⏳ 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

Dated 1868 — three years after Appomattox — The Painter's Manual is one of the early American handbooks of the painter's trade, written for the journeyman who carried his kit from house to house. It covers the trade as the 1860s painter knew it: colors and their mixing, oils and mediums, the preparation of wood and plaster, plain painting and finishing, and the decorative branches — graining and marbling — by which a painter proved himself a craftsman rather than a laborer.

The value of an 1868 manual is the earliness. This is the trade before the ready-mixed paint can, when every painter ground and mixed his own colors and judged his materials by eye and hand. The instructions carry that self-reliance: how to make a paint do its work, how to imitate oak and mahogany and marble with brush and comb, how to finish a room so it would stand for years.

For restorers of Civil War-era and Reconstruction houses, this is a primary source for the finishes they are trying to match — the colors, the grounds, the varnish coats of the period. For painters, it is a look at the trade in its formative American shape, when the painter's knowledge lived in his hands and in books like this one.

An antique painting book from the trade's early American years. For painters, decorative finishers, and restorers of 19th-century buildings.

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This is a print-on-demand reprint of a scanned historical document.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 1868 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 1868 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 1868 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.