Book du jour - debossed lettering

The lettering I'm using on the cover of the Black Books is time-consuming and fiddly - but I'm really enjoying doing it.

The font, Gill Sans Ultra Bold, needs a bit of extra spacing between the letters. I'm using it at 72pt - printing it out and then transferring to the piece of board that's cut for the front cover (careful positioning is essential). First time I tried this, I glued on the paper and cut round the letters; this time I used carbon paper to trace the letters. You don't actually need to trace much - dots can be joined later, as long as you remember what goes with what -

Cutting is with a scalpel - don't cut all the way through the board, then use the tip of the scalpel to lift a corner (or two) of the letter and peel it out. If the cutting has been fairly even, the letter will come out easily. Check that the letters are removed to roughly the same depth.

Once the cover is glued on (with a paste mixture rather than straight pva - that would dry too fast), you can find the letters and use your finger to define them as much as possible -- then take your bone folder and simply run it round the edges of the debossed letters. "Simply" - hah! You carefully and slowly do this, using gentle pressure, feeling for the edges and going right into the corners. A slip of the tip will leave a shiny skid-mark. Inside the letters, the tip has left a shiny line - I'd rather it didn't, but it does help the letters to stand out and be read.

For tracing the next cover, I used an awl to mark the corners, then joined the dots with the scalpel. Fortunately nothing went wrong, no letters were accidently joined to others... The curvy bits are best done with carbon paper. Perhaps there are fonts that are all angles - I haven't searched for them.

The light shines through the cut-back areas - this is a way of checking for an even depth.

I've been cutting the letters quite deep - would a fairly shallow cut  make for a good-enough effect?

An advantage of using this technique is that it helps keep the book titles short - I'm aiming to make them even shorter - perhaps as short as "in", "at", "over" - prepositions can be so abstract and open to interpretation.... This ties in with the "small words" textile pieces I've been making.