At the church I'm MD for I am looking to switch back to the older style hymn board that used to be used years ago. The one that is used now is magnetic and the magnetic numbers for 5's 3's are all broken. The company the church bought the numbers from is out of business.
At my church we are three hymnals, RitualSong, OCP(called the blue book in our parish) and a parish white book. I need something to distinguish the three colored books, so I am looking for letters R, W and B. I thought of using colored paper but that doesn't look professional enough and probably will be hard to see from a distance. The company that sells the older style numbers sell letters as well but not individual letters and only sells them in set! That is not possible to buy four sets of whole alphabet letters of which I'll only ever use 3 individual letters.
They need to be the following size: The board piece measures 2 ¼” X 4 3/8”.
Go to St. Google and type in "hymn board numbers." There are several companies that sell the boards, off-the-shelf numbers, and can do custom jobs. But I think that unless you can find someone local, you may have to buy number and letter sets.
In a previous parish I played for (and attended school), we had 3 books in the pews: Worship 3, Glory & Praise (the first blue hardcover edition from 1984), and Music Issue (which were in brown covers, and were the "brown book" to us). To differentiate between the books, we had red, blue, and brown colored strips (cut out from construction paper and laminated) that ran the width of the board and the height of the number cards. These were placed up first, and then the numbers were put up over top of them, so you had a colored block sticking out to the left (or right, or both sides, depending on who put the numbers up for Mass) of the number to indicate which book. Hope this helps.
In my current parish (where we use Breaking Bread, soon to be probably changed to Worship IV) our numbers are individual pieces of pexiglass cut to the right size, with large number stickers stuck on--the reflective kind you usually see on the sides of mailboxes. It works pretty well, and they're a lot more durable than the tagboard cards I had in previous parishes.
I am researching the same thing, just now. Letters are harder to come by than numerals, that's for certain. Mine need to be 2 7/8 inches in height. I would mainly need, for now, "P" for page, As we only use a J.S. Paluch missalette right now.
When you say the 5s and 3s are all broken, do you mean the magnets are broken or the numbers are broken? In any event, what I would do is put the word out in your parish for a carpenter/ wood worker and see if they can't make the letters for you and make new 5s and 3s. You can buy magnets and glue them to the numbers/ letters. Just a suggestion.
To participate in the discussions on Catholic church music, sign in or register as a forum member, The forum is a project of the Church Music Association of America.