⏳ 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

McClellan Chappell's Hand Lettering (1912) is a slim 26-page beginner's pamphlet — the first rung of the ladder. Short, direct, and meant to be worked through with pen or brush in hand, it introduces the novice to the formation of letters: the basic strokes, the standard alphabets in their simplest forms, and the first exercises in spacing and neatness.

Pamphlets like this were the trade's front door: cheap, portable, and unintimidating, they put the fundamentals in front of beginners who might never buy a full manual. What survives in these 26 pages is the 1912 starting point — the alphabet as the beginner met it, before the fancy work began. The pamphlet format is its virtue: nothing here to intimidate, everything needed to begin — the strokes, the letterforms, and the order in which to practice them. Begin with the single strokes, then the letters built from them, then the first short words — the pamphlet's whole pedagogy in one progression.

For the modern beginner it is a gentle, period-authentic first lesson; for the collector, a scarce survival of the trade's humblest literature. It is also the kind of ephemera that rarely survived, which makes this 1912 printing a small treasure for the trade historian.

For beginning letterers, students, and collectors of trade pamphlets. The 1912 beginner's first lesson in hand lettering — all 26 pages of it.

Details: 6×9" paperback, 26 pages, 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This is a print-on-demand reprint of a scanned historical document.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.