Sign Folk

The Grand Exhibition of the Society of Sign Painters

The following article is re-posted from the original on Better Letters. This August we’ll be opening a very special sign painting exhibition within the public-facing part of Letterheads 2018: London Calling. It is being curated by Meredith Kasabian of Best Dressed Signs and the Pre-Vinylite Society and builds on her research into an 18th Century […]

22 Jun 2018

Karl Blaschke: The Sign Man of Munich

[This book review is reposted from the original on the Better Letters blog.] “Signwriters are entitled to their immortality just as are other artists and craftsmen” – Kevin Corrigan Kearns, Dublin’s Vanishing Craftsmen Signwriting is perhaps the least documented of the lettering disciplines; it’s nature is ephemeral versus the relative permanence of calligraphy on important […]

18 May 2018

Roy Reed’s Reconstructions

Roy Reed is a prolific collector and researcher of ghost signs, and uses his skills as a designer to decipher them. I’ve featured his work previously, on the almost illegible William Walker & Sons sign in Bermondsey. Roy is also a co-collaborator on the forthcoming Clapham Ghostsigns Walk. He has kindly shared some more of […]

27 Apr 2018

E. Gautier’s Beautiful Paris Ghost Signs

Independently of each other I have been sent photos of this beautiful Paris ghost signs by Wim Dammers and book contributor Leisa Clements. It is a remarkably elaborate piece of work, including picturials in other sections. This is isn’t surprising as it is advertising the services of E. Gautier’s sign firm. He no doubt wanted […]

6 Apr 2018

‘London Sign by Sign’ by Marco Bazelmans

Back in May, Marco Bazelmans contacted me about a project he was working on as part of his communication design studies in Aachen, Germany. The brief was to create a guide of some sort, and he had selected signwriting as his theme. In particular, he had honed in on the idea of portraying signwriting, both […]

4 Oct 2017

When Better Letters Met Cliff Headford

This is a reposting of the article that originally appeared here on the Better Letters blog. On 4th July 2016 I received the following email in response to a book I was working on at the time: I care for an elderly gentleman in Bristol, now nearly 96, who was a sign painter after the […]

1 Jul 2017