Letters From Here

Today’s remarkable find is this OLD Pontiac Porcelain Dealership Neon Sign.

Yes, that’s right.  A neon sign from a forgotten era, advertising a Pontiac Car dealership.  If you are scratching your head right about now, the listing tells us a little about what it calls the “Holy Grail of Pontiac neon signs”:

“This old porcelain Pontiac neon dealership sign is 100% original with NO RESTORATION or TOUCH UP and NO CLEAR COAT ever and is the rare version with double stroke neon Pontiac wording with full horizontal and bull nose neon. This is the finest in original condition I have ever seen anywhere. Displays 9.5+ on both sides. Beautiful day one color with super high gloss. This is the Holy Grail of Pontiac neon signs. This one still has its all original cabinet and mounting hardware from day one and in very high grade condition”

It seems many people agree with the seller’s assessment, as the price for this sign is an astronomical $21,100!  With 25 bids, it is indeed a very popular item, and the bidding isn’t over yet, nor has the reserve price been met.

In the interest of finding out more about these kinds of signs, we turned to the recently relaunched eBay Guides.  The eBay buying guides are a place where both experts at eBay and our expert eBay shoppers write about their areas of specialization and interest.  A search on “signs” returned an Automobilia Buying Guide link, which contained a lot of helpful information, but nothing about the Pontiac sign.

Searches further afield revealed little about this particular sign.  This provides us with a huge conundrum, since we know this item is of interest to many people, and yet don’t know enough about it to give you a good idea as to why it is so valuable (although we have to say, it would look classy in our billiards room).

We did locate an article by Dave Margulius, writing for Collectors Weekly, on The Disappearing Art of Porcelain Signs.  He interviews Michael Bruner, the author of the book Signs of Our Past: Porcelain Enamel Advertising in America.  Bruner explains that the longevity of porcelain signs made them a cost-effective way for companies to advertise their products.  “Ultimately however the cost killed porcelain sign making.  It’s labor intensive compared to paint or silkscreen on thin metal. You can’t take a piece of chintzy metal and put porcelain enamel on it.  You’ve got to have something substantial or it’ll just fall apart when it’s being fired.”

 (via eBay stories blog | Signs, signs, everywhere a sign…)

Last fall, Kirsten Hively launched a free iPhone app called Project Neon, which allows users to locate, rate, and learn a little of the personal history of 120 New York signs. But the rising neon nostalgia isn’t limited to the Big Apple. A month ago, the Neon Museum, which preserves and showcases the spectacular animated neon casino signs from the mid-century Las Vegas strip, finally opened its doors after 16 years of planning.

We talked to Hively, an architect by trade who started snapping photos of classic New York neon signs two years ago this December. In the following year, she launched her Project Neon blog, a Google map, and a Kickstarter that raised more than $5,000 for her app. She explained why neon signs have such an irresistible allure that she’s felt compelled to photograph more than 800 so far.

 (via Neon Lost and Found: Where New York City Still Burns Bright | Collectors Weekly)

Instagram photos of vernacular ‘typography.’ 

WLT: World View

mollyblock:

Today, in Corsicana, Texas: Ghost signs, brick porn, extreme heat. (Taken with Instagram at Corsicana, Texas)

The story behind two mysterious signs in the Smithsonian’s collection complicates the provenance of the invention.

(via OPEN: The History of Neon Signs - Hal Wallace - Technology - The Atlantic)

This beautifully atmospheric photograph was taken in Melbourne, at the city’s busiest intersection, by a school teacher named Angus O’Callaghan. The exact year of the twilight scene is unknown, but it’s thought to be around 1969. O’Callaghan had rediscovered an earlier interest in photography and between 1968 and 1971, in the evenings and at weekends, he would wander the streets of the city taking pictures with two Yashika twin-lens reflex medium-format cameras — one for black and white and one for color. He hoped his pictures might make a book. No one was interested and he filed away his negatives and transparencies in a shoe box where they remained unseen for decades.

Now, at last, the picture has found its way into print, along with two other fine shots by O’Callaghan, in a book titled Characters: Cultural Stories Revealed through Typography by Australian designer and Melbourne resident Stephen Banham. I can’t claim any detachment when I warmly recommend Banham’s book. We have known each other for years — I interviewed him a decade ago for Eye — and he asked me to write a foreword, so I did. His book is even better than it promised to be on the basis of the proofs he sent me, a significant study of the way that type and letterforms can be interpreted as vivid narratives of life and history in our cities. It’s a worthy companion to earlier books about public lettering by Nicolete Gray, James Sutton, Jock Kinneir, Phil Baines and Catherine Dixon, and the investigations of street signs in Herbert Spencer’s Typographica.

Rick Poynor: Typographic Stories of the City Streets: Observers Room: Design Observer

Vernacular Typography is the creation of graphic designer and Brooklyn native Molly Woodward, who has spent the past decade taking photos of the city’s “found lettering.” All over the city, and the world, local signage is disappearing and being replaced with mass-produced signs and the brands of global corporations. Molly is trying to preserve it—and she has a Kickstarter campaign to help do that.

I asked her a few questions about “endangered local signage.”

  Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York: Vernacular Typography

s. congress zebra (by John Gusky)

[The Hypothetical Development Organization] also reminds me of the story of the Turkish real estate agent Mehmet Ali Gökçeoğlu, who we read about in Emre Alturk’s contribution to Al Manakh 2, “Dubai, Copied and Pasted”.

You might say that, like Walker, Gökçeoğlu recognized something of the unrealized potential of the development sign as a fiction. And, also like the story of the Hypothetical Development Organization, Gökçeoğlu’s story indicates the power of telling stories not as “a series of words”, but through “plans, schematics, models, renderings”.

Unlike Walker, though, Gökçeoğlu was not satisfied to let his pictures simply tell a story. He ran for office on them…

More:  hypothethical signs – mammoth // building nothing out of something