⏳ 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

A show card had seconds to stop a shopper — and W. A. Thompson's 1906 Modern Show Card Lettering Designs and Advertising Phases taught card writers how to win those seconds. This vintage show card manual pairs lettering alphabets with the other half of the trade: the advertising phrases that filled the cards — the words that sold soap, shoes, and seed corn in 1906.

Thompson's designs cover the card writer's working repertoire: display alphabets for headlines, price-ticket lettering, and layout ideas for cards that read across a busy store. The advertising phases — period selling phrases — are a bonus for anyone reproducing vintage retail work with honest wording. Together they give the complete card: the letters and the language.

For sign painters, show card writers, and collectors of vintage advertising, this 1906 book is both a workbook and a time capsule. Copy the alphabets for reproduction cards, mine the phrases for period-correct wording, or study it as a record of how Main Street sold goods in the Edwardian years.

Whether you letter cards by hand or collect the literature of the trade, Thompson's 1906 designs deserve a place on your shelf. Letters and language, exactly as the trade used them.

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This is a print-on-demand reprint of a scanned historical document.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 1906 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 1906 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 1906 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.