If you run a store, you need signs. They draw your customers’ attention to the things you want them to buy.
These small signs were known in the retail business as “showcards.” Today they come in standard designs, printed by computer or industrial printer. But in the days before large chain stores and computer printing, it was simply not economical or expeditious to have showcards printed from type. Instead, they would be hand-lettered, by a professional if the store was a large operation, or by the shopkeeper himself if it was a small business.
Where skilled labor is needed, correspondence schools will follow, and dozens of teach-yourself manuals of showcard writing were published in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Here is a collection of some of the better ones, all well scanned and just as useful to the graphic artist today as they were a century or more ago.
A page of catalogues from wallpaper firms, including both wallpaper patterns and colorful illustrations of rooms decorated with wallpaper.
A page of the novels and other literary effusions of the prolific Félicien Champsaur, whose works were not always appreciated by the critics, but whose books tended to have pictures and ornaments by the best French illustrators of the late nineteenth and eartly twentieth centuries.
A new page of Indian art includes a miscellany of useful and beautiful books.
We have begun a page on Asian architecture, which right now includes some books on Chinese and Indian architecture. The Chinese section has a few interesting eighteenth-century albums of architecture “in the Chinese taste.”
We have added a collection of newspaper archives, which we expect to grow to much larger dimensions over time. As usual, it is pure whim that dictates our choices among the many newspapers archived on the Web.
Pittsburgh newspapers have their own separate page, which is probably the most complete collection on the Web of freely available archived newspapers from Pittsburgh and the surrounding area.