⏳ 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

The commercial card writer got paid by the card — and Sidney Hackes's Fairchild's Rapid Letterer and Show-Card Maker (1910) was written for speed. This is the rapid method: alphabets designed to be lettered fast without looking hurried, shortcuts and systems for turning out show cards, price tickets, and window announcements at a commercial pace.

Hackes — who also wrote Davids' Practical Letterer — knew the trade from the inside, and the book is full of the working writer's economy: quick display hands, simplified borders and panels, and layouts that get the selling message on the card with a minimum of strokes. Rapid never means sloppy here; it means practiced, efficient, and professional. There are alphabets here you will not find in the deliberate pattern books — hands simplified for the clock, with the unnecessary strokes ruthlessly cut away.

For the modern ticket writer and sign painter, the 1910 Rapid Letterer is a master class in commercial lettering rhythm — the hand that can letter a window's worth of cards before lunch and have every one of them read from the sidewalk. An essential companion to the more deliberate alphabet books.

For show-card and ticket writers, sign painters, lettering students, and collectors of the trade classics. Speed lettering, 1910 style — by one of the trade's own.

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This is a print-on-demand reprint of a scanned historical document.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 1910 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 1910 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 1910 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.