Fascia Signs, Human-Made, at the Central Lettering Record

Fascia Lettering in the British Isles (1978) by Alan Bartram is one of a ‘trilogy’ of books, with the other two focused on street name lettering and tombstone lettering. It is presented as an extended essay, complemented by over 160 of Bartram’s photographs and his insightful commentary on the fascia signs they depict.I frequently refer to the book, and the last time I pulled it from the shelf I was struck by a paragraph with a prescient message for our times. It accompanies the final featured sign which Bartram describes as “an amateurish effort” that is “wrong in the right way”. His remarks conclude with this expression of a central thesis within the book:“We respond to it because it was so obviously done by a human being, with human weaknesses. The street feels a human place because of it. Lettering which is smoothly anonymous, without wit, imagination, personality or sensitivity, gives the impression of having been designed as well as made by machines. A street of such lettering…