Philadelphia Graffiti Handstyles — Street Penmanship, from Gangster Prints to Wickeds

Philadelphia has never had the mainstream aura of New York, and its writing has stayed largely off the record. Yet few cities have produced a scriptural texture of their own — a shared way of shaping letters that goes beyond the individual signature. Local writers call it Whip City: in the sense used in boxing or dancing, the whip is the energy pushed into a stroke to get speed and consistency at once. Named “Gangster Prints” when they first appeared in the mid-to-late 1960s, the old Philly hands have since branched into a whole family of variants, developed on walls and refined on paper.

In the spring of 2023, French graphic designer and architect François Chastanet spent time in the streets of Philadelphia with his camera. He also sat down for notebook lettering sessions with writers from several generations — a rare look at the preparatory work that happens before anything reaches a wall. The result traces the ongoing evolution of the city’s handstyles, with particular attention to the condensed, monumental “Tall Hands” and the “Wickeds”, elaborate wild-style signatures that demand exceptional control and exist nowhere else. Chastanet has been doing this kind of close visual analysis for two decades, from Pixação: São Paulo Signature to Cholo Writing: Latino Gang Graffiti in Los Angeles and Dishu: Ground Calligraphy in China.

Philadelphia Graffiti Handstyles: An Exploration in The Early 2020s gathers 125 color photographs and diagrams across 160 hardcover pages in a large 24×36 cm format, with a foreword by Philadelphia writer and researcher Sam Meyerson aka CURVE — co-author, with Bret Syfert, of the Tallhand & Punchline fonts and manual — and an essay by Chastanet himself. Le Grand Jeu invites you to the Paris launch, with the author present to sign copies.

📖 Philadelphia Graffiti Handstyles by François Chastanet — book launch
🗓 Friday, October 2 | 🕕 6 – 9 P.M.
📍 Le Grand Jeu, 15 passage de Ménilmontant, Paris 11