Tag Archives: American Sign Museum

A Glimpse of ASM’s Attic

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It’s not wrong to think of museums as simply organized — some much more than others — attics. Of course, almost all museums have attics of their own. It’s where they store stuff that exceeds the space available for displays but, like all that stuff in your own attic, is just too good to throw away. The American Sign Museum has always had multiple attics.

The situation became somewhat simplified when the museum moved into its current location in 2012. With the actual museum occupying about half of the approximately 40,000 square-foot building, the other half made a fine attic. I was once treated to a walk through the space when it really was an attic. I was also in the space for the incredible Signmaker’s Circus, a following Coffee With Tod session where museum founder Tod Swormstedt shared some of his thoughts on organizing signs for the Circus, and a presentation on some of the banners borrowed for the Circus (Sideshow Signage). Plans for expanding the museum were well underway when the circus came to town and the cleanup that preceded it could be considered an early step in the expansion. Most of the stuff that was in that section is now stored in other locations and a recent Coffee With Tod session provided a look at one of those locations.

Almost every available sign was pressed into service at the Signmaker’s Circus so I have seen some of the attic’s contents before. The clown and lion trashcan toppers were there. Tod has been on the lookout for the lion’s partners ever since he learned it was part of a Wizard of Oz set. The mortar and pestle hung in the museum’s main section until very recently. After leaving the attic, I stopped by to check out its replacement.

This sign from a closed New York restaurant was in the attached storage area when a retired sign painter stopped by the museum. Tod was there and took the fellow on a personal tour of the area. When they reached this sign, he stopped and stared for a long time then finally announced “I painted that”. “Made my day… my month,” Tod told us.

Letters, we got letters. We got lots and lots of letters. And walls full of neon skeleton signs, too. There are many more individual letters, some much larger than these, stacked around the area. Only about a fourth of the wall of skeleton signs is in the picture.

A couple of long tables were filled with billboard tags. Although I instantly recognized the name Lamar as something I’d seen on billboards, it had never occurred to me that it was something separate from the billboard or that it was collectible in its own right. Guess I never realized that there were so many companies painting billboards, either.

Tod is especially fond of items used by individual sign creators. Here he is showing us a couple of quite old and wonderfully personalized painters kits.

Tod also likes self-promoting signs. This one has the added attraction of being an example of bad design. It includes examples of pretty much every style of lettering the painter is capable of but picking out the painter’s name is quite a challenge and the curious spelling of “windos” makes one wonder if Mack didn’t really plan ahead.

The “ROOMS” and “I.O.O.F” signs are both backlit by candles. Tod opened each of them to show the candle holders but I was at the back of the crowd at the time and missed out on a picture. I am very confident that these unusual pieces will have a home in the museum’s new area.

Most people know that Mohammed Ali’s birth name was Cassius Clay but not everyone remembers that there was a “junior” at the end. The champion boxer’s father was a successful sign painter in Louisville, Kentucky. Cassius Clay, Sr. painted the sign that Tod holds.

Our last stop was outside at three bas-relief sculptures. They and an identical set were once part of Cincinnati Gardens sports arena. The arena was demolished in 2018 and the museum once had the letters from the arena’s name mounted outside the museum. They were removed in preparation for the expansion and will eventually reappear along with this, boxer, basketball player, and hockey player.

Much remains to be done before a completion date for the expansion can be determined. There are expectations that it will be this year and even hope that it might be around summer’s end but no one is foolish enough to make any promises or place any bets. Whatever the date, it’s pretty phenomenal to think the museum will soon double in size and will instantly be almost full. And there will still be an attic.

Sideshow Signage

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Those who read through the comments on my The Signmaker’s Circus post already know that old circus banners were an important part of that American Sign Museum event earlier this year. Others will have just learned that. Some thirty hand-painted banners from the 1940s and ’50s hung from the walls of the area set up for the celebration and added considerably to the event’s authentic circus feel. An event devoted entirely to those banners took place at the museum on a recent Tuesday.

I arrived at the November 1 event a few minutes early and, knowing where the banners were hanging, headed directly there. Along with a few others, I happily snapped photos of the eye-catching wall hangings until I heard applause coming from elsewhere in the museum. I can only assume that the applause was triggered by the introduction of museum founder Tod Swormstedt because when I reached the real event Tod was telling the story of the banners and The Signmaker’s Circus. The banners were hanging in an empty warehouse that also belonged to their owner. They weren’t really on display but had been hung “just because”. Tod saw them, immediately envisioned them at his museum’s upcoming anniversary party, and asked. Told that, yes, he could borrow them, Tod drove to the Boston area with a helper, rolled up the banners on an upper floor of the warehouse, carried them down a fire escape, and hauled them to Cincinnati. He had been fielding questions about them ever since but not tonight. Tonight he introduced the banners’ owner, David Waller.

David began by telling us that there was almost always some deception in the banners. He made his point with a photo of a woman who was certainly quite small but not nearly as small as depicted on the canvas that identified her as the “world’s smallest mother“. He then claimed that similar deception had occurred tonight. Most of us had been drawn to the event, he said, expecting to hear an expert on circus banners. Instead, we would hear from a mere collector of such banners. Maybe that was an attempt at real deception but few were fooled as David proceeded to prove himself an expert on the banners as well as their creators and subjects.

I guess the title of tonight’s event was a little deceptive but I’ve no doubt it was unintentional. Although promoted as “Under the Big Top: Circus Banners of the 1940s and 1950s”, the event concerned banners advertising sideshow attractions that rarely, if ever, appeared in a ring in the Big Top. Many were people with deformities that attracted the curious. Today that naturally leads to thoughts of exploitation, and no one doubts that was sometimes the case, but sideshows provided income to many who would have had a tough time otherwise. When exploitation was mentioned, Otis the Frog Boy, who owned a car modified so he could drive it, wondered if people would prefer he was on welfare. Sylvia, the Big Footed Girl, made a good living for many years although, unable to wear shoes, she balked at appearing in the cold north. Many sideshow performers padded their paychecks by selling postcards and other items. Part of the spiel about Johann Petursson, the Viking Giant, was that he wore rings the size of napkin rings. He sold copies of his rings as souvenirs. Sometime after one of these rings came into Waller’s possession, he met a buddy’s new girlfriend from Iceland. When the conversation turned to circuses, she told of having a giant for an uncle and produced a childhood picture of her sitting on Johann’s lap. Waller gave her the ring.

Clearly, many of these banners made preposterous claims and stretched truth to the max. Many of the attractions were complete fakes that used mirrors, trick lighting, and other gimmicks. It might be a little hard for some of us to believe that people were that gullible just a few decades ago but what may be even harder to believe concerns an attraction that was 100% real and involved no trickery whatsoever. Once upon a time, tattooed women were so rare that people paid money to see them. Betty Broadbent retired in 1967.

The Signmaker’s Circus

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The Signmaker’s Circus took place last night at the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio. The picture of Zoltar was not taken there which I realize might not seem quite proper to some. It was taken last week at Uranus, Missouri, but not used in the journal entry for the stop. I liked it and jumped at the chance to use it here when I realized it was a pretty good match for the event’s Save the Date card. The event is subtitled “A Decade of Camp” since its reason for being is to celebrate the museum’s first ten years in Camp Washington. The permanent full-time opening was on June 23, 2012, but two preview days occurred three weeks earlier. This blog was still fairly new then, and I had not yet stopped creating oddments. I did post a blog entry here that includes a link to the oddment and the oddment can be reached directly here.

All the rest of the pictures are from the circus, and there’s a bunch. I arrived about ten minutes before the scheduled start time and found a fairly close parking spot on the street. The museum’s parking lot was being used for valet drop-off and fire juggling. A line that had formed in the lot moved quickly to — and almost as quickly through — the doors when they opened.

The museum looked extra festive and drinks were available at multiple bars. A young lady (blurrily seen here) circulated through the crowd in a dress bearing cones of popcorn. The Burning Caravan provided music to party by from in front of the Rock City sign.

I knew from a Friday Facebook post that something would be revealed from behind a red curtain but I had no idea what. By the luckiest of coincidences, I was walking by the curtain when the ringmaster began his countdown. A proclamation from Mayor Pureval was read making today “American Sign Museum Day” in Cincinnati then the curtains parted. Others had paid better attention to the clues and some had been involved in the preparations. I was gobsmacked when I saw the great neon-illuminated space on the other side and we were invited to pass through the balloon arch.

I recall going to exactly one circus as a child. At ten or so years of age, I was naturally in awe of the exotic animals, people, and costumes as I watched the entrance parade from my bleacher seat. There were no elephants or tigers present last night and I’m over six decades more worldly and jaded than I was then, but I wasn’t watching a distant parade from bleachers last night. With carnival music accompaniment, I was doing the marching past exotic people and costumes. And there was neon everywhere. I did not magically feel ten years old but I was at least as awe-struck when I walked into that room as when those elephants entered the big top all those years ago.

The Burning Caravan played throughout the evening inside the museum while DJ Mowgli provided music for the circus. I’m pretty sure this is as close to a rave as I’ll ever get. People with turbans and tails chatted casually as people with neither lined up to confer with a real live Zoltar.

The ringmaster continued working and introducing acts both on and over the stage. Photos from later points in that on-stage performance can be seen here, here, here, and here.

A sign museum can always be counted on to have just the right marker for everything and that includes pointing to the two food trucks parked right outside the building.

I didn’t get my fortune told but I did get a tee shirt airbrushed. This was free with the purchase of an event shirt. The shirt was dropped off at the painting booth then picked up later when it was completed. The artist and the fellow who took down the instructions had a disagreement over whether it was “DEnny” or “DAnny” so the name was left blank until I returned. This gave me an opportunity to get a snapshot of the shirt getting its final touches.

What a wonderful way to celebrate the museum’s first decade in Camp Washington. I certainly enjoyed myself though I expect someone will ask, “Who was that bearded lady I saw you with last night?”

Taste of Memory

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I don’t have a dog. Don’t need one. I can eat my own homework. I went to three different events yesterday with the intent of including all three in this post. I’m still going to do that despite the sad fact that they will not be as well documented as I planned. However, before I can even start talking about the three planned activities, I have to tell of my arrival home at the end of the day.

I took quite a few pictures throughout the day and popped out the memory card containing most of them as soon as I reached home. One of the day’s events had been Taste of Cincinnati with 36 restaurants and 18 food trucks. There is no reason anyone would be even slightly hungry after attending such a gathering and I really wasn’t. Nonetheless, I grabbed a few snack crackers from an open box when I walked by it on the way to my laptop. I popped one into my mouth and munched it as I picked up the laptop and headed to the table. I popped in a second one but it didn’t munch so well. It failed to crumble on the first bite so I bit it again before realizing something was terribly wrong. As I juggled laptop, memory card, crackers, and some mail I’d retrieved from the mailbox, the memory card somehow ended up in the hand with the crackers and then in my mouth. Something in it had snapped on that second munch attempt. One bite equals 68,719,476,736 bytes.

My first thought after accepting that the pictures were gone was to post something canned this week. But I had taken some pictures with my phone and those survived. There were enough, I decided, to do a stripped-down version of the three-event post I had planned. Here goes.

Coffee With Tod got the day started at the American Sign Museum. This was the second Saturday morning that museum founder Tod Swormstedt spent sharing some of his knowledge with museum members. During the first one, he picked a few special signs and told about their history, owners, and acquisition. Today he spoke about how “Signs of the Times” magazine has been an inspiration for and something of a predecessor of the museum. “Signs of the Times” is a sign industry trade magazine that Tod’s family was involved with from its beginning and which they owned for most of its life. In the photo, Tod is holding a hardbound copy of the very first issue from 1906. The tenth anniversary of the museum’s move to this building will be celebrated next month with an open-to-all Signmaker’s Circus.

Next up was the Taste of Cincinnati which was first held in 1979 and is now the longest running culinary arts festival in the country. Like many festivals, this one did not happen in 2020 or 2021 due to the COVID pandemic. As mentioned, 36 restaurants and 18 food trucks are participating in this year’s event. I took pictures of many of them and made sure to snap a photo of each one where I made a purchase. Those are all gone and the picture at left is out of sequence. It was taken after I’d done my eating and was ready to leave.

Before the festival is opened to the public, first, second, and third place offerings are picked in four categories. I limited my purchases to the four number ones. In the Soup/Salad/Side category, that was Bulgogi French Fries from YouYu. The Waygu Meatball from Council Oak Steak and Seafood placed first in the Appetizer category. Both were served from the same booth as the two restaurants are part of the Hard Rock Casino.

The only picture on my phone of the Entree winner was my failed attempt to get it and the Procter & Gamble towers in the same picture. I got half of the towers and the side of the container holding Alfio’s Veal Short Rib Ravioli. Pompilio’s Chocolate and Peanut Butter Cannoli won the Desert category and fared much better than the ravioli in the picture department.

Once I’d finished my selective sampling, I walked about a block from the festival and hopped on the streetcar to reach Washington Park. There a number of sculptures made entirely of Duck brand duct tape are on display. Named “Knock It Out of the Park”, the exhibit is all about baseball. I believe I took at least one photo of every sculpture but very few were on my phone.  

Buddy, Can You Lend Me a Sign?

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When the American Sign Museum announced its “first-ever traveling exhibit” at the National Museum of the Air Force, I felt pretty confident that I would see it someday. I was less certain that I would see the signs the museum had loaned to the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company. Then, with almost no planning and a fair amount of luck, I saw both borrowed batches of brightness this week.

On Saturday, I learned that my previously made plans for the week had fallen through then almost immediately recalled an email about a museum member discount for the play featuring the loaned signs. I went to the CSC website looking for something later in the week but was surprised to find that a front-row seat was available for the next day (Easter Sunday) and that the performance was one followed by a Q&A with some of the performers. I snatched it up.

CSC’s production of The Comedy of Errors has a modern setting with the play’s Ephesus presented as a Las Vegas-like city. Wanting to add some Vegas-style glow to the stage and realizing that an outstanding repository of neon and such was just a few miles away, the CSC reached out to the ASM, and here (with permission and a phone camera) is the result. The play is hilarious and the cast is superb. In addition to the neon, modern touches include a number of songs to make it a sort of Shakespearean musical. All my roadie friends will be happy to learn that among those songs is a version of “Get Your Kicks on Route 66”. The production runs through April 30.

With some pictures of one set of borrowed signs in my pocket, it wasn’t long before I began thinking about a blog post on the subject, and almost immediately realized that any such post would benefit greatly by also including the other set of current loaners. On Tuesday, I headed to Dayton and, after breakfast at the nearby Hasty Tasty, the Air Force Museum.

Using the life of real sign maker William H. Hahn as inspiration, placards displayed with the signs tell the story of the fictional Joe Signman. On display are examples of the lightbulb, neon, and plastic signs Joe would have dealt with during his career.

My birthday has been the subject of a couple of recent blog posts so you might already be aware that the United States Air Force and I were established the very same year. I have about five months seniority on the Air Force and am all done celebrating. The museum, however, intends to talk up the big anniversary throughout the year. “The Signmaker’s Journey” will be there through October 10.

Chillin’ With Neon

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What would it take to get you to walk around outside in 28° weather? The subjects in the photo at right did it for me. As part of the ArtsWave Red Light Valentines Display, the American Sign Museum kept the outside signs illuminated for several hours on both Friday and Saturday nights, and I decided that was something I ought to see. I helped justify the trip downtown with one last drive across a favorite bridge just ahead of an extended closure.

The John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge has had its share of brief closings over the last few years. Once it was closed until it could be inspected after being struck by a car. Then it was closed when pieces from one of its sandstone pillars started falling onto the roadway. A protective net, visible in the middle picture, allowed it to reopen. Recently, it was closed for its own protection when a fire closed the nearby Brent Spence Bridge carrying I-71/I-75, and the nineteenth-century suspension bridge was just too tempting to truckers with rigs far in excess of the bridge’s limits. It was reduced to a single lane a couple of weeks ago as crews prepare for a full closure on Monday. Repairs that include replacing deteriorated sandstone will keep it closed for nine months or so.

After crossing to Kentucky on the Roebling, I returned to Ohio on the now repaired Brent Spence, and headed to the Sign Museum where I was greeted by a brightly lit Holiday Inn sign.

I have seen these signs lit before, but only when some event was taking place in the museum. Having them all aglow with an empty parking lot and dark building was something new to me.

I was half expecting there to be a number of photographers flitting around the signs but I had the place all to myself. After twenty gloveless minutes of tripod toting and camera aiming, I had a pretty good idea why. As I drove back past the Holiday Inn sign, I found myself thinking that heated steering wheels might not be entirely frivolous.   

Return of the Signs

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Concerts, museums, festivals, and parades have all made frequent appearances in this blog but not lately. They have all been impacted by the COVID-19 shutdown. I”ve tried to keep my concert cravings in check by watching online live streams and even did a post about it back in the early days of the quasi-quarantine. The closest a museum has come to being the subject of a post in the last several months is when I covered the new stairs at the closed Cincinnati Art Museum. Until today.

The Cincinnati Art Museum opened to members on June 18th and to the public two days later. Parts of the Cincinnati Museum Center will be open to members on July 10 and to the public on the 17th. The American Sign Museum allowed members in on July 1 and will open to the public on Wednesday, July 8. Preceding a general opening with a members-only “soft opening” isn’t the only thing these three have in common. All will operate at reduced capacity enforced by advance reservations. Employees and visitors will be screened for high temperatures. All employees will wear masks and masks will be required for all visitors to the Sign Museum. The other two stress the wisdom of wearing masks and ask that visitors comply but apparently won’t actually require it. Hopefully, anyone not wearing a mask will be glared at intensely until they at least start smoldering.

Almost as soon as I heard of the Sign Museum’s opening, I went online to make my reservation. I had expected to be asked to pick a day and time but was simply assigned the first slot on the first day. That was just fine with me but I’m guessing a phone call is required if a specific time and date is needed. Before entering, I stepped out front to get a look at the recently added Burma-Shave style signs. Here is the font-appropriate finale. The big letters atop the building were rescued from Cincinnati Gardens just ahead of its 2018 demolition. The ‘S’ was moved and three lower case letters added to make the perfect sign museum topper.

Once inside, it was scan, scan, scan. My temperature was checked with a forehead scan, my ticket was scanned on my phone, and I scanned a QR code for the self-guided tour. The free live tours have been temporarily halted to help maintain social distancing. I’d never tried the audio tour and figured I should since the live tour I always recommend won’t be available for a while. The audio tour is accessed through a smartphone by scanning the QR code or entering the URL. It then plays through the phone (earphones recommended) and is controlled (start, stop, etc.) through it. I was quite impressed and will have no qualms about recommending it in lieu of a live expert. With or without a guide, I almost always find something new when I visit although sometimes it’s something that’s been there since day one and I’d just not noticed. These signs on the floor were definitely new. They are placed throughout the museum as reminders about social distancing and to provide visual hints as to just how far six feet is.

Of course, all the old favorites are still there. The audio tour talks about the history of signs just like a live guide would and describes many of the more interesting signs on display. It doesn’t cover every detail of every sign and that’s just like a live guide, too. Exploring and reading on your own is part of the fun. The audio tour does come up short when it comes to answering questions but the folks at the front desk and roaming staff members are happy to do that.

A favorite spot of mine is this workshop area which is usually open with contents constantly changing. Some signs leave here to return to their proper homes in the wild while others are on their way to be displayed in the museum. The big camera, a highlight of my day, is one of the latter. A lot of space remains unfilled in the building housing the museum and a major expansion is in the works. As told here, the neon trimmed Pentax, complete with working flash, will be part of that expansion.

As I mentioned, I sometimes think something is new when it isn’t but I’m pretty confident that both of these items are recent additions. The “color chart” was once used by Cincinnati’s Holthaus-Lackner Signs who donated it. I’m absolutely certain that the neon sculpture is new because I watched the comment card being taped to the window as I approached. For any who miss the Dan Aykroyd connection, there’s this. The Neonworks sign shop can be glimpsed in the background of both of these photos. Guided weekday tours usually included a visit inside the shop. Those visits are on hold along with the tours but you can still watch through the windows.

Before leaving, I made a pass through the gift shop where I spotted this book by a couple of friends in Oklahoma. I then posted a picture similar to this one to a Route 66 Facebook group. It has received about fifty reactions (including from one of the authors) but no comments. I really expected someone to jump all over the Kentucky tagged items on the left and those on the right tagged Ohio. Route 66 ran through eight states that are listed on an out of frame sign, and neither Kentucky nor Ohio is among them. Those two states do, however, supply the majority of museum visitors and gift shop customers. There is a Stanley Marsh 3 (the Cadillac Ranch guy) sign on the cover of the book that reads “ART IS WHAT YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH”. Clearly, those candles are art.

Trip Peek #92
Trip #144
SCA Conference 2017

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This picture is from my 2017 “trip” to the SCA Conference. I put trip in quotation marks since the conference was in Cincinnati and I spent every night at home in my own bed. The retired Holiday Inn sign is in front of the American Sign Museum where we had dinner after the first full day of the conference. That day was spent on a bus tour around the Cincinnati area, the next was filled with presentations, and the third with a bus tour north along the Dixie Highway.

Trip Peeks are short articles published when my world is too busy or too boring for a current events piece to be completed in time for the Sunday posting. In addition to a photo thumbnail from a completed road trip, each Peek includes a brief description of that photo plus links to the full-sized photo and the associated trip journal.

Signs and Suds

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The American Sign Museum almost always has something on the schedule that interests me but there have been way too many scheduling conflicts of late. Not so on Thursday and the Signs & Suds event with Rhinegeist Brewery. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect but I like Rhinegeist and love the sign museum so I signed on just as soon as I realized I could make it.

I used the event at the museum as an excuse to have dinner at the nearby Camp Washington Chili. Traffic was nowhere near as bad as I feared so I got to the chili parlor, enjoyed my 4-way with absolutely no time pressure, and arrived at the museum just after the doors opened at 6:00. The event was scheduled to start at 6:30 so I had plenty of time to look through the gift shop, chat with a few of the other attendees, and speculate what might be inside those growlers and crowlers. I also spent some time contemplating the growlers themselves. The tight sealing insulated containers certainly bear little resemblance to the glass jugs my buddies and I would lug back from the neighborhood bar filled with 3.2 beer back in the day.

The beer tasting would take place during a fairly normal guided tour of the museum conducted by Kevin Wallace. No one will ever match museum founder Tod Swormstedt as a tour guide, although Kevin is getting pretty close. I failed to get a head count, but an after the fact guess is around 40 attendees. Before getting rolling on the tour, Kevin asked how many were in the museum for the first time. It seemed to me that about 3/4 of the hands went up. Maybe I should have expected that but I didn’t; Neither did Kevin.

Of course, this was not an entirely normal tour. Its other guide was TJ DiNino from Rhinegeist, who poured and described four different beers throughout the tour. The beers were Amelia Belgium, Existential Apple, Odd Job, and BA Big Willie. TJ spoke about the ingredients, process, and taste of each in an easily understood layman’s language although he was perfectly capable of speaking in more esoteric terms when called for.  

The event’s description included the phrase “will pair iconic American Sign Museum signs with rare Rhinegeist beers”. As someone who has toured the museum multiple times, I admit to sometimes wandering off and not always paying close attention to what was being said. I did not hear all of the pairings but I did hear “Since we’re drinking a California style IPA, here’s a sign from California.” Good enough for me. 

Book Review
Vintage Signs of America
Debra Jane Seltzer

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I photograph a fair number of signs as I travel, and I know quite a few people who photograph many more than I. Not one, however, is in the same league as Debra Jane Seltzer. If sign hunting was an Olympic sport, the petite Seltzer would be buried under gold medals. Her photo expeditions are legendary. Until recently, when she and her dogs (currently four) headed out in the white Chevy van named Sparkle, they would take along a big stack of notes and marked up map printouts. Today there might still be a printed list of targets but Google maps and a smartphone have reduced the need for paper considerably. The target list is never limited to signs. It’s almost certain to include interesting buildings and other roadside attractions of all sorts.

Seltzer’s website, Roadside Architecture, is the primary beneficiary of these expeditions. It currently contains more than 60,000 searchable photos organized by subject and location. It’s described as “Buildings, signs, statues, and more”. Photos are added and other maintenance is performed between trips. While traveling, Seltzer maintains a blog with stories and pictures from the road and a Flickr account with pictures that didn’t appear in the blog and probably won’t make it to the website. Links to these and more can be found at the Roadside Architecture website.

So why a book? Even though the subject matter of the structured website, the blog, and the Flickr account is essentially the same, they have different uses and different audiences. A book’s audience is different yet. In reading the book, I spotted a couple of signs that could be within range of upcoming travels. As I put them on my own list, I realized that the book could be used as a “shopping list” for travelers. The website, of course, is a super shopping list and both the blog and Flickr can can be sources of things to see, but the printed page is consumed differently and if the book gave me some ideas I’m sure it can do that for others.

However, before I thought of Vintage Signs of America as a shopping list, I thought of it as a primer. There is a one page introduction which, in addition to providing an overview of the rest of the book, offers a little insight into why Seltzer likes signs and why you might, too. This introduction page and a few near the book’s end where the subject is preservation are the only pictureless pages in the book. The other pages are filled with roughly 175 color photographs divided into five chapters. The first of these, “Types of Signs”, is where I got the idea of the book as a primer. Examples of bulb, opal letter, mechanical, and other types of signs appear with descriptive text. It prepares the reader for recognizing the various types in the wild and also provides a little history of advertising and the sign industry.

The next three chapters form what Selzer refers to as the “theme” section of the book. One chapter focuses on “People” with sub-themes like chefs, women, cowboys, and Indians. I was a little surprised with the statement that “There are far fewer representations of women than men on surviving vintage signs”, and considered why that was so. For starters, most of those chefs, cowboys, and Indians are male. The neon women my male mind first thought of were bathing beauties diving into motel swimming pools. Women are portrayed in other roles but not often. Evidence, I suppose, of women being even more underrepresented in the ’40s , ’50s, and ’60s, when most of these signs were made, than today.

The “Animals” chapter is probably my favorite. Colorful birds, fish, and dogs draw customers to businesses of all sorts. Sequenced neon segments can make birds appear to fly and dogs and horses appear to run. A pig almost always indicates a BBQ restaurant although one sign shows a line of pigs merrily leaping in to a grinder to be made into sausage.

“Things” is as varied as you might imagine. Bowling balls and pins are popular as are skates, cars, and assorted food items. Donuts and ice cream cones seem to be the most common edibles used to attract customers. Bowling balls lend themselves to animation and when a neon bowling ball rolls, a strike is virtually guaranteed. Together, “Types of Signs” and the three chapters of the “theme” section make up a sort of sampler of the massive Roadside Architecture site. Picking less than 200 images to populate this sampler had to be tough but the choices made were excellent.

Like the signs themselves, the color photographs snag a reader’s attention. They’re all good eye-candy and some, like those with running animals, flying footballs, or operating machinery, require some amount of study. The pictures are far from alone, however. Every picture has an extended caption that describes the sign, often tells its history, and sometimes includes more general information. As Seltzer tells it, “I snuck facts and history into captions which makes it easier to swallow.” Easy to swallow describes the whole book. Even though it may look like a picture book, it seems quite natural to read it front to back and absorb those “facts and history” along with the images.

The last chapter, “Preserving Vintage Signs”, has those pictureless pages I mentioned earlier. It begins with a couple of pages of text that is sort of a “state of the signs” message. Here Seltzer tells of what has been happening to signs and why. The last page is also all text with some answers to the question “What can I do?” In between are descriptions, with pictures, of the big three sign museums in the country: The American Sign Museum (where I bought my copy of the book) in Cincinnati, OH, the Museum of Neon Art in Glendale, CA, and the Neon Museum in Las Vegas, NV. The whole chapter, and the final page in particular, might just be the inspiration someone needs to get involved is saving or documenting vintage signs.

So I’m thinking that some folks will get inspiration from this book, some will use it as a shopping list for their own sign hunting, for some it will be an introductory primer into the world of signs, and others might see it as a sampler of the full Roadside Architecture web presence. Those are all valid uses for the book and it will satisfy all of them quite nicely. Of course, some might see the book purely as a nice presentation of some very pretty pictures. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that. With the few exceptions noted, there are pretty pictures on every page.

Vintage Signs of America, Debra Jane Seltzer, Amberley Publishing, April 1, 2018, 9.2 x 6.5 inches, 96 pages, ISBN 978-1445669489
Available through Amazon.