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xvii A Note on Sources Many type enthusiasts contributed to this study by correspondence, published articles , conversations, or all three. A few of them had strong opinions that are not necessarily apparent in their words as quoted. Some background knowledge may help to place their ideas in context. Henry Lewis Bullen (1857–1938) spent 66 years in the printing industry,“as compositor ,salesman,promoter,engineer,and without remuneration and because of his love for the graphic arts,as a librarian.”1 He held various positions in sales and management at the American Type Founders Company (ATF) between 1892 and 1936 and was a major figure in New York City’s type community.He wrote an unsigned series of articles, “Discursions of a Retired Printer,”for the Inland Printer magazine between 1906 and 1908,and many other signed articles before and after,over 400 in all,including extensive histories of those who had brought about recent changes in type founding.Bullen “was both a witness of and a participant in many of the dislocations and also advancements which followed the introduction of the machine in the craft of setting printers’types,”2 wrote Dr.James Eckman,who compiled a list of Bullen’s second extensive series of short articles for the Inland Printer between 1918 and 1931,“Collectanea Typographica.” Bullen established ATF’s Typographic Library and Museum in 1908 and maintained it until 1934, a huge task that took many hours on holidays, weekends, and after regular business hours. He managed ATF’s Engineering Department, which promoted production efficiency in printing plants and composing rooms, and received several patents for machines in ATF’s line of “Cost Cut Equipment.”3 He was also involved in the planning and production of ATF specimen books and wrote articles for ATF’s house organ, The American Bulletin. xviii the bentons Stevens Lewis Watts (see below), who also worked at ATF, wrote a tribute to Bullen that he gave as a lecture in March 1966 for the Heritage of the Graphic Arts series in New York City. Watts called Bullen a “resourceful and superior salesman,” and “a many-sided man with multiple objectives, achieving successful results in nearly every undertaking.”4 Bullen’s historical writings must be read with his ATF connection in mind, because for all the years he was working at the company he was also, of course, promoting it and its products. He was known to stretch the truth in some cases, perhaps not deliberately but out of a rush of enthusiasm. According to David Walker Mallison’s 1976 Columbia University dissertation, “[Bruce] Rogers … tried to encourage Bullen to restrain a propensity for hyperbole and occasional inaccuracy.” And again, “D. B. Updike also indicated to Bullen that eagerness to establish an attractive point could misrepresent the blander truth of a situation.”5 However, since Bullen was a colleague of the Bentons at ATF, his version of some stories may in fact be more accurate than later retellings. Dr. James Russell Eckman (1908–1987), a cardiac surgeon, medical intelligence officer during World War II, and member of the Mayo Clinic’s staff in Rochester, Minnesota, was also an avid printing historian. The Smithsonian Institution called on him regularly in his capacity as a type expert.6 Eckman wrote a series of articles about printing history for Printing Impressions magazine that were later expanded into a book, The Heritage of the Printer. He was very helpful in my original research, and later sent six pages of detailed notes about the outcome, pointing out several instances where a Bullen quotation I had used that was flattering to one of the original founders of ATF was also either deceptive or completely false. Eckman painstakingly proved each of his points with quotations from documents in his own collection or the ATF Collection at Columbia University. In this revision, when certain Bullen “facts” were contradicted elsewhere, I included both versions of the story. Theo Rehak is a type founder and the author of Practical Typecasting. He worked for 12 years at ATF in Elizabeth, New Jersey, until it closed in 1993, and now owns and operates two rebuilt and meticulously maintained Benton engraving machines at his Dale Guild Type Foundry in Howell, New Jersey. His foundry casts true foundry types, ornaments, borders, and initials. In 2000, a Tokyo publishing house commissioned Rehak and Alan C. Waring to re-cut and cast the types needed to reproduce four pages of the Gutenberg 42-line Bible for the grand opening...

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