A Family Firm Dealing in Signs and Wonders

[Wandering Eyes]

In an era when it feels ever harder to trust what you're seeing, how edifying to find something “fake” that actually authenticates a genuine, old-school, artisanal flair.

That's not to deny the technological short-cuts nowadays available to John Cox, compared to when he started trading out of his garage back in 1982. But anyone touring the Lexington premises of Thorough-Graphics–this Aladdin's cave, teeming with color and invention, where Cox and his family supply around 70 percent of signage to the local Thoroughbred industry–will unfailingly be drawn to the “antique” signs he has been contriving over the last decade or so.

It is little more than a sideline, developed during fallow periods in the sales calendar that drives most turnover. But there's no mistaking the satisfaction it provides, to craftsman and customers alike.

Cox had always been intrigued, back at the University of Kentucky, by trompe l'oeil (literally, “trick the eye”).

“We had a visiting professor who was big into that stuff,” Cox recalls. “So the first semester with him, I carved a deflated basketball out of wood: it was stained with leather dye, and had all the dimples in it, and lettering to make it look deflated. And then, the second semester, I carved an IZOD alligator shirt, again with folds in it, just using different techniques to make it look real–the round end of a ball peen hammer to give it texture, things like that.”

Paradoxically, the charming “antique” effect Cox can simulate now, as a seasoned master of his trade, would be much harder to achieve with genuinely aged material.

“People have offered me old barn wood and asked whether I could paint on that,” he says. “But it'll have stuff in the grain, and the original paint will have gone into little cracks. It's much easier to paint it all new, and then make it look old. So we start by trying to make them look just like they would have done, when brand new, with the correct typefaces for the period. And then it's about knowing how paint ages over the years. We've redone so many signs that have had taken lots of weather, rust and rot. So we just try to emulate that the best we can: sanding, a little wood carving, and glazing to make it yellow the way old lead paints would.”

Cox leaves the reverse pristine, ensuring that nobody will ever be deceived about what they might be buying. And, as it happens, the “new old” look aptly symbolizes the evolution of the business: John and his wife Ann now being joined by son John Jr. and often, especially during the baseball off season (her husband is a minor league pitcher), by daughter Abby. For this is a true family firm, passing skills from one generation to the next–and, as such, typical of the myriad ancillary specialists nourished by the concentration of an international industry in this neighborhood.

Credit Chris McGrath

Growing up, Cox had a typical local exposure to horses. His mother sold bloodstock advertising, and the family went racing at Keeneland and the Red Mile. One of the ways he paid his way through college was as usher in the reserved seats at Keeneland; another was working at a local sign company focused on Thoroughbred sales: branding for stall doors, flowerboxes, awnings. And while his brother Jim followed in their mother's footsteps, later joining Darley as head of marketing, at just 23 Cox decided there was enough demand to give his former employers a little competition.

“I thought I'd just be cheaper and get all their business!” he recalls. “Well, it doesn't work that way. I quickly learned that it was about building relationships. It's a unique little niche. We can do a lot of other signs, too, but when the sales are rolling, we have to turn away everything else because we just don't have time.”

An annual highlight of the cycle is Saratoga, where Cox has been going for 35 years. Actually he made the Hall of Fame plaques at the National Museum of Racing, until they ran out of space and went virtual. But the main action up there, just as in Lexington, has always been the sales–where clients typically have permanent boards on which a film of clear static, with appropriate lettering, can be peeled away and replaced.

“Fasig-Tipton give us a little place to set up and work on the property,” he explains. “We try to do it all before we get there, but inevitably somebody wins a race across the street and a half-brother needs an update sign. We also paint the jockey [statuettes], in front of the pavilion, in the colors of Grade I winners since the previous sale.”

And while they don't paint the Travers canoe, they did a version in green-and-yellow when Lane's End found one to celebrate Code of Honor's win a few years ago; and then repainted it in the Repole colors, to show at the September Sale, after City of Light came up with Fierceness. That's instructive both of the improvisation that characterizes many client requests, and of how all of us, without particularly noticing, develop a brand awareness.

As you walk round the workshops and storerooms, and see samples leaning here and there, you realize how effectively different farms have identified with their liveries: gray-and-yellow for Stone Farm, for instance, yellow-and-black for Claiborne. Not forgetting, of course, the familiar greens and blues of two rival auction houses.

All these color schemes tend to be developed by clients themselves, with agency help, but it's Thorough-Graphics that deploys them.

“People want their colors on everything from their card boxes to a feed tub that no horse ever eats out of,” Cox says. “And we also do plenty out on the farms, from vehicles to stallion plaques. We've done a bit of everything, right down to jockey silks on the bottom of a swimming pool.”

Some clients additionally seek creative guidance. Some, equally, will go their own way and break all the design rules. If they do, well, the customer is always right.

“I've made signs I wouldn't necessarily put my name on,” Cox admits. “You try to talk them out of it, but their kid has designed it or something. There's several you see, driving around town, that you think, 'Hmm, there's a kid involved in this somehow!'”

Cox, who has taught design and layout classes across North America, seeks to combine functionality with aesthetics.

“What makes a good sign?” he asks. “It's about how you manipulate fonts and colors to get an effect. Since the invention of these little 'cricut' machines, which cut out letters so that people can just stick them on, it's not the same. Because they don't know about how to make things pleasing to the eye. So, yes, we'd like to think we can do that better.”

Cox and colleagues who share those standards around the country send each other photos of particularly egregious signs. “We're like the sign police,” he says. “Writing tickets.” Conversely he likes to surround himself, as a collector, with the best of his trade.

“It helps me, as a designer, to have all this visual inspiration around us here, all the different colors,” he says, pointing to a wall. “Those are original show cards for bands that played in San Jose and San Francisco in the late '70s, early '80s. I had a friend who hand-painted them all, to put in ticket office kiosks. I convinced him to move to Lexington and we started a sign-painting school here, in 1989. We'd only been going six months when he had a heart attack and died. He was only 46. He was a real inspiration to me.”

Credit Chris McGrath

Cox donated many samples of that friend's work to the American Sign Museum at Cincinnati, which includes a model “Main Street.” Last May, moreover, he spent eight days working on storefronts for that remarkable exhibit, one of around 40 experts giving their time from around the nation.

But if the best share timeless standards, their working landscape remains ever shifting–for better or worse. They can't use redwood anymore, for instance, and sandblasting red cedar instead evidently yields trickily uneven outcomes. And modern paint, even the expensive enamel that Cox uses, doesn't last so well because it can no longer contain lead. On the other hand, technology has transformed opportunities since the firm's foundation.

The continuity comes through the people instead. Until recently, John Jr. was working as a lobbyist at the state capital in Frankfort. But he has gone back to his roots with a view to consolidating his parents' work across decades of transformation.

Today Cox can show you round the workshop and explain the workings of giant, computerized printers and plotters, whether cutting out adhesive vinyl or printing out static cling-on. Ink is dried by ultra-violet lights as a suction belt pulls it through.

On the other hand, some challenges remain as old as the frontier. Cox points to one sign from a famous farm. “Here's one we're having to redo because it got shot a couple times,” he explains. “Never know what happens out there on a country road!”

In between, Cox has helped to shape the background–in barely noticed increments that aggregate to something fundamental–to the professional lives of a whole community. At the breeding stock sales last November, Thorough-Graphics clients made 22 of the top 25 sales at Fasig-Tipton and nine of the top 10 at Keeneland. Not that they're taking specific credit. “Our people sell some $1,000 horses too,” Cox acknowledges. “But we wouldn't mind working on commission sometimes!”

His handiwork is so ubiquitous that he even takes credit for introducing branded hip stickers to sale consignments. As so often, necessity was the mother of invention: if your hands ache enough, you're going to come up with something like static cling.

“We used to hand-paint everything,” Cox recalls. “Didn't have computers or plotters or printers. I just learned the same way sign painters had always learned. But it got to a point, maybe the early '90s, where I kept getting more and more business but couldn't keep up, simply because I couldn't paint that quickly. It took a real toll.

“Even in college I used to dream of a machine where you just stuck a piece of poster board in one end and it came out the other, finished. And now that's exactly what I have. We've had a flatbed printer about 18 years. So it's all come a long way. It's all very different, but still the same kind of product.”

So does part of him, having learned the lore of the old craftsmen, feel that it's almost cheating? Almost too easy?

“Maybe at first,” he says with a wry grin. “But now, not at all. It was very laborious doing all that stuff. Your hands hurt. We still do some things by hand, like the statuettes. But otherwise I'm very happy to say adios to all of that.”

Guess you might even call it a sign of the times.

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