One hardly ever sees them nowadays. Lettraset had a whole range of fonts, letters & numbers on like a grease-proof backing paper. You placed the letter you wanted face down on the paper and rubbed the back of it with a biro. The letter would transfer to the paper.

It was used for doing posh layouts, obviously in the days before WYSIWYG DTP systems. Type-writers, of course, were limited to one boring monospaced font.

They also had a range of, say, fancy shading, such as dots, hashing, etc. that could be used in art work.

As a kid we used to get these scenes (such as the surface of an alian planet) and rub down Lettraset spacemen, rockets and stuff, to make a picture.

Surely you had this in the USA?

>Sorry this did spike your interest. But really, it didn't mine either. I thought it was just cool.
>
>What is a Lettraset? Never heard of it.
>
>>Most the fun in spirograph was the sensation of the tracing and seeing the pattern slowly come to life. This, I'm sorry, is no more interesting than a screen saver or Media Player's background patterns.
>>
>>Now if there were a PC-based equiv of the old Lettraset transfer panaramas, complete with mouse scribble to press the chosen, dragged figures onto the background! ... :-)
>>
>>
>>>Do you remimber the Spirograph toy. Well here is one online.
>>>
>>>http://www.washington.edu/bibsys/mattf/nina/