⏳ 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

Jesse Haney's Manual of Sign, Carriage and Decorative Painting (1870) is one of the very first American sign-painting manuals — published just five years after the Civil War, when the trade was still young and its knowledge lived mostly in the shops. Haney set out to put it in print: sign painting, carriage painting, and decorative work, taught the 1870 way.

The book covers the working methods of the post-war trade: forming the letters, shading and ornamenting, striping and decorating carriages, and the decorative painting — graining, marbling, and fancy work — that filled out a painter's year. It is the craft at its most traditional, before the correspondence schools and supply-house manuals standardized it. Haney writes for the painter who must turn his hand to whatever the town needs — a storefront sign in the morning, a carriage to stripe in the afternoon, a parlor to grain by week's end.

For the modern reader Haney's is a time capsule of the first order — the American sign trade as it was actually practiced in 1870, in the voice of a man who lived it. The methods are old, the materials are old, and the flavor is irreplaceable.

For sign painters, carriage and vehicle painters, decorative artists, and collectors of 19th-century trade literature. Among the earliest American sign manuals — 1870, and proud of it.

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This is a print-on-demand reprint of a scanned historical document.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 1870 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 1870 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 1870 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.