Show Card Writing

Hey dudes! While I'm holed up inside avoiding these FREEZING temps we've been having I thought I might share a personal relic with you. Behold:


The book I hold in my eerily pale hands first belonged to my (maternal) great grandfather. It's taken quite a beating in passing between him, my grandfather, and me, but the fact that its pages and even its spine are intact is amazing because this book is 106 years old. That's right, ONE HUNDRED AND SIX.


It's hard to see in this crappy photo, but the book is called Show Card Writing. Published in 1903, it's an instructional textbook on the (pretty much) extinct art of 'show card writing', a.k.a. advertorial art. The text is really straightforward and sometimes pretty boring (it being a textbook and all), but the images are rendered in painstaking detail and, of course, they're all done by hand! Now that almost everything is done with at least some help from computers, it's easy to forget just how much time and effort went into art (in all its forms) back in the day. Sure, computers are a huge time saver, where would we be without them, blah blah blah, but there's just something special about handmade art.

I really wish you could hold it in your hands and read it, but unfortunately these scans will have to do. Here are some 100-year-old ads:








Amazing, huh? The book also details many, many different styles of lettering. You can't get fonts like these on a computer! Here are some of my faves:

I was 12 when my grandfather gave me this book as a Christmas present, and it definitely shaped my style as an artist. I mean, how can you not be inspired by this stuff? Tree-shaped letter E? A peg-legged letter A? Genius!

That same Christmas I was given the book, I was also given a set of calligraphy pens (once an art geek, always an art geek). The moment I flipped to this page, I made it my mission to burn this alphabet into my memory:


This is how I learned calligraphy, a skill I mastered a few months after first drooling over this page. You might think it's a useless skill, and maybe it is, but I always have it in my back pocket to pull out on a party invitation or place setting or what have you. In fact, I used it to write an inscription in the opening page of my great-grandfather's book. I don't have a scan of it because the ink is too faded, but this is what I wrote:

This book belonged to my great-grandfather Alfred Laakso, who was born in Kauhava, Finland on September 20, 1878. He died in Wakefield, Michigan on April 9, 1961. His son, my grandfather, gave me this book. January 5, 1995.

It's the oldest thing in my family, and I'm so proud to own it! A few times a year I'll leaf through it and find something new and interesting. Here's what's on my mind this time:


He's almost too beautiful to eat, but not quite. It's almost turkey time, which means it's almost time for a visit from this guy:


Only 11 more sleeps, guys!