⏳ 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

The drugstore had the busiest windows on Main Street — and William A. Thompson's Druggists and Dispensers Practical Show Card Instructor (1909) taught the men behind the counter to letter them. This is show-card writing aimed at one trade: the price cards, window announcements, and display tickets for remedies, toiletries, prescriptions, and sundries that filled the druggist's window.

Thompson covers the card writer's working method adapted to the drugstore's needs: readable price hands, display alphabets for announcements, borders and panels suited to small cards, and layouts for the standard announcements of the trade — sales, new remedies, seasonal goods. The emphasis is commercial throughout: cards that a busy clerk could letter neatly and that would sell from the window. Thompson writes as a man who has lettered the cards himself: his instructions carry the practical asides — on paint consistency, brush care, and lettering posture — that only come from doing the work.

For the modern ticket writer it is a specialist's book with a charm all its own — the authentic voice of the 1909 drugstore, and a complete method for the small-card work that was the backbone of the trade. Collectors of pharmacy and advertising ephemera will find it a rich period piece as well.

For show-card and ticket writers, sign painters doing retail work, lettering students, and collectors of drugstore and advertising Americana. The 1909 druggist's own card-writing instructor.

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This is a print-on-demand reprint of a scanned historical document.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 1909 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 1909 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 1909 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.