leroy lettering machine

[jordan]

has anyone ever used one of these? i want to buy an old one off eBay just to mess around with it. i think it would be fun to send out books in envelopes where the address looks like the font from an old EC comic. should i bother?

 

[mjp]

I used a similar device in ye olden days. One that used a regular pen or pencil, rather than a LEROY PEN.

The results are cool in a mechanical-but-not-really kind of way, but the process is ridiculously tedious. Just like all the other old school letting methods.

 

[jordan]

i think it would be cool to see the process of lettering an EC comic with one of these. i'm assuming there were people who had this specific skill and could do it really fast and with uniform character spacing and line height.

i read through this whole thing about lettering and it made me wish i had taken a drafting elective in high school.

 

[mjp]

could do it really fast and with uniform character spacing and line height.

That kind of tool does the spacing and line height...you can't really change that. That's one of the things that looks weird about the result, it's monospaced. There's no kerning.

I took drafting in high school. I don't remember such an exhaustive study of letting though. Mostly a lot of criticism of how I erased pencil lines on my corners.

 

[hoochmonkey9]

Mostly a lot of criticism of how I erased pencil lines on my corners.

not surprising.

 

[jordan]

Wait, how is the character spacing locked? i get how the line height is locked, since the guide is against a straightedge, but you have to manually set where you ink each character, right? unless you're only lettering ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO.... over and over again.

 

[mjp]

The one I used had a kind of gear/ratchet system that advanced the pen/pencil when you'd lift it from the guide. I see the illustration you've got there isn't really the same thing. Yours looks like more fun.