Part of Metal Type’s Printing Advice Section, here Phil discusses printing signs.<\/p>\n
At the start of my apprenticeship, we printed a lot of signs. \u00a0All kinds of signs. \u00a0For Sale, For Rent, Rooms to Rent, etc.<\/span><\/p>\n We sold many of these directly from our small shop office, but we also sold all manner of signs to a stationery shop that was located in downtown Regina, by the name of Hazen-Twiss Stationers. <\/span><\/p>\n This shop was started by two business men of this name, and ran for some years, when the partnership split up and Mr. Twiss opened a shop in Saskatoon. <\/span><\/p>\n Anyway, Mr. Hazen here in Regina sold a wide variety of stationery items including some signage that we printed for him. The production runs were always very small, at about 6 signs per caption. Dad always printed one or two more for us as a stocking item for our shop. We got about 10c per sign from Mr. Hazen and sold them to the public for about double that. <\/span><\/p>\n This went on for many years and when we finally got out of this, sign business, we had about 100 different titles. We gave away our final stock to a local church bazaar and then just scrapped whatever was left over.<\/span><\/p>\n All of these signed were printed letterpress of course and on about 50thou, thick white cardstock. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n We used wood type from about 10 line to about 20 line which was the biggest we had at that time. \u00a0The largest of these signs were printed on our 12 x 18 C & P hand fed press. We used to lay these freshly printed signs all over the shop to dry overnight. We used regular job ink to avoid washing up the press after such a short run. \u00a0Took over night for the ink to dry.<\/span><\/p>\n50thou Cardstock<\/h2>\n