#type casters

Typography Tuesday

A new addition to our collection is American Type Designers and Their Work, a brief catalog for an exhibition held at the Lakeside Press Galleries of the R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company in Chicago, Illinois, 1947-1948.There are no type samples presented in the catalog, but it lists 48 American type designers who today are luminaries in the American type design constellation. 

The catalog was designed by Carl Purington Rollins, the master printer to Yale University from 1920 to 1948. The text is set in Monotype Garamont, designed by Frederic Goudy in 1923, with Trafton Script, designed by Howard Trafton for Bauer Type Foundry in 1933. The illustration of the 19th-century type caster was redrawn form a wood engraving in J. Luther Ringwalt’s American Encyclopedia of Printing, Philadelphia, 1871. The simplified illustration of a matrix-cutting pantograph routing machine was supplied by Limited Editions Club and Heritage Press founder George Macy. 

Rollins acknowledges the influence of the English Arts & Crafts movement on early 20th-century American type designers and notes that “With the invention of the pantograph punch cutter [invented by Linn Boyd Benton, the father of Milwaukee-born Morris Fuller Benton, the most prolific type designer of the 20th century] type design became an ‘art’ rather than a craft, and as might be expected the personality of the designer became for various reasons more important.” He continues, 

Good types have character and power that we neglect at our peril.. . . A faulty choice can pull against the message and the purpose, even as the veriest jackass. A sound and happy choice can lend wings to words. . . . 

Rollins follows this with an admonition from the great American type historian, printer, and founder of the Merrymount Press Daniel B. Updike:

If we do not judge types rightly, they will judge us -- the penalty of foolish choice being the penalty we pay for choosing foolishly in life. We are punished by getting what we want!

Typography Tuesday

This week we return to J. Luther Ringwalt’s wonderful American Encyclopaedia of Printing published in Philadelphia in 1871. We begin with the racist, colonialist, nationalist, and oddly religious chromolithographic, allegorical frontispiece depicting movable type and the printing press as the West’s (and specifically, the free American press’s) heroic contribution to the salvation of humanity, especially the “lesser” races. Yikes!

We follow that with the entries for the Punch and Matrix, a lithograph of typographic activity reproduced from Joseph Moxon’s 17th-century Mechanick Exercises, and wood engravings of a job-case stand and pre-Linotype/Monotype type-setting machines. Several, not-always-reliable mechanical compositors were invented in the 19th century, such as the Mackie and Hattersley machines shown here, before the industry stabilized with just a handful of standard automatic type-setting systems, including Linotype, Monotype, Intertype, and Ludlow Typograph. Mark Twain famously lost his shirt (so to speak) on one of these inventions, the Paige Compositor.

View our other posts on Ringwalt’s Encyclopaedia.