The Bentons: How an American Father and Son Changed the Printing Industry

1 Metal Type

1 Type is something that you can pick up and hold in your hand.”1 So began the British typographer Harry Carter in a 1968 lecture series on the history of type at Oxford University. A few years later even Carter’s opening statement became history as new technology began to push aside type’s three-dimensionality, relegating metal type to museum status. Today, type is simply one of the many variables that we control electronically to produce documents. But in the late 19th- and early 20thcentury world of Linn Boyd Benton and his son Morris Fuller Benton, type was still something to pick up and hold, as it had been since Johannes Gutenberg’s day. The Bentons’ working lives revolved around metal type, so this story begins with type itself and how it was made before they appeared on the scene. Each individual piece of type was an oblong piece of metal slightly less than an inch high with a relief (raised) letter on one end in reverse, so that when it was inked and printed on paper it would appear “right-reading.” The earliest description of how type was made appeared in a children’s encyclopedia printed in 1567 by Christopher Plantin, Dialogues Francois pour les jeunes enfans.2 In 1683 Joseph Moxon published a comprehensive account of the process in his famous Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing,3 and Pierre Simon Fournier’s explanation in Manuel Typographique was completed in 1766.4 Lucien Alphonse Legros and John Cameron Grant described how type was made in their 1916 classic Typographical PrintingSurfaces ,5 and another good source is Paul Koch’s 1933 article, “The Making of Printing Types,” printed in the first issue of the Dolphin, a journal on the making of books.6 What follows is a simplified version of the process. chapter 1 Metal Type “ 2 the bentons The Punch The three preliminary steps in making type had to do with the “punch,” the “matrix,” and the “mold.” Basically, a steel, hand-carved “wrong-reading” letter, or punch, was hammered into a piece of copper to create an indented cavity, or matrix, which in turn became the critical component of a mold assembly, into which a molten alloy of lead was poured to make an individual piece of type. The famous American printer, typographer, and type historian Theodore Low De Vinne defined the first step in the process, punch-cutting, as “the art of designing and engraving the model characters from which types are made.”7 Punches were cut by hand, in a profession that required a considerable amount of skill, precision, and patience. British typographer John Dreyfus explained that “punchcutting demands manual dexterity of a kind which can only be attained after many years of experience.”8 The punch-cutter started with a bar of soft steel, usually about a quarter of an inch square by about two to three inches long. It had to be long enough to be held firmly in a clamp, and thick enough to avoid being bent when it was struck with a hammer. Until the middle of the 18th century these small pieces of steel had to be forged by the punch-cutter himself, which is why punches of that period are found in strange shapes and sizes.9 The small bar of steel had to be made smooth at one end, called the “face.” The punch-cutter filed and then ground the face on a stone until it was perfectly flat and at right angles to the length of the bar. In some cases the punch-cutter was also the designer of the typeface he was about to cut, having envisioned it himself or having been inspired by letterforms he may have seen or by a previous typeface he wished to alter. Or perhaps the punch-cutter consulted a designer’s precise drawing on a geometrical grid for each letter he was about to create. If so, he would etch fine lines corresponding to the grid on the face of the punch, and then transfer the letter, reversed left to right, within those lines.10 He could also burnish a carefully drawn image right onto the face of the punch or perhaps draw the letter freehand on the steel, although Richard Southall, a contemporary A piece of type A punch 3 metal type British type consultant, finds the last option hard to believe. “Defining...