On February 10th, Matthew Carter is going to speak at RIT on “Genuine Imitations: A Type Designer’s View of Revivals.” It will be thrilling for me, and I’m sure for many RIT students. The event is meant to celebrate the publication of my new book, The Bentons: How an American Father and Son Changed the Printing Industry. (Carter graciously wrote the Foreword back in 2007.) I’ll start out talking about Morris Benton’s Type Revivals, which were groundbreaking in their own day, and Matthew Carter will bring the discussion into the 21st century.
To gather more images for my talk, I’ve been spending time lately in the Cary Graphic Arts Collection at RIT. (The Benton book, at almost 400 pages, does include many type images, but the chance to see them in a larger format and the opportunity to show many more examples is too good to pass up.) Because I’ll concentrate on four Benton revivals—Bodoni, Garamond, Civilite and Bulmer—I’ve been lingering over Giambattista Bodoni’s 1818 Manuale Typografico and RIT’s set of Morris Benton’s original 1909 drawings for his Bodoni revival; The Dramatic Works of Shakespeare printed by W. Bulmer and Co. in 1791; and La Civilite Puerile, 1564, no doubt one of the earliest examples of Civilite type in France. The Cary Collection is so amazing. When I gave David Pankow a few call letters for books that I thought would be printed with the original Civilite type, he pulled out many, many others, including one that he called “an orgy of Civilite.”
I asked David whether he got the original Benton drawings for Bodoni at the ATF auction in 1993, and he said no, that he didn’t actually know where they came from, since they were already part of the collection when he arrived at RIT in 1979. Some of the drawings are hard to see on the yellowed paper, but after a little bit of magic on the computer (thanks, Frank Cost!), they are pretty amazing. In the image below, you can see how the lower case t was revised more than a year after the original drawing. The letters (from baseline to the top of the ascender line) are about nine inches high. There are many markings on each sheet, some with equations or other numbers.
working drawings for ATF’s Bodoni revival, 1910
Why Morris Benton revived types is easier to discuss than how, since he didn’t leave notes or diaries about his work. Of course, we do know how types were made at ATF, but did Morris Benton start with a small, inked-in drawing, or a larger outline drawing, or did he perhaps enlarge and then trace over the original examples that were in ATF’s Typographic Library and Museum? We don’t know. Unlike his father, who wrote several essays about type and about his work, and also a manual for the matrix engravers that ATF sold to Japanese companies, Morris Benton didn’t leave a written record, except, it appears, for the several boxes of letters that he wrote to his fiancée Mary Ethel Bottum during their four-year engagement!!
The books are due back from the printer any day now. Hope to see you on February 10th!