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267 chapter 16 The Benton Legacy The ease with which we can choose a typeface today from a plethora of options to fit a particular need is something we may take for granted, but it is possible only because of the tremendous amount of labor and ingenuity that came before. Almost every literate person today benefits from the legacy of Linn Boyd Benton and Morris Fuller Benton, but due to the nature of their work and to their own reticence, this legacy has for the most part remained hidden. Most books written before 1990 about the history of type omitted the Bentons altogether , some lamented that they were being ignored, and the rest devoted perhaps a few sentences to them, glossing over years of hard work and success. For example, Ruari McLean summarized Linn Boyd Benton’s accomplishments in one sentence in his 1980 book The Thames and Hudson Manual of Typography : “Type continued to be cast, and composed, by hand until the American Linn Boyd Benton’s invention of the punchcutting machine in 1884 made the Monotype and Linotype composition systems feasible.”1 Warren Chappell complained about Benton’s “zeal for standardization” in A Short History of the Printed Word (1970): “The shop convenience and economic advantage of [Benton’s] ‘improvements’ were bought at high cost to individual letter forms and the effect of the type on the page.”2 Chappell did not mention Benton’s system of expanding and condensing letters in the book, or even how his engraving machine was a necessary component of the Linotype and Monotype systems, which he described in detail. 268 the bentons Not much was written about Morris Benton, either. “Sufficient credit has not been given to Morris Benton,” J. L. Frazier wrote in Type Lore in 1925, “who has never sought or been thrust into the limelight, despite his great service to printers.”3 In 1982, William Ovink called the younger Benton “the engineer who had a far greater share in type design than our mainly artist-oriented histories of type production suggest.”4 While some early 20th century typographers considered type design to be an art form, certainly the Bentons did not regard themselves as artists. They expected type to express profound ideas but remain the servant of those ideas, and they felt that in text matter, a typeface’s own particular beauty should not intrude upon the reader. “When the printed page conveys information to the reader, without attracting attention to itself,” Linn Boyd Benton wrote in 1906, “it is ideal.” But he also realized that type for advertising had different requirements: “The design for a display type is often made to attract attention, not only to itself, but to what it proclaims, by its boldness and beauty and sometimes even by its ugliness.”5 In an address before the British Typographer’s Guild in London in 1932, Beatrice Warde paraphrased Benton’s first statement above, saying that typography should be invisible, like a crystal goblet, “because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than to hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.”6 Her metaphor became famous in typographic circles. “Printing demands a humility of mind,” she went on, “for the lack of which many of the fine arts are even now floundering in selfconscious and maudlin experiments. There is nothing simple or dull in achieving the transparent page. Vulgar ostentation is twice as easy as discipline.”7 Warde’s crystal goblet metaphor may have been inspired by a 1929 essay on type design by the British typographer Harry Carter, in which he compared the amateur type designer to one who followed more traditional practices. Carter suggested that printing was a supremely conservative art, “concealing technical revolutions under an appearance of unruffled continuity.”8 After all, the art of the type-designer is a comparatively humble one. His business is very largely not to obtrude himself needlessly between the writer and the reader. All moral qualities are irrelevant to aesthetic considerations, but if there is one that is not amiss if it makes itself felt in the design of a fount of type it is dislike of pretentiousness—a very negative quality. The danger of amateur influence upon printing is too great an attention to the objective excellences of the page. The craft-revival, instinct as it was with moral and social doctrine, is a new wine very little of which can safely be poured into the printer’s old bottle, and one may...

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