⏳ PRINTED ON DEMAND — Please allow 3–4 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. Hardcover binding takes longer than paperback. Please allow 3–4 weeks from order to delivery.

About this book

William Hugh Gordon believed lettering could be taught the way arithmetic is taught — one lesson at a time — and his 1920 One Hundred Loose Leaf Lessons in Lettering with Pen and Brush is the proof. This vintage lettering course delivers exactly one hundred progressive lessons, each building on the last, taking the student from first pen strokes to finished commercial lettering in both pen and brush.

The loose-leaf format was the point: lessons could be studied in order, practiced at the bench, and kept as a personal reference file. Gordon — the era's leading lettering teacher and co-author of the Speedball texts — structures the course the way a good teacher structures a term: fundamentals first, then alphabets, then the shaded, ornamental, and display work that earned a letterer his pay. Pen and brush get equal attention, because the working letterer needed both.

For self-taught letterers, homeschool art students, and sign painters rebuilding fundamentals, this 1920 course is a patient teacher that never gets tired. Work the lessons in order and the progress is real — this is how the trade trained its own before classrooms took over. Pair it with Gordon's Lettering for Commercial Purposes for the complete Gordon education.

Whether you're learning lettering from scratch or coaching a beginner, Gordon's one hundred lessons remain one of the soundest self-study courses the trade ever produced. A century old, and still lesson one.

Details: 6×9" hardcover (case laminate), 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This is a print-on-demand reprint of a scanned historical document.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 1920 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 1920 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 1920 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.