⏳ 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

Ross F. George was the man behind the Speedball textbook empire — the lettering teacher whose books put broad-pen alphabets into the hands of millions — and his 1927 Elementary Alphabets and Their Construction is the foundation course. The premise is in the title: alphabets are not memorized, they are constructed. George breaks the letterforms down to their elements — the strokes, the proportions, the geometry — and rebuilds them step by step, so the student understands every letter from the inside out.

This is the book for the beginner who wants to do it right from the start. The construction method teaches spacing and proportion as part of the letterform itself, not as an afterthought — the discipline that separates the trained letterer from the copier. The 1927 plates show the clean, confident commercial alphabets of the Speedball era, the letterforms of the 1920s sign and show-card trade at their most teachable.

For lettering students, George's elementary course remains one of the fastest routes to sound letterforms: learn the construction and the style takes care of itself. For sign painters and graphic artists, it is the Speedball master's own grounding in the fundamentals — the book the famous textbooks were built on.

The construction-first course in lettering by the Speedball master. For lettering students, sign painters, and teachers of the craft.

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This is a print-on-demand reprint of a scanned historical document.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 1927 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 1927 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 1927 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.