⏳ 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

Before latex paint there was calcimine — the cheap, fast, breathable water wash that whitened the ceilings and walls of half of America — and Albanis Ashmun Kelly's 1912 The Expert Calciminer is the trade manual that taught painters to master it. Kelly (of the Kelly sign-painting family) wrote for the working painter who had to wash, size, and calcimine a room and make it look right: mixing the calcimine, preparing plaster and old calcimined surfaces, laying the wash evenly without laps or streaks, and tinting for the soft colors of the period.

Calcimining looks simple and punishes sloppiness — the book's value is in the professional cautions: how to handle surfaces that have been calcimined before, how to avoid the peeling and powdering that come from wrong preparation, and how the calciminer priced and scheduled the work. It is a complete small-trade education, the kind of specialized manual a journeyman painter kept in his kit.

Today the book is essential reading for restorers of old houses, because calcimine is what they keep finding on the ceilings — and understanding how it was applied is the first step to dealing with it, whether stabilizing, removing, or matching it. For painters, decorators, and preservationists, Kelly's manual is the period authority on a finish modern books barely mention.

An antique painting book on a trade the modern world forgot — and the old-house restorer still meets. For painters, plasterers, and historic-preservation craftsmen.

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This is a print-on-demand reprint of a scanned historical document.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 1912 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 1912 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 1912 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.