Hand-painted supermarket signs

August 12, 2007 9:04 AM

I'm looking for information about big paper supermarket window signs and for images of them, preferably from the 80s or earlier.

I'm wondering how they were made (brush lettering, big markers, stencils?) and if there's a standard name for them.

posted by Nancy Lebovitz to society & culture (9 comments total)

Speaking only and specifically for an Eisner / Osco store in Bloomington, Indiana in that time frame, the signs were handpainted by what to me looked like a professional signpainter. I know this because the letterforms fascinated me and I would occasionally walk right up to the window they were displayed in and look very, very closely at the brushwork.

Here is a member profile on a webforum of someone who was once 'a full-time sign-painter for Albertsons.' Here is a bio of font designer Chuck Davis, who notes that he began as a grocery-store signpainter. He says, "I didn't have a clue what I was doing really until I started reading SignCraft magazine."

The magazine site offers a search feature, who knows how far back it goes. Here's an online course in sign-lettering. Alas, diligent searching did not uncover the it-must-be-out-there-website of a notional obsessive collector and expert of this specific ephemera.

Hope that helps and maybe someone else will be inspired to locate said theoretical collector.
posted by mwhybark at 9:33 AM on August 12, 2007 [1 favorite]

My grandmother made them for her grocery store using butcher paper and tempera paint (red, blue, and black). She did them freehand, and was almost certainly self-taught (she worked fulltime in her father's grocery store and then her own, starting when she was 12). I can ask my mother and aunt for more details, if you're interested, but basically Grandmother would just decide what she wanted to advertise, rip off some butcher paper, get out her jar of tempera, and have at it.

Many smaller grocery stores in the Chicago area still have this kind of sign -- feels like a total throwback driving around near Midway Airport.
posted by katemonster at 10:07 AM on August 12, 2007

(Just to clarify, she worked fulltime in her father's store starting at 12, her own from the time she was 23.)
posted by katemonster at 10:08 AM on August 12, 2007

Wow. Hadn't thought about those signs in a while. Now I miss them.
posted by sourwookie at 10:14 AM on August 12, 2007

My father's clothing store still uses that sort of big banner sign to announce sales, although he's gone to computer-printed signs in-store. A signpainter does them, brush on paper, freehand. You can see the pencil lines where he pencilled in the letters before painting. The paper was surprisingly thick but flexible, almost clothlike, very hard to tear but very easy to roll up.
posted by mendel at 10:17 AM on August 12, 2007

Mendel, your calling them banner signs gave me the clue. Here's someone who still paints the signs.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 11:14 AM on August 12, 2007

I've been fascinated with these signs for quite a while. Though it seems like a self-taught art form, grocery signs really are a trade skill with their own aesthetic, and those colors, sizes, and font styles are somewhat codified and probably were taught, as they are today, one sign painter to another. Throughout the 20th century this type of sign painting has also functioned as a source of income for itinerant laborers and marginal people like hoboes and songwriters. A few years ago I wrote a blog post about American sign painting containing some interesting links, and here it is; and here's a picture I took recently in Oak Park, IL, a beautiful example of the work. I'm sad to see that most of my links are now broken, but Googling variations of "sign painting history' "hand painted sign history" etc., should yield some interesting hits.

Please feel free to email me if you want to talk about sign painting. I have a small file going on it for some future hoped-for academic work.
posted by Miko at 9:06 PM on August 12, 2007

Oh, here ya go -- The Letterheads - a sign painting/handlettering forum. Another page shows handlettering basics and suggests that it could be learned from letterform books.
posted by Miko at 9:09 PM on August 12, 2007

YouTube: Art of Hand-Lettering a Sign

The Letterer's Blog


The Golden Age of Lettering - Cached article - GREAT info
posted by Miko at 9:18 PM on August 12, 2007 [1 favorite]