About Lantern & Ladder

Why we started

There is no shortage of handwriting workbooks. Most of them are printed from the same clip art, put every letter of the alphabet on one crowded page, and leave a four year old to work out where the pencil goes down. A parent buys one, the child gets two pages in, and the book goes in a drawer.

We wanted the opposite of that. One thing on a page. A dot where the pencil starts. Arrows numbered in the order a school teaches the strokes. Rows that begin with a solid letter and end with an empty space, so the help falls away without anybody having to decide when. Pages big enough for an arm that still moves from the shoulder.

None of that is new. It is how handwriting has been taught for decades. It is just rarely done carefully, because doing it carefully is slow.

How a book gets made

Each book is built from a plan before a single page is drawn: how many pages, in what order, at what age, with what on each one. Then the pages are generated from that plan, so a change to the method changes every page at once rather than fifty pages by hand.

1. The plan. What a child should be able to do at the end, and the shortest honest route to it. Book 1 exists because a child cannot write a letter before they can draw the lines a letter is made of.
2. The pages. Every guide letter is drawn from the outline of a real typeface designed for beginning readers, never grey text faked to look like a model. The stroke arrows follow the Zaner-Bloser order, sit along the ink rather than beside it, and are numbered.
3. The proofs. Every page is rendered and checked for things that do not show on screen: ink too close to the trim, a line that would vanish in the gutter, a page number in the wrong corner.
4. The print. We check the files against the printer’s rules ourselves before uploading, because a book that comes back rejected is a month lost.

The author

Milo Wick is the pen name the books are written under. Milo is a former primary teacher who spent eleven years in classrooms watching children learn to hold a pencil, and who got tired of photocopying worksheets that were nearly right. The books are the worksheets, done properly and bound.

The name is a pen name, not a person we are pretending exists. Say hello at milo@lanternladder.com and a real person answers.

What we will not do

• No characters selling anything. Rudy and Sadie are in the books to keep a child company, not to be collected.
• No rewards you have to buy. The certificate at the back is a page, and you already own it.
• No app. These are books. A screen is not where a pencil grip is learned.
• No data we do not need. The printable packs are free and ask for nothing. See the privacy policy for the short list of what we do keep.