Hand-Lettered Breakfast Lunch Dinner Sign, Genoa NV, c. 1970–2000

The Piece

A long hand-lettered trade sign reading BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER, the three words separated by painted dots and set inside a red panel with rounded ends on a white ground. The lettering is a tall condensed serif, drawn by a sign painter rather than cut from vinyl, and you can see it in the letterforms: the strokes swell and taper, the serifs are cut at slightly different angles from one letter to the next, and the spacing was judged by eye to fill the panel rather than set by a machine.

It is painted on hardboard, with countersunk screw holes at the corners and at the center of each long edge where it was fixed to a building or a sign frame.

The red has crazed across its entire surface into a fine web of cracks, the pattern enamel makes after years of sun and temperature swing. It has not flaked or lost color, it has simply aged. At the chipped lower corner the edge shows a layer of blue beneath the white, which means this board carried an earlier sign before it was repainted for this one. Two working lives on one piece of hardboard.

History & Provenance

Acquired as a diner sign from Genoa, Nevada.

Genoa is the oldest permanent settlement in the state, founded in 1851 as Mormon Station on the Carson Branch of the California Trail, a decade before Nevada was a territory and thirteen years before statehood. It sits under the eastern wall of the Sierra in Carson Valley, and it has kept its scale: a few streets, a courthouse museum, the old bar, and a steady traffic of people driving up from Carson City and over from Tahoe to eat and look around. A restaurant there serves travelers more than locals, which is exactly the kind of place that puts all three meals on one long sign facing the road.

Hand-lettered signage of this kind was the ordinary language of American roadside business until vinyl and computer-cut lettering took the trade in the 1980s and 1990s. A local painter was hired, laid out the panel, and brushed it. The work is anonymous by nature, which is why the surviving boards are valued for the hand in them rather than for a maker's name.

The dating here rests on construction rather than on documents. Hardboard substrate, enamel lettering, and the letterform style place the sign in the later twentieth century, and the blue paint found under the white shows it was painted over an earlier board, so the hardboard itself is older than the lettering on it. A confirmed establishment name and operating dates would tighten this considerably.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A sign this long does something no picture can. It runs eye-level across a wall and sets the register of a whole room in one line of text, which is why restaurants, kitchens, bars and finished basements keep buying them and why the good ones do not sit around.

What makes this one worth having over a reproduction is the surface. The crazing is a record of a board that hung outdoors in the Carson Valley and took the sun, and the blue under the white is a record of the sign that came before it. No one manufactures that. Hang it over a range, along a hallway, above a doorway, or lean it on a plate rail, and it reads as an object that did a job rather than as decor bought to look like one.