⏳ 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

Gold on glass, letters you can feel — James Callingham's 1890 Sign Writing and Glass Embossing teaches the most magical corner of the sign trade. This Victorian manual covers both sides of the glass sign: reverse-glass sign writing with gold leaf, and the embossing of letters and ornament into glass itself.

Callingham wrote when the gilded glass sign was the crown of the trade — the pub fascia, the shopfront, the office door with its gold-leaf lettering glowing through polished glass. His instruction covers the full process: preparing and sizing the glass, laying and burnishing gold leaf, backing and shading, and the embossing techniques that raised letters and borders from the surface. It is exacting, traditional work, and the book treats it with the seriousness it deserves.

For today's gilders, reverse-glass artists, and sign painters, this 1890 manual is a foundational text. The gold-leaf methods are the same ones practiced now; the embossing instruction documents techniques few books cover at all. Restoration specialists matching Victorian glasswork will find period-correct process detail; collectors of sign-writing literature will recognize one of the genre's essential nineteenth-century titles.

Whether you gild glass or dream of learning, Callingham's 1890 guide is the Victorian masterclass. Gold, glass, and the patience to marry 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This is a print-on-demand reprint of a scanned historical document.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 1890 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 1890 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 1890 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.