Category Archives: American Type Founders Co.

Link

Open source font family based on Benton gothics

Open Source Font Family Based on Benton Gothics

Today, August 3, 2012, Adobe introduced its first open source type family, called “Source Sans Pro.” The family is a set of sans serif text fonts based on Morris Fuller Benton’s gothic forms, especially Franklin Gothic, released by the American Type Founders Company (ATF) in 1902, and News Gothic, released in 1908. Adobe’s Paul Hunt wanted to “create a set of fonts that would be both legible in short UI labels, as well as being comfortable to read in longer passages of text on screen and in print.” Hunt didn’t intend to copy specific features from these types, but instead, he “sought to achieve a similar visual simplicity by paring each glyph to its most essential form.”

Interesting that Hunt would choose the Benton types, as opposed to any of the array of sans serif possibilities available today. News Gothic, used for the  opening crawls of the Star Wars movies, was found to be the most legible typeface in a 1912 type legibility study done by Barbara Roethlein at Clark University. “If legibility is to be our sole criterion of excellence of typeface,” Roethlein wrote, “News Gothic must be regarded as our nearest approximation to an ideal face, in so far as the present investigation is able to decide this question” (see page 234 in my book).

Morris Benton was 36 years old when News Gothic came out in 1908, and had two young daughters, aged ten and six and no doubt learning to read. He hadn’t yet formally initiated the legibility studies he would pursue for designing Century Schoolbook (1918–1921), but he must have studied or at least discussed Louis Emile Javal’s 1879 type legibility test results with his father, who used them to collaborate with Theodore Lowe De Vinne on the Century Roman type, designed for De Vinne’s magazine The Century, and first used in 1896.

In a letter dated July 9, 1909 and published in the July 16, 1909 issue of The Dial (an American magazine of literature, philosophy, and politics, that was published during the 19th and 20th centuries), Bruce Rogers agreed with and repeated a sentiment that another letter-writer to The Dial had put forth, namely, that the most beautiful types are also the easiest to read.

Apparently, Adobe’s Paul Hunt agreed.

Some of Morris Benton’s gothic types:

1 Comment

Posted on August 3, 2012 in Adobe, American Type Founders Co., legibility, Morris Fuller Benton, type

An Evening of Typeface Revivals

Posted on January 26, 2011 | 2 comments

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!

More later —

2 Comments

Posted in American Type Founders Co., Matthew Carter, metal type, Morris Fuller Benton, type, type designer, typeface revival, Uncategorized

A trip to see an original Benton matrix-engraving machine

Posted on February 14, 2008 | 4 comments

This Saturday I’m going to visit Theo Rehak in Howell, New Jersey, to see his two working pantographic matrix-engraving machines, invented by Linn Boyd Benton. I think one of them dates all the way back to Benton’s Milwaukee type foundry, from about 1886. Theo and I have been corresponding for years, at least since 1993 when he read and edited an article I wrote for the American Printing History Association Journal about Linn Boyd Benton and his son Morris Fuller Benton.

At that time, I didn’t have a clear, detailed photograph of a Benton engraver for the article, so I traced one from a nine-year-old photocopy of a magazine article about how the American Type Founders Company (ATF) made type in the early 1900s using the “Benton system.” The article had appeared in the American Machinist magazine for December 16, 1909. I couldn’t find an original copy of that magazine anywhere in my home town of Rochester, New York. I had even traveled to the Syracuse University science library to photograph its copy of the article, only to find that those exact pages had been cut out of the bound volume of American Machinists from 1909!

So I struggled with a very dark photocopy of a picture of the Benton engraver, and later found out that Theo didn’t like my tracing! Maybe I left out some important part of the machine. I’ll ask him about that.

I had actually visited the old ATF headquarters in Elizabeth, New Jersey in November 1984 with Richard Marder, the grandson of one of the founders of ATF. He spent the better part of a day explaining many things to me, which I recorded in a notebook that I still have. Mr. Marder helped me to understand how the Benton engraver worked and told me what he remembered about Morris Benton. At the time I was researching the Bentons for my master’s thesis in Printing Technology from RIT.

The day I visited ATF, Theo Rehak was there working, although we didn’t meet each other. The company was struggling to stay in business; it was now a tenant in the building it had formerly owned. Mr. Marder introduced me to George Gasparik, who gave me a tour of the facility. We had to move the plastic off of several Benton machines so that I could photograph them—only one or two were actually being used. The photographs I took weren’t particularly detailed.

In 1984 I didn’t get to see how the Benton machine was adjusted for optically scaling the letter patterns it used to produce matrices for different sizes of type, but this Saturday I will. I’m bringing along copies of about ten or so pages of the ATF “Day Book,” which gives instructions for adjusting the machine for the various sizes of specific fonts. I’ll also take copies of the “cutting slips” for Morris Benton’s Freehand that Theo donated to the Benton collection at RIT’s Cary Library.

Mr. Marder read my completed thesis in the summer of 1986 and made a cassette tape of comments about it for me, which was very helpful for revising the manuscript. My expanded story of the Bentons, with many illustrations, is going to be published by the RIT Press. I’ve modified the original thesis considerably so that it will be understandable to readers who have no background in type.

This has been a very long process for me, and I guess I’ve been preparing for this trip for years. I’ve invited my two sons to come along on Saturday and see something they’ve been aware of their whole lives (one is 22 and the other is 19). Luckily they both live near Theo’s type foundry, Roger in Manhattan and Gus in the Bronx as a student at Fordham, so it will be an interesting diversion for them (I hope). In any case, Theo has mentioned several times that we’ll “do lunch,” which sounds good to me.

Tomorrow, Friday, I’m going to see Jan Siegel, the Rare Book Librarian in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University. Columbia inherited ATF’s extensive type library the first time the company went bankrupt (in 1936), and so all of the original type specimens and books that Morris Fuller Benton studied for his type revivals and legibility studies should be there. This ATF Collection has an original copy of the American Machinist article, as well as several other original documents I want to photograph. Actually, the main reason for my going to Columbia is to show Jane the 21 references I’ve made to Columbia in my book, to make sure they are properly documented.

More to come …

4 Comments

Posted in American Type Founders Co., Linn Boyd Benton, matrix engraving machine, metal type, Morris Fuller Benton, optical scaling, type

Tagged , , , , ,