Even in this dirty world, there still are artists, artisans, and their patrons soldiering on and doing their damnedest to keep the enthusiasms of gracious living alive. Bernard Maisner is one of this army’s generals.
A fine artist, he specializes in “giant miniatures,” as he calls his oil paintings on large canvases. Inspired by illuminated manuscripts, they are exhibited in the N.Y.U. Grey Art Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among many other venues, and they are included in the collections of the Morgan Library & Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art as well as in many private collections.
Maisner is also a champion calligrapher. Sought after by taste-makers around the world, he sells stationery and paperweights to Bergdorf Goodman. Custom pieces are also available on his Web site.
At his office, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Maisner revealed his collection of vintage display boxes, which contain some of the nibs, pens, inks, and waxes he’s collected over the decades. (He also collects ledgers and notebooks with handwriting dating to the Civil War and even medieval times.) He keeps more ephemera in his primary studio, at the Victorian-style home on the Jersey Shore that he shares with his wife, the ballet dancer Bonnie Behrman. Until recently, she taught dance on the first floor; Maisner keeps his studio on the second. Their daughter, Rose, is a plastic-surgery resident at a Manhattan hospital.
Maisner grew up in Bergen County, New Jersey, in the 60s. His father worked as a furrier—“a mink man, as they were called then”—and his mother was a housewife who painted and made stained glass. They were modern, creative parents who took him to see Jimi Hendrix perform at Madison Square Garden and encouraged him to bus into the city for rock concerts at the Fillmore East. “I wanted to become a doctor, but my parents insisted I become an artist,” he says.
In the Age of Aquarius ethers of the 60s, calligraphy and medieval manuscripts were a vibe as much as a visual. From the moment Maisner first became aware of this art form, he was enchanted. Before attending Cooper Union, in Manhattan, he taught himself how to create calligraphy by closing his eyes and visualizing writing an entire letter in his mind’s eye, seeing it unfolding in slow motion.
“Before I actually put pen to paper, I have to see it in my mind and feel the pen,” he explains.
To make a little extra money when he was a teenager, he’d go to a nearby mall and remake some of the signs in calligraphy. The next day he’d return to the stores. “I noticed the sign in your window isn’t as beautiful as the inside of your shop,” he’d say. “I made this for you, and you can have it for five dollars.” It was a winning—and profitable—approach.
His calligraphy professor, at Cooper Union, was impressed but nevertheless insisted that he start from the beginning. He was glad for the instruction in seeing letterforms properly and for the chance to undo any bad habits from, he says, “misguided interpretations about lettering.” In 1977, he graduated and was awarded a Best in Show citation by the artist Chuck Close in New York University’s Small Works exhibition. He was also included in a group show at the Holly Solomon Gallery, in SoHo.
But there still was the immediate matter of making a living. Through a neighbor, he learned that the tobacco company Philip Morris needed a calligrapher and letterer. He started by providing name cards for conferences and expanded to lettering and logos for brands including Lexus, Absolut Vodka, Converse, and M&M’s along with album covers for Whitney Houston, Carly Simon, and Mick Jagger.
Next, Maisner took his work to films and television, creating props and giving actors camera-worthy handwriting skills. He has written letters and addressed envelopes for Daniel Day-Lewis in The Age of Innocence and Johnny Depp in Sleepy Hollow.
Some 25 years ago, when computers and digital fonts had all but replaced the need for hand-lettering, Maisner had to re-invent himself. He considered starting a company designing computer fonts, until a friend urged him to go into the social-stationery business, designing invitations for weddings and other celebrations and lettering the envelopes and place cards for these events. He describes his unique calligraphic script as “a blend of the traditional aspects of copperplate and Spencerian styles” with his own special sauce of flourishes and magic.
The social-stationery business took off, surviving recessions and pandemics, and today Maisner is busier than ever.
He recently returned from five days in Venice, where he hand-delivered his place cards for a wedding. “Maisnerian” is a word one hears often from his clients. The art historian, consultant, and cultural critic Sarah Hoover describes her collection of Maisner’s work as “stalker-level extensive.... When I was wedding-planning in 2012, I went to the ends of the Internet searching for a calligrapher who could do Spencerian calligraphy,” she says. “But when I stumbled on Bernard’s Web site, I knew his was not just period calligraphy. It’s not a copy of something else.”
Rachel Minard, the founder and C.E.O. of the marketing-consulting firm Minard Capital L.L.C., met Maisner more than 20 years ago. On his stationery, she averages 60 or more handwritten letters a week. “Letter writing is the purest expression of love I know,” she says. “I must have over 8,000 cards, all of which will be used as they were intended, to carry love to its recipient.”
Paging through an album of recent work, he revealed dozens of wedding invitations, each different from the rest, each remarkable in its own way. “People think it’s art, but it isn’t,” he says. “My fine art is a blend of inquiry into the meaning of life and the meaning of death. The social stationery celebrates life.”
William Norwich is a journalist and a novelist. His new novel will be published by Atria Books next year
