In his introduction to Signs of Italy: Outdoor Lettering Up and Down the Boot (Lazy Dog Press, 2015), author James Clough marvels at how ‘flexible and accommodating’ the alphabet can be in the hands of sign-makers, whether they are professionals or amateurs. ‘Before typefaces and computer-generated fonts dominated the scene,’ he writes, ‘for about a hundred years there was no standardisation of letterforms for commercial signs.’ His book celebrates a huge variety of signs and letterforms, in dozens of different locations, from big cities to tiny villages, in a generous series of photographs taken by Clough himself and many others, including colleagues, friends and acquaintances over the past two decades.
‘Depending on whose opinion you have, a piece of lettering may be a work of art, in or out of fashion, good, bad or ugly,’ writes Clough in the book’s introduction. ‘It may also be suitable or unsuitable for its purpose and may look good or bad within the space it occupies or congruous or incongruous in relation to the surrounding architectural environment.’