Originally published at: Store specializes in vintage Letraset | Boing Boing
…
9 Likes
Gosh - an immediate 40-year-old hit of nostalgia, right there! And supply is limited, they are merely selling off excess sheets from a bulk buy they picked up from an old art supply store.
Makes me wonder if there is a market for part-used Letraset sheets.
(BTW @beschizza your first Letrashop link in the text goes to the same place the Letraset link goes to.)
10 Likes
Nice! I remeber that stuff from my job training.
Do they still produce that stuff, or is this selling off the last stocks?
5 Likes
we used to have a shop in soho
4 Likes
Read the comment above yours. 
5 Likes
I think I have some old half-used ChartPak somewhere…maybe now’s the time to sell it on eBay for a million bucks
4 Likes
Same here. My mother used to bring these home from work for my sister and I to play with.
7 Likes
In my case, IIRC, it was my Dad. I’m not sure if he brought them from work but I do recall him using them for marking up electronics projects.
4 Likes
O.M.G.! I was only talking about this to a friend of mine earlier this week. Back in the 70’s I worked for a small print and publishing house in town, and I used to put books together from the original manuscript and photos. We had a very early photo-setter, an Addressograph-Multigraph, which was punch-tape driven. It produced long galleys of texts, which I cut up and pasted onto art board with a hot-wax system, but display type wasn’t available, so Letraset and Mecanorma were used, the catalogues were very heavily used!
This book is one I put together, starting from the author’s manuscript and photos, there are blank spaces in the text, due to the British Ministry of Defence redacting stuff that they’d previously approved - that was an on-going issue right up to publication day. Letraset didn’t get so much of a look-in, other than the title on the dust-jacket. I got a credit in it for my work, as well. 
8 Likes
I still have some Letraset sheets, but they aren’t very old, and I think they’re all Helvetica, so I probably shouldn’t rely on those alone for my retirement planning
1 Like
I was lucky enough to drop in on the day my art supply store found a couple crates of these in the storage room and put them out for a dollar a sheet.
Also have some symbol fonts (+ a whole sheet of copyright symbols) and rub down texture from a design shop I used to work in. (again, stuff that was at the bottom of a closet for years).
All right, thank you.
1 Like
I miss the hands on feeling of using transfer lettering, my drafting table, and my self-healing mat. I lettered so many maps for RPGs with those
2 Likes
<obligatory NFT joke>
2 Likes
As a bit of a follow-up, I sent a link to this to my former work colleague, and by a strange and spooky coincidence, he’d very recently found a sheet of Letraset still in the original Letraset paper bag that it was purchased in.
It’s totally useless! The plastic backing sheet has just turned brittle and fallen to pieces, so the stuff does have a definite lifespan, and needs to be approached with care.
5 Likes
oooh, that Letraset burnisher is a beauty. i want one. that being said, i’m 100% entirely happy to never have to use Letraset again. like digital audio files over vinyl and cassette, gimme Indesign over hand-set type any day. i’ve been to those places and i’ve done that. never again.
5 Likes
Ha, I still have plenty of old LetraSet sheets as well as Zip-A-Tone overlay and the paddle burnisher, the ball burnisher, AND the tiny swiveling blade Xacto. Does anyone remember the technique of burnishing a letter off from the backing sheet just into the air and then using the very tip of a #11 xacto blade to catch it? Once free from the backing and loose you could carefully apply it to the desired object, say, the curved surface of a model. We did this in industrial design class for making models. For extra credit now: what did graphic art material and process did we use to create COLORED lettering?
4 Likes
Throw in some Rubylith and halftone screens and I’m in.
3 Likes
I used to work at an art supply store and we sold tons of letraset sheets. We had a stock of shading sheets that we kept specifically for the cartoonist Hugh Haney which was pretty cool.
2 Likes
