When I first started to re-learn cursive, just getting the muscles back for connected writing required a lot of practice. I started to write out Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian, one of my favorite books. It was quite an undertaking, and perhaps did not do me a lot of good in terms of the discipline to write correctly and well, but it definitely built up some muscles, and helped me appreciate how much time it takes to write out a book by hand. Patrick O'Brian did write much of his early books, if not most of them, buy hand with a pen and pads of paper. I got through a few chapters before other life intervened.
Shelby Foote, noted Civil War Historian and write of Very Large Books, wrote all of his books using a dip pen and boxes of Esterbrook 313 Probate stub nibs. I have not seen what his writing looked like, but I seriously doubt he was going for "beautiful writing."
There was a thread recently here on FF that included a few examples of Charles Dickens' hand writing and it was barely legible. The talk was that he was writing for speed and flow, not aesthetics. That's why writers in the age of hand-writing most often used scribes or they themselves would do the work of making a "fair copy" to be sent to the editors.
To copy a book, or to write one "fair" in a nice and readable hand would be quite an undertaking. But if done with care and deliberation, you would most likely see some change of hand from beginning to end unless you're already well-established in your mastery.
I still think about going through Jane Austen and writing out the occasional letter she's transcribed in the books. Unfortunately, they're usually not the letters of the nice people that she copies verbatim, but silly persons like Anne Elliott's sister Mary. But it would still be interesting to try. Jane Austen's own personal letters are also interesting to study, even if they're not books.
Andrew
Scattered all over the place today, and apologizes after the fact to Corina the wise for any ramblings and/or thread deviation that may have occurred.
