Business signage with a letter per row - where to put apostrophe?

Solution 1:

I had originally only provided a comment, but I'm going to turn it into an answer at the risk of providing something subjective.

But before that, I should say that there is no rule here. This isn't even something that could be answered by any normal style guide.

It seems to me that there are two general approaches that could be take to this.

One is to give each letter and each punctuation mark its own space:

MY    LADY'S    INN

The other general approach is to put the punctuation alongside one or the other letter.

But which one?

MY    LADY'S    INN

MY    LADY'S    INN

In addressing this, I'd consider the following:

MY    LADIES'    INN

Here, we have the plural possessive. Since we aren't using a scheme whereby the apostrophe goes on its own, it has to go with a specific letter. The only letter it can go with is the s.

Which means that as a so-called general rule, we can't create a system where the apostrophe comes before a letter—because it would be impossible to form a plural possessive of a word that ends in s if we did.

Therefore, we could use this consistently applied system:

MY    LADY'S    INN

MY    LADIES'    INN

Or this inconsistently applied system:

MY    LADY'S    INN

MY    LADIES'    INN

Everything being equal, consistency is generally the best approach. So, if I had to argue for putting an apostrophe alongside a particular letter, I would say it should go after a letter, not before it.

Of course, in the case of a single sign, there is no need to use any kind of system because it doesn't need to be applied to multiple signs. And it's entirely up to each person's personal opinion how they actually want to style it.