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Foreword
- RIT Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
xiii Foreword The American Type Founders Company, formed in 1892, was not the first to revive historical styles of type, nor the first to exploit type designs in large families of weights and widths, nor the first to reconcile the design with the technology of type, nor the first to understand the importance of marketing to the success of type. However, if it did not invent these things, it practiced them so well that the result amounted to ATF’s real invention: the modern type business. In the history of type-making, ATF in its heyday came very close to the paradigm. It had a great boss in Robert W. Nelson, an engineer of genius in Lynn Boyd Benton, a fine and prolific type designer in Morris Fuller Benton, and a brilliant publicist in Henry Lewis Bullen, amasser of ATF’s typographic library, the best historical resource ever housed at a type company. The legacy of ATF’s business model, chiefly in the form of the typefaces designed wholly or partly by Morris Benton, survives to this day. How ATF came to choose the typefaces it produced, sometimes following and sometimes leading typographic fashion, makes a fascinating study. It is not hard to understand how Morris Benton came to revive the type of the 15th-century Venetian printer Nicholas Jenson, as he did in Cloister Oldstyle: he was following the trail blazed by a great reformer, William Morris, whose Golden Type for the Kelmscott Press acknowledged a debt to Jenson. It is not hard either to see why Benton revived the type of Claude Garamond: the French Imprimerie Nationale had dusted off its Garamond types for the Paris Exposition of 1900, where they were much admired (although later found to be wrongly attributed). But in the case of Benton’s first revival, Bodoni, there seems to be no obvious precedent. Bodoni was the antithesis of everything Kelmscott. It was against “modern” types, the degenerate 19th-century offspring of Bodoni, that William Morris rebelled. Bodoni was neoclassical elitism on the page. Morris, the xiv the bentons medievalist socialist, spoke of “the sweltering hideousness of the Bodoni letter.” The impetus to cut a Bodoni seems to have come not from outside the company but from ATF’s own resources: the library, and the acumen of Henry Lewis Bullen as a typographic taste-maker. ATF’s library had a copy—in fact it eventually had three—of the Manuale Tipografico, the massively comprehensive specimen of Giambattista Bodoni’s foundry published in two folio volumes by his widow in 1818. For a type designer hunting for inspiration the Manuale is an embarrassment of riches. It took Benton three years of research, Bullen said, to design his interpretation. The result, ATF Bodoni, propagated over time into a large family and much copied, became a staple for American newspaper headlines, where its digital renditions are still in everyday use. To have turned his hand to two apparently antithetical designs, a Jenson and a Bodoni, suggests a versatility in Morris Benton more than a strong personal style. Added over time to the range of his designs were an enhanced version of an existing typeface (Century Expanded), an exercise in legibility (Century Schoolbook), a face from an outside designer, the architect Bertram Goodhue (Cheltenham), a blackletter (Cloister Black), an Egyptian (Stymie), a Jazz Age titling (Broadway), and a sans-serif that culminated a tradition of sturdy 19th-century American gothics (Franklin Gothic). Benton, a man who graduated from Cornell with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1896, went immediately to work at ATF, was put in charge of the company’s type-design department in 1900 and designed a typeface as good as Franklin Gothic in 1902, might be said to disprove William Morris’s dictum that “The letters should be designed by an artist and not an engineer.” It was no doubt the lack of an artistic temperament that explains Benton’s adaptability as a designer. The picture of him that emerges is of a loyal employee more concerned with equipping the company to do its business than with his own self-expression. It would be hard to find two more different temperaments in the same line of work than Benton and the type designer Frederic Goudy, his contemporary: the one modest to a fault, the other extroverted and famously good at self-promotion. Benton’s reputation has suffered by comparison with Goudy’s, perhaps more from the disparity of their characters than from the quality or...