⏳ 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

The Speedball pen changed lettering forever — and Presenting the Speed-Ball Pen with Alphabets (1915), by William Hugh Gordon and Ross F. George, is the book that introduced it. Forty-six pages that launched a revolution in the lettering trades: the new broad-nib steel pen, the alphabets designed for it, and the technique that let card writers, sign painters, and commercial artists letter faster and more uniformly than the brush alone ever allowed.

George would go on to build the great Speedball textbook series on this foundation, and the 1915 booklet shows the method at its birth — fresh, direct, and aimed at the working letterer. The alphabets are the classic Speedball hands: clean, rhythmic, built for the pen's broad stroke, with the construction and ductus explained so the student can reproduce them reliably. For the show-card writer of 1915, this little book was a trade secret made public.

For modern letterers, the 1915 Speedball book is the origin document of broad-pen commercial lettering — the alphabets that dominated 20th-century card writing, advertising, and sign work, in their first published form. For collectors, it is one of the keystones of the Speedball literature.

The book that launched the Speedball era. For letterers, calligraphers, and collectors of the great pen-lettering texts.

Details: 6×9" hardcover (case laminate), 46 pages, 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This is a print-on-demand reprint of a scanned historical document.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 1915 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 1915 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 1915 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.