⏳ PRINTED ON DEMAND — Please allow 3–4 weeks for delivery

This book is printed one copy at a time when you order it. There is no warehouse shelf of these — your copy goes on the press after you check out. Hardcover binding takes longer than paperback. Please allow 3–4 weeks from order to delivery.

About this book

Douglas C. McMurtrie was America's great printing historian — the man who documented how type came to America — and Alphabets: A Manual of Letter Design (1926) is his working manual for everyone who draws letters for a living: printers, advertisers, sign men, and designers. It treats the alphabet as a design problem with right answers: proportion, weight, spacing, and character.

The manual presents specimen alphabets across a range of styles with the printer's eye for what reproduces well and reads well — the practical considerations that separate a letter that looks good on paper from one that works on a sign, a page, or a package. McMurtrie's historical knowledge runs underneath it all: he knew where every letterform came from, and it shows in the soundness of his judgments. The result is a manual that teaches principles rather than tricks — exactly what the working letterer needs.

Published in 1926, the book sits at the meeting point of the hand-lettering tradition and the machine age of type — valuable now for anyone who designs with letters, whether by brush or by keyboard. The principles haven't aged: a well-drawn alphabet is still a well-drawn alphabet.

For typographers, graphic designers, sign painters, lettering artists, and students of printing history. A printer-scholar's guide to drawing letters that work.

Details: 6×9" hardcover (case laminate), black and white interior, cream paper.

⚠️ Please read before ordering — about print quality

This is a print-on-demand reprint of a scanned historical document. The pages were scanned from an original 1926 printing, and the print quality of your book reflects the condition of that original scan.

What that means in plain terms: you may see faded text, uneven inking, age spots, show-through from the back of pages, and other imperfections that were in the 1926 original or introduced by the scanning process. These are preserved as-is — they are not printing defects, and they are not something we can fix.

We are not responsible for the condition of the original source material. If you want a pristine modern typeset book, this isn't it. If you want the actual 1926 book with all its character intact, you're in the right place.

Printed on demand by IngramSpark. One copy at a time — no inventory, no waste.