Deca-dry Dry Transfer Letters

For Font Fanatics Only

I started creating newsletters, posters, and comic strips back in fourth grade. Starting in fifth grade, my mom would take them to work, run off photocopies, and I would sell them on the bus ride back from school. Then a hobby shop opened up near us. “Applewood Hobbies” it was called. You’ll hear a lot about this place in future posts here.

Anyway, aside from the usual collections of miniature soldiers, models, paints, games, and other things this place sold, it also had dry-transfer letters, which I found in December 1980, when I was 11 years old. There were two main brands: DecaDry and Letraset. Here are some pictures:

This is what the spinning rack of them looked like. What seemed to be hundreds of choices were available. My favorites were the gold Old English (from Letraset, also pictured below), and some I don’t even remember the name of. There’s still a bunch of those old sheets in an old box full of my early fanzines and publications.

The back of the DecaDry sheets looked like the image below.

In the age before digital typesetting, if you didn’t work for a phototypesetting place, this was all you had. They were a pain to put down, but so much fun. They were expensive, especially on a $2 per week allowance, which also had to cover the new Stephen King, James Herbert and Peter Straub paperbacks ($2.95 and up in those days), perhaps a nice new set of World War II miniatures, or a lead figurine of a minotaur, or that LP of 12 x 5 by the Rolling Stones which I had been eyeballing since the summer of fifth grade...Sigh.

      A few years ago, I paid a visit to Thompson’s Hobbies in Lakewood, Colorado (now closed) and found that yes! you can still purchase these sheets. I can’t imagine what trickle of a revenue stream these must bring in for whatever parent corporation owns them, but the fact that you can still find them in this day and age is remarkable.