IAMPETH - calligraphy

A friend of mine, Zac Schauer, sent me a link to this amazing scanned library of calligraphic resource books. They've all been painstakingly scanned in and are free to review on the site www.iampeth.com/books
Already, even after sifting through one or two of the PDF books I can see there is a TON of amazing hand-done typography, most of which has lessons on how-to.

I read an article a while back that was complaining about the lack of attention paid to penmmanship in today's schools. People say that because kids these days have more reason to use computers for lessons and papers, that noone really focuses on using penmanship. I admit that even my penmanship (while it was never fantasitc) has definitely gone down the drain.
CBS posted this article about the topic.

I also remember reading that the height of one's ability to write beautifully is somewhere in your 20s - and from there it starts to diminish. I spent about 15 minutes looking for the source of that fact, and although I'm almost positive it was in the book The Thing about Life is that One Day You'll be Dead

If you put any number of phrases about penmanship into google, you'll end up with half a million results complaining about the fading purpose of good penmanship. I suppose those of us who appreciate it for it's aesthetic purposes are also probably the same people who like receiving a hand-written letter in the mail.