This morning I stopped by the Mystic Chamber of Commerce, which is located at Schooner Wharf in Mystic. Schooner Wharf, finished in 2003, was my single largest sign project to date. There are six fairly large wall-mounted signs with gilded individual letters, all finished with 23k gold leaf, and two oval projecting signs, along with several signs for other businesses on the premises.

The large rectangular signs are all made with DiBond laminate and framed in cedar. The round-faced plastic letters are from Gemini Inc., and were gilded with 23k gold leaf imported from Germany. The project used three full packs of gold - each pack containing 500 leaves, 3&3/8 x 3&3/8 inches square, all hand-laid and burnished. There is really nothing that shows off the beauty and power of gold leaf more than large round-faced letters, and the Gemini letters are great because the smooth, consistent sufaces are an ideal substrate for gilding.

In the 19th and early 20th century, signs with raised gilded wood letters were the quality standard for outdoor signs. A larger sign shop might manufacture their own letters, while other shops would purchase them from manufacturers such as Spanjer Bros. of Chicago. Those letters were made of wood, usually pine, and were highly labor-intensive; the letter blanks had to be hand-carved and sanded to acheive the rounded profile. When finished, the letters were literally boiled in linseed oil as a preservative, then painted with several coats of white lead - a highly toxic, but extremely durable primer - then pained with several coats of enamel before, at last, being gilded. The painting process alone required several months - each coat of white lead took over a week to dry - with each coat being hand-sanded to acceptable smoothness before the next step. When the painting and gilding process was complete, the letters wood be screwed from their backs to the signboard, usually painted sheet metal with a wood frame. The traditional background for gold letters was black smalt, a fine-grained colored ground glass, which was adhered to the panel with glue. The results are striking - a smalt background displays gold letters with a look similar to gold jewelry on velvet. In the case of the Schooner Wharf signs, I had strongly encouraged the use of green or black smalt for the background, but was overruled by the client; these signs have a green enamel backround.

The use of gilded plastic letters, while not purely traditional, allows these signs to have the look of traditional wood-letter signs, without the labor costs required by the lengthy process of carving and painting wood letters.