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About this book

Practical Carriage and Wagon Painting by M. C. Hillick, 1898. The 19th-century carriage painter's complete trade manual — back in print.

Before automobiles, every carriage, wagon, and sleigh wore the painter's work, and this antique sign painting book is the manual that taught the trade. Hillick covers the whole craft start to finish: preparing woodwork, priming and filling, rubbing down, mixing colors, varnishing — and the decorative work that set a good shop apart, including striping, lining, lettering, and ornamenting carriages and wagons in the style of the 1890s.

For the modern pinstriper, this book is a goldmine: carriage striping is where the American striping tradition was born, and the vehicle lettering instruction covers the horse-drawn era directly — the ancestor of today's truck and van lettering. The 192 pages are packed with shop-tested methods, color guidance, and the kind of practical detail only a working tradesman would think to write down.

An essential reference for pinstripers, vehicle letterers, restoration painters, and anyone who wants to understand where striping really came from.

Details: PDF digital download, 192 pages.

⚠️ Please read before ordering — about print quality

This is a digital edition scanned from a historical document. The pages were scanned from an original 1898 printing, and the quality of your download 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 1898 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 1898 manual with all its character intact, you're in the right place.