If you run a store, you need signs. They draw your customers’ attention to the things you want them to buy. You might need a small sign advertising a sale on dirty collars, for example—because how are your customers going to know these collars are a bargain if you don’t tell them?

These small signs were known in the retail business as “showcards.” Today they come in standard designs, printed by computer or industrial printer. But in the days before large chain stores and computer printing, it was simply not economical or expeditious to have showcards printed from type. Instead, they would be hand-lettered, by a professional if the store was a large operation, or by the shopkeeper himself if it was a small business. Where skilled labor is needed, correspondence schools will follow, and dozens of teach-yourself manuals of showcard writing were published in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

You could master the basics of showcard lettering in a few weeks at most. But if you wanted to set yourself apart from the ordinary run of half-educated clerks and make yourself into a truly valuable showcard-writer, you would learn the fancy tricks of decoration in the later chapters of these books, such as three-dimensional metallic designs.

But what will you write once you have the skill to form letters and decorate the spaces around them? Some of the books give suggestions for advertising phrases as well. For example, you might try a few homespun platitudes.

An Ounce of Underwear is Worth a Pound of Medicine.

The Sun of a New Prosperity is Rising Over the Hilltops of Discontent.

Laugh and the World Will Look at Your Teeth, and Judge of Your Taste—Good or Bad—By Their Condition.

Or you might appeal to the mathematically inclined.

Quality, Style, Finish—These Are the Four Cardinal Points of Excellence Which distinguish “Our” Clothing from All Others.

Note the early use of “quotation marks” for “emphasis.”

You might point out the superiority of your goods.

A Medley of Merit.

An Avalanche of Beauty.

Or you might allude to the extraordinary bargain to be had while supplies last.

A Cut to the Heart—A Tragedy in Prices.

Frost Nipped and All Shriveled Up Are the Prices.

As silly as some of these signs might have been, they did their job. And they probably did it better than the printed signs of today, which we ignore. Our printed signs are all alike: if you go into a Rite Aid, and then travel five hundred miles and go into another Rite Aid, you will see the same signs, and you will ignore them, because they are simply visual noise. But the hand-lettered sign is a personal communication from the merchant to you. There is only one sign like it; you will never see it again.

The art of lettering signs by hand is almost completely lost. As Dr. Boli has remarked more than once before, if a graphic designer wants text to look handwritten, she scours Google Fonts for a handwriting font that approximates the look she has in mind—as if there were no other way to create text that looks handwritten than by setting it in specially designed type.

But there’s good news. The art can be revived. You could learn it yourself from the same textbooks that taught the clerks of a century ago to become more valuable employees by mastering the art of the showcard.

As most of our readers have probably already guessed, there is a new page of Showcard Writing in the Eclectic Library.

The well-known artist Eli “Bonkers” Johnson will be opening his new show at an undisclosed location. The new show is entitled “Hey, Is This the Art Opening?” Potential patrons will wander through the neighborhoods most fashionable among the artsy set, looking into each storefront and asking the prescribed question. Mr. Johnson promises champagne and chocolate to all patrons who find the location of the show. It will be open for one night only, and then will close and reopen at a different undisclosed location, which Mr. Johnson says is necessary to maintain fidelity to the theme of the show.

Our old friend Father Pitt provides this picture of a porch pediment in the Lawrenceville neighborhood of Pittsburgh, showing the effect of separate ownership of rowhouses on a Victorian streetscape.

“Plague of Wallabies,” by guest cartoonist Thutmose XLVIII.

Yesterday Dr. Boli had a little too much to say about current trends in art, and specifically about how we judge art entirely by its utility, which is to say by the message it conveys. He brought up some examples of exhibits by living artists at the Carnegie Museum of Art.

Our frequent correspondent “Maypo” asked,

What is the good Doctor’s prediction of the timing of when the Carnegie Museum’s patrons lose their collective patience with this nonsense?

Dr. Boli thought this over, possibly for as much as thirty seconds, and came up with the answer he is sure is correct: when it is replaced with a different nonsense.

That is, after all, what has always happened in the past. The discussion came up in the first place because of an abstract expressionist work “of a purely decorative nature” by Virgil Cantini.

Much of abstract expressionism was arguably nonsense, but the whole point of it, and the thing the average yokel objected to, was that it had no message. As much as you could mock abstract expressionism, it trusted the viewer to make an interpretation of the work—or no interpretation, as Cantini apparently believed—from the work itself. Now you can ask what a work means and be given a correct and indisputable answer: “It means we should be aware of the marginalized living among us.” How do you know? “Because it has ‘be aware of the marginalized living among us’ written in 512-point Franklin Gothic on the front.”

But the great wheel keeps turning. There will come a time when art for the sake of message is old-fashioned, and only the yokels and the philistines will come to the museum looking for something with words on it that will tell them what to think. We might suppose that will be a glorious day for art. But it probably will not be. It will probably be the triumph of a different kind of nonsense that we have not been able to predict. But it will displace the nonsense that is current today.

A friend of Dr. Boli’s pointed out a sculpture by Virgil Cantini in Gateway Towers, a 27-floor 1960s modernist apartment building at the Point in Pittsburgh. Because this friend is the sort of friend who prefers not to leave stones unturned, he dug up a newspaper article from the Post-Gazette announcing the choice of Cantini for the sculpture.

According to John H. Smith, manager of the building, the Cantini work will be “toward an abstraction in bronze, glass and steel, of a purely decorative nature.” No story or symbolism will be attempted, he added.

Can you imagine the screaming fits that would ensue today if you asked a professional artist for a work “of a purely decorative nature”? Art is supposed to challenge bourgeois assumptions (the art and academic worlds being the last known habitat of the nearly extinct term “bourgeois”) and show us what’s wrong with the world! You can’t make me do that lowbrow arts-festival trash!

We judge art entirely by its utility today. Do you think Dr. Boli is being too harsh on the art world? Let us look at the descriptions of the four exhibits by living artists currently on display at the Carnegie Museum of Art. You may visit the site and read them for yourself if you like, although you should be warned in advance that the Carnegie Museum of Art has the ugliest Web site in the history of museum Web sites.

For this new body of work, Watt partnered with the Pittsburgh Poetry Collective and Carnegie Museum of Art’s educators in engaging workshops that inspired a list of words in response to Western Pennsylvania’s industrial history and present-day concerns.

You will note that words are an important part of this particular work or set of works. We are not to be trusted with our own interpretation of a visual work; we need words to tell us what is important about it.

How do you see yourself, your body, your views, ideas, and experiences as you move within this museum? I want, I demand, I need, I insist.  Andrea Geyer’s Manifest actively acknowledges and embraces the idea that a museum is made of many people: from visitors and staff to artists, we make and remake the museum every single day.

This work is nothing but words. Dr. Boli has made remarks before about works of art that consist entirely of the artist scrawling slogans on a bedsheet, and perhaps some readers thought he was indulging in humorous exaggeration. “I DEMAND THE MUSEUM TO WELCOME MY SMELL MY NOISE MY INADEQUACY AND MY STRUGGLE.” That is the entire text of one of these bedsheet banners, in unadorned black letters. The words are everything; there is nothing else to the art. They are not interesting words. They are not poetic words. They are simply a statement of what the artist thinks is important.

Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape examines environmental history and degradation, particularly in the American landscape, as well as urgent concerns about climate change, through the camera lens.

Photography is an excellent medium for addressing the problems of modern life; but Dr. Boli would submit that a photograph that needs an introductory statement of principles to be appreciated is not a very good photograph. The curators who mounted the exhibition should have the courage to let the pictures speak, and should stand out of their way while they are speaking.

Launched as a response to the devastation of living reefs due to global warming and ocean acidification, the Crochet Coral Reef resides at the nexus of art, science, and environmentalism.

This is a gorgeous work of art, and it is only a pity that it needs a practical excuse. Furthermore, the excuse dilutes the message. Art that simply celebrates the beauty of the coral reef will make us love that beauty and want to protect it. Art that comes at us with a chip on its shoulder disposes us to place it in a political context of approval or disapproval before we have even seen the art.

Dr. Boli will make a prediction that will make him anathema in the art community: not a single one of these exhibits will fix what’s wrong with the world. But though Virgil Cantini is not Dr. Boli’s favorite Pittsburgh sculptor, he did make the world better, because he made spaces more beautiful. To increase human happiness is the only way to save the world. The only way art can increase human happiness is through beauty, and it is time for us to disclaim any other purpose for it. It is time for us to stand with Oscar Wilde and say, “All art is quite useless.”

Are you a house-restorer looking for colored pictures of interiors decorated they way they were when the house you are restoring was built?

Are you a graphic designer looking for ideas for repeating patterns?

Are you a website owner looking for a colorful background to show off your questionable taste in design?

Are you an interior decorator curious about those barbarous days when interiors admitted other colors than beige and off-white?

Are you just nebby?

No matter which of those categories you fall into (and if you fall into none of the others, you surely must fall into the last), you will want to take a look at the latest page in the Eclectic Library, where we have assembled a large collection of catalogues and sample books of wallpaper. This is your chance to catch a glimpse of an alternate universe in which interiors need not be decorated in neutral colors. Spend an hour among these pictures, and your everyday world will seen joyless and drab. But rejoice! You can do something about that! A can of paint, a bucket of paste, and a few rolls of wallpaper can place you among the Edwardian gentility.

Dear Dr. Boli: Why is there fashion? —Sincerely, Naomi Campbell.

Dear Madam: Fashion exists so that we will throw away our clothes before we have a chance to complain about how shoddily they are made.

Dr. Boli does not participate in fashion. He stopped buying suits in 1874. Up to that point, he had bought only the best suits from the best tailors, and they wear well. He is running low on collars, however, and finding them hard to replace, since, contrary to his expectations, the fad for shirts with collars sewn on seems to have some lasting power.