Tea rooms

The weather has been warm and sunny and if this building had still housed the Ocean Beach Tea Rooms I would most certainly have stepped in for afternoon tea. The idea of tea rooms by the beach evokes some atavistic memory of the sound of the seaside on a hot day, the splish splash of gentle waves as they break onto sand too hot to stand on, the strangely lulling hubbub carried on the breeze. What surprises me about the signage, dated 1898, is how well it seems to work, despite there being so many things wrong with it from a typographic viewpoint. The sizing is wonky, the spacing inconsistent, and worst of all, every A is a different type style!