Eye Magazine

Signwriter Joby Carter’s All the Fonts of the Fair includes 26 hand-painted alphabets inspired by lettering found in traditional British fairgrounds. Carter grew up on his family’s travelling funfair, Carters Steam Fair, which has recently passed on to new ownership, giving Carter more time to pursue his craft (as he explained at Eye’s Type Tuesday, November 2023).

The book serves as a practical guide to signwriting while documenting examples of handmade signage made with skills that date back to the nineteenth century, and that were in use up until around the 1960s. From Dodgem Deco to Waltzer (right), each of Carter’s alphabets arrives as a set of technical drawings (each letter is rendered at 30mm tall), with construction lines and guides, plus plenty of advice on how to draw them, using negative space and painting curves, ‘fishtails’ and ‘trousers’. Archive photographs show the eye-catching letters in use on fairground rides and give a sense of the lineage of fairground painters from Edwin Hall and Fred Fowle (see Eye 86) to Carter’s own mentor, Stan Wilkinson.

Carter states that, in almost every case, each alphabet presented has been developed from an original of just one or two words rendered in a particular style; his sources range from black-and-white photographs to existing fairground equipment that still carries decades-old lettering. Contemporary fairground artist Aaron Stephens created four of the alphabets featured in the book, Wilkinson contributed two, and Carter the rest. The resulting collection is a celebration of a practice that is now an endangered artform. In keeping traditional skills alive, Carter hopes to inspire the next generation of signwriters, for whom this new book supplies an admirable starting point.

Mark Sinclair, writer, editor, Stroud

First published in Eye no. 106 vol. 27, 2024