Letraset Dry-Transfer Lettering

[Nick Shinn]

Call yourself a pro?
This is what the big boys used 🙂

[Bruce]

In the early 1970s I worked at Charrette, the art supply store based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at that time the largest reseller of Letraset in the world. As someone already passionate about type, I took a special interest in this product (and in Chartpak and Normatype, which we also sold) and in 1975 had the enormous good fortune to be sent on a trip to England to visit Letraset, Chartpak, Winsor and Newton (paints, brushes), and Blundell Harling (measurement tools such as scale rulers). What astonished me about the Letraset plant was the fanatical cleanliness of the place. (And by hilarious contrast, parts of the W & N plant seemed almost mediaeval!) The sheets were produced on what was basically a web press, with an endless roll of polyethylene being spooled into an area with a very acurate silkscreening rig, then sent onward to be waxed overall.

I began using Letraset in my architect dad's office in the 1960s, then later as a graphic designer in the 1970 used it a lot. One could often get far better spacing in titles and headlines doing this oneself with Letraset rather than buying Typositor output from someone who was generally working in tight-no-touch spacing mode. Wish I had a nickel for every line of Typositor type — allegedly ready to go — that I had to wax and then cut apart to respace letter by letter . . .

What's amazing is that I still have many, many sheets of Letraset, stored in boxes marked Serif, Sans, Decorative, and Symbols, and they are still usable, even though the newest ones probably date from 1980. The wax doesn't hold as well as it once did, and the burnishing tends to make the polyethylene warp and wave a bit more, but I think it is a testimony to the extremely high manufacturing standards of Letraset that these objects are still viable forty years later. I doubt very much that Presstype would still be that way. Certainly Normatype had a tendency to separate from the backing sheet even in the days when it was freshly-manufactured.

[rs_donsata]

I saw my father use letraset to make some letterings for his business in the early 80's... seemed quite hard to get it right.

[5star]

Coolio, I've seen these in the art supply stores. Looks like a great way to create some distressed letter shapes and funky whatever.

n.

[Té Rowan]

*blink* *blink* I found an old rub-down sheet in a box with qsn replies. Not Letraset, though, but edding ref. 2013, 12pt Grotesk Schmalfett minuscules. No idea what the hey I used it for.

[Letterpress1964]

sata
16 May 2012 — 11:38am

I saw my father use letraset to make some letterings for his business in the early 80's... seemed quite hard to get it right.

Hi - yes it used to take ages - enough to drive you mad - and then my little boy sometimes ripped up the finished a/w for a "joke".

- David

[dezcom]

Like any other skill, it took practice to use Letraset well. I had plenty of practice, using it from ints initial release in the 1960s until the mid 1980s, when the Mac took over.