How did Morris Benton’s reticent temperament and seemingly mundane personality affect his working life? I would venture to say that they were assets.
On March 12, 2015, the RIT Cary Collection in Rochester, NY, will open a new exhibition on the gregarious and prolific type designer to whom Benton is often compared, entitled “Frederic W. Goudy: 150 Years of Typographic Influence.” Steve Matteson, Creative Type Director at Monotype, will speak at 5 p.m. on Discovering the Goudy Legacy. The Cary Collection is home to many Goudy artifacts, including some type original drawings and The Paw, the plaster cast of FWG’s hand, said to bestow bad luck upon touch.
One of the cases in the exhibition will display a first edition copy of a book of Beatrice Warde’s essays on type and typography. Warde started her career in the early 1920s by working as Henry Lewis Bullen’s assistant at the American Type Founders (ATF) Company’s extensive typographic library. She went on to become a well-known writer on typographic subjects. In her famous 1932 address to the British Typographers’ Guild, “The Crystal Goblet, or, Printing Should Be Invisible,” she said:
I once was talking to a man who designed a very pleasing advertising type which undoubtedly all of you have used. I said something about what artists think about a certain problem, and he replied with a beautiful gesture: ‘Ah, madam, we artists do not think – we feel!’ That same day I quoted that remark to another designer of my acquaintance, and he, being less poetically inclined, murmured: ‘I’m not feeling very well today, I think!’ He was right, he did think; he was the thinking sort; and that is why he is not so good a painter, and to my mind ten times better as a typographer and type designer than the man who instinctively avoided anything as coherent as a reason.
The two type designers to whom Warde was referring were most likely type designer Frederic Goudy, and Morris Benton, ATF’s chief type designer, who had a mechanical engineering degree from Cornell University. Goudy and Beatrice Warde must have met at ATF because Goudy made frequent visits to the company when it was located in Jersey City. Goudy was famous at ATF for his artistic temperament, and Benton for his reticence.
That Warde was speaking of Goudy and Benton was also the opinion of Richard C. Marder, whose grandfather John Marder of Chicago’s Marder, Luse & Co. was one of the original founders of ATF. Richard Marder spent a lot of time on Saturdays in ATF’s typographic library, often seeing Morris Benton there because Saturdays were half-workdays.
He may not have been as lively or extroverted as Goudy, but Benton’s attention to detail and his engineering bent no doubt helped him in the business of type designing. He didn’t consider himself an “artist,” and that’s not a bad thing.
Beatrice Warde, The Crystal Goblet: Sixteen Essays on Typography (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Co., 1956), 14–15.
Frederic Goudy, A Half-Century of Type Design & Typography, 1895–1945 (New York: The Typophiles, 1946), 1:92.
Richard C. Marder, handwritten note on my original Benton master’s thesis, 1986.