Adventures In Writing On Album Pages...

I recently stumbled across this book:



This copy from the 60s discusses hand lettering. I really enjoyed my drafting class in high school, and if I had been born a few decades earlier I may well have pursued it as a career. Anyhow, I was inspired to to give it a go. I normally label things by putting little bits of paper into my album by the stamps in question; however, there are a few cases when I would rather write directly on the background page.

First I got some stuff on ebay:



I was lucky and found a partial Leroy lettering set with just the bits I needed (small templates and a scriber) for $20. These scribers were designed for technical pens & pencils with a 1/8 inch barrel. A modern Rotring drafting pencil or technical pen will do, but they are kinda pricey -- the pens are also a bit finicky. So I decided to go with a cheap 03 micron pen. Now the question was how to attach the pen to the scriber? For that I found a plastic adapter designed to attach a pencil to a compass, but the adapter holds the pencil at an angle. I needed the pen to be at 90 degrees to the scriber body. So I put the adapter under a heat gun, waited for it to get pliable, and straitened it out. Then I attached it to the scriber with the scriber's offset screw. With the old pens the scriber was designed to use that screw was used to adjust the height of the scriber so ink would flow properly, but we don't need that with a modern, porous tip pen. This is the result:



For my first test, I wanted to put a date on a page margin -- the illustrated background pages in my album already have a date in the left margin and I find it very handy. Here is the result showing both an illustrated page and my blank album page with freshly a lettered date:



I'm pretty happy with it, and now have all sorts of ideas about writing and drawing on my album pages...

Demonstration...



Don

I remember when all our engineering drawing were inked and lettering was done by Leroy.

My God! It's been years since I thought about Leroy sets. I've forgotten such things existed.

Thanks for a trip down memory lane. I haven't seen a Leroy set in decades. We only had the drafters use them if the client was willing to pay for it. Even for an efficient drafter Leroy was sloooowwww compared to hand lettering.