My father too was a hand-letter sign painter. He worked into the 90's until he passed at 89. There are still places around my hometown with examples of his hand-lettered signs and cards.

It looks as though she has used one of the largest Speedball nibs, though I'm not sure what was available back then in the way of lettering tools.

I've done a fair bit of calligraphy & lettering, myself, but my own handwriting is generally not very good, unless I take two or three times as long as I usually do.

The spacing on the fourth line really stands out to me. All of the words are very well spaced, but then there is an oversized gap between the two words of the fourth line, indicating perhaps, a glitch in her placement computation. I am a very symmetrical person when it comes to design, so assymetry drives me nuts!

I've always admired the work of signpainters and hate thinking about the downside of our migration to digital being the more-or-less demise of signpainting and letterpress printing.

Me, I learned to letter in Drafting class, and I once bought all those Speedball pens and learned some rudimental signpainting skills--just enough to appreciate the work of the true craftspersons.

Here are some photos to peek at at Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/signpainting

My father owned a sign business and often did hand-lettering up through the 1960s. It's a shame people now must rely on the impersonal perfection of computers. It should be noted that while my father's commercial lettering was lovely, his personal handwriting was pretty near illegible. Go figure!

When I was a beginning typesetter in the mid-1980s, our shop was next to an old-school signpainter who was incredibly skilled in hand lettering. He did all the signs in our building, and I wish I still had some samples of his work, because you'll never see such a thing again. At the time, we sent him a fair amount of work because he could work in much larger formats than we could with our phototypesetting equipment, which was limited to (I think) 12" in width. To blow it up on film or velox was a big additional cost and also size-limited. If you wanted a sizeable sign, the signpainter was the only way to go.

apposition

To keep height of letters even, she has clearly drawn faint lines to guide her. I still admire her skill, though. I've had teachers in the past who could do this on the blackboard but I think writing, itself, is a lost art.

beautiful hand lettering... the chart in back also looks pretty amazing.

A very important skill in those days. Nowadays such a poster would always be composed on a computer: the text would be typed in and automatically come out even. She is able, no doubt from long practise, to produce letters which are all exactly the same size, lie on a perfectly horizontal line, and are even aligned to the centre, entirely by hand.