Comics: IBM Typewriter “Lettering”

The earliest use of IBM typewriter “lettering” may have been on Stan Drake’s “The Heart of Juliet Jones”. In Cartoonist Profiles #4, November 1969, Drake was interviewed and asked about the lettering.

Q: Would you tell us what you did about the business of lettering your strip?

A: I was paying a considerable amount of money to a lettering man [According to Irwin Hasen, it was Ben Oda.] to letter my strip each week and I began to think, “Wouldn’t it be neat if I could just type it out and save all that money for the lettering.” So I got in touch with IBM and wanted to know if I had a lettering man letter up the alphabet, whether they could make a set of keys for their Executive typewriter, with these hand-drawn letters. My hope was that I could then sit down and type out my balloons and save the cost of a lettering man. But IBM told me that it would cost me as much as $7000 to make a set of keys like this. I realized finally that they didn’t want to do it because such a machine would be the only one existent, and if it needed repairs they’d have to be done specially, etc. I did actually settle for one of their standard type faces that looked something like comic strip lettering, but it was just so perfect that it wasn’t hand lettering. I did strips with this for a while though. I finally gave it up when the syndicate decided that they didn’t like it as well as hand-drawn lettering. But I guess I did save something like $1400 in lettering costs during the period when I used it.

Drake used IBM typewriter “lettering” on the dailies from January 10 to July 9, 1966, and the Sundays from February 13 to July 17, 1966. 

June 26, 1966, Courtesy of Heritage Auctions

The typeface was called IBM Directory. Below is a page from the 1964 National Office Machine Dealer’s Association Blue Book.

The same typeface was used by Neal Adams on several projects including “A View from Without...” in Phase 1, 1970. 

Courtesy of Heritage Auctions

Below are side-by-side typeface details from the Blue Book, “The Heart of Juliet Jones” and “A View from Without...”.

Further Viewing

Heritage Auctions, Stan Drake and Neal Adams

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