Bringing Back the the Coast Manual of Lettering and Designs
A Kickstarter to publish a new edition of this extremely rare antique sign painting book.
Unfortunately the Kickstarter to republish the Coast Manual of Lettering and Designs (1907) was not successful but Jay Smith is exploring other ways to bring back what is one of the rarest antique sign painting books out there. I'll share future news via the free BLAG mailing list.
This project followed the article Jay wrote about his luck in acquiring this book, and four more classic originals, last year. He talked about this in his BLAG Meet session, which included some discussion of the possibility of reprinting it.
The plan for this project was to use high-quality scans of Jay's original copy to create a shop-friendly, ring-bound edition at the same size. He would then keep this new edition and donate the original to the wonderful folks at Letterform Archive.
Below you'll find some more pictures of the book.
Cover, spreads, and pages from the Coast Manual of Lettering and Designs.
The Coast Manual in BLAG 07
By coincidence, the Coast Manual is among the five publications reviewed by Jason Carne in BLAG 07, the Letterheads special. It is one of the books that the Letterheads pored over in their early days, and so here is a sneak preview of the text that Jason wrote about it.