About

The Mission

The mission of this project is to educate and promote the fascination of the now obsolete technology of transfer type—most notably Letraset. It is half checklist, half altar. What started as a rhetorical “I wonder how many sheets of Letraset I would need to have a full, complete set?” has now become a visual and typographic springboard into topics of style, taste and typefaces named after hot dogs. The goal is to get one sheet of everything! And once such a monumental collection is amassed, I would like to donate it to a collection, museum or library for future study.

The Contributors

Joe Galbreath is young enough to have never been properly trained on the art of transfer type application but old enough to be a tenured professor at West Virginia University. Somewhere between earning his BFA in Graphic Design from the University of Akron and getting his MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, he became fascinated with graphic design technology and its recent past. At some point, perhaps through a random Letraset catalog or one of his many out-of-date production books, he learned about paste-ups, mechanicals and transfer type. He teaches Advanced Typography at WVU every fall and makes his students use Letraset at least once. He keeps a box of ragged, half-used sheets out in the lab all year round.