Lettres Décoratives: A Century of French Sign Painters’ Alphabets

Across France, before standardized type arrived to settle the question, the sign painter was the city's typographer — the person responsible for how storefronts, restaurants, and music halls looked. These artisans worked from large chromolithographic portfolios: model alphabets printed to demonstrate styles, teach technique, and supply an entire trade with its visual vocabulary. Lettres Décoratives recovers that tradition in full — more than 150 plates of French decorative lettering from portfolios printed between the mid-1800s and the 1930s, most reproduced here for the first time, spanning the full arc from high Victorian ornament through Art Nouveau sinuousness to the clean geometries of early modernism.