glory”) and political broadsides (“A genealogie of Anti-Christ: Oliver Cromwell Triumphant”). These pieces seem additionally to have advertised his main line, the handwriting business, marked as they are in a range of scripts, from humanist to gothic, down—in the case of Cromwell as the Anti-Christ—to the devil-shaped flourishes.

But what today appears idiosyncratic and demonstratively complex was in fact part of a standardization necessary for making and maintaining a global empire. English Round Hand was developed so that secretaries of all kinds could more easily decipher each other’s work; Bickham wrote handwriting manuals but also accounting textbooks. Even as writing became less “personal,” it remained an expression of power, both as a support for elite communication and as a visual sign of it.

Bickham’s handwriting manuals themselves were not actually written, of course, but engraved and then printed. As we rework each curve during digitization we add to the sum of processes embodied in the script, each a step further from handwriting itself. Bickham demonstrated skills that his hands possessed; the perfection of vectors available for purchase is on a different plane altogether.

But it is just this tension between the personal and the perfect that gives a font like Millionaire its meaning today.