Keuffel & Esser Leroy Lettering Guides

When you hit print on your computer and listen to the motors, gears and rollers come to life, you sometimes lose sight of how much harder it was at one time to produce a repeatable typeface where a press was not feasible. For architects and engineers, plans needed to be legible to avoid confusion. In 1937 the K+E Leroy lettering tools were released and became so popular that by the 1960’s the GSA required all engineering documents being submitted to the US Government to be lettered in the K+E Gothic template. 

Each guide contains a series of characters engraved into the surface (PVC in this case, but celluloid in the past). The stylus (seen to the right) follows these engravings and transfers them to paper via an attached ink nib, pen or pencil. The stylus can be adjusted to write at an angle with the adjustment of one of the arms. While it may seem barbaric by today’s standards in practice it is quite easy to use and I can see why it became so popular.

The guides I have are all standard engineering and alphabet guides but Keuffel & Esser also made guides to-order. You could get one with a signature, or special characters your engineers used repeatedly on documents. After cleaning all the guides and putting some fresh ink into my Koh-i-noor Rapidograph pen and taping down a ruler for a baseline I decided to give it a spin. The pen is held into the stylus via a quick release clamp so changing sizes takes seconds. These guides definitely show signs of heavy use but after 40+ years they work perfectly – creating crisp repeatable letters and shapes.

The standard kit included several guides, a stylus, several different width ink nibs, a hand lettering tool and manual. Along with the small nibs in the kit, K+E worked with Koh-i-noor who provided them with ink pens (that held more ink than the standard nibs).

For a great inside view on the manufacturing and history of these guides check out this article by Joe Soper.