Page 8 - Pharmacy History 22 Mar 2004

Photographically produced labels – for pharmacists with time on their hands!
Researched by Geoff Miller
The following story about producing labels by hand in the pharmacy comes from the days before desktop publishing and the almost universal use of computers as a business tool.
Frank Casson, a Pharmacist from Loxton in South Australia, wrote to the Australasian Journal
of Pharmacy in April 1921 about producing “Home Made Labels”.
He said, “ It often happens that a few labels for a particular purpose are required, but one hesitates at the cost of having them printed.
To take a common case – a man starts a new business in an up country township. He has plenty of time on his hands but not much £-s-d. (money), and he wants to put up his own corn paint, cough mixture and he also wants a dispensing label The Mouth
Wash. Not really ordering a thousand of. It would be convenient to have a few labels to start the goods. Time enough to run up a printing bill when the money begins to come in.
This can be done at nominal cost if you have, or can borrow, a half plate camera.”
Casson then goes on to describe
how to draw a design on white demy paper, copying lettering and style from American Magazines. The lettering is carefully drawn using a ruler and a Tee square and is filled in with a pen or brush using Indian ink.
The design is made four times the size of the required label, and then reduced using the camera, to make a plate which may contain several different sizes of labels.
The plate is developed in a mixture of pyro and bromide and then prints are made by exposing a piece of sensitised photographic paper, which costs about 6d a square yard from Kodak, in a
printing frame together with the glass plate negative.
The exposure time can be anything up to half an hour in bright sunlight, and several frames are put out at the same time. After development and washing and drying carefully, the finished labels are cut up by hand ready for use.
Casson concludes Needless to say, all this takes time, but the lettering is fascinating work, and always useful practice. In this case the designs on the card can be worked up in colour if preferred. And used as show cards. Hand lettering can be much more beautiful than printer’s type, and if you like your designs, when the time comes to launch out you can have line blocks made from them—your own artistic labels on your own proprietaries.
Examples of Casson’s labels.
Figure 1: Glass Plate for printing multiple labels.
8 ■ Pharmacy History Australia
volume 2 ■ no 23 ■ July 2004