⏳ PRINTED ON DEMAND — Please allow 2–3 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. Please allow 2–3 weeks from order to delivery.

About this book

William Joseph Baker's Show Card Book (1916) is the card writer's trade book from the heyday of the craft — written for the men and women who lettered America's storefronts. Sale cards, price tickets, window announcements, special displays: if it was lettered on card stock and hung in a window in 1916, this book teaches how to make it.

Inside are the quick, confident alphabets the professional card writer lived by — hands that could be lettered fast and still read from the sidewalk — along with borders, panels, and display treatments that give a card its selling punch. Baker writes for the working writer: layouts that fit standard card sizes, color schemes that pull the eye, and the speed methods that let a writer turn out a store's whole window in a day.

By 1916 show-card writing was a recognized trade with its own conventions and its own pride, and Baker's book captures it at full maturity — practical, commercial, and aimed at one thing: cards that sell goods. For the modern ticket writer it is both a method book and a style guide to the authentic 1910s commercial hand.

For show-card and ticket writers, sign painters who do retail work, lettering students, vintage advertising collectors, and anyone who letters price cards by hand. The 1916 card writer's working book.

Details: 6×9" paperback, 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This is a print-on-demand reprint of a scanned historical document.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 1916 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 1916 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 1916 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.