The story
Type founding before the ATF Co.
By the beginning of the final decade of the nineteenth century, type founding was in a state of crisis. With the introduction of the Linotype, which could cast whole lines of body type in house, demand for hand-set type was in decline. Throughout the late 1880s, prices had been maintained by an informal cartel of foundries, but as the number of foundries increased, prices dropped dramatically, a trend accelerated by the invention of hot metal typesetting. Additionally, type at this time was not standardized, either to body size or to base line, and printers resented the incompatibility of types from different foundries. Leaders in the industry, notably Joseph W. Phinney of the Dickinson Type Foundry in Boston, set up a committee to address these problems, eventually recommending consolidation.
Consolidation and early years
By the late 1880s, there were some 34 foundries in the United States. In 1892, 23 foundries were brought together to form the American Type Founders Company. The Chicago Tribune (February 12, 1892) listed the 23 foundries as:
MacKellar, Smiths, & Jordan, Co. (Philadelphia),
Collins & M’Leester (Philadelphia),
Pelouse & Co. (Philadelphia),
James Conner's Sons (New York City),
P. A. Heinrich (New York City),
A. W. Lindsay (New York City),
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Charles J. Carey & Co. (Baltimore),
John Ryan Co. (Baltimore),
J. G. Mengel & Co. (Baltimore),
Hooper, Wilson & Co. (Baltimore),
Boston Type Foundry (Boston),
Phelps, Dalton & Co. (Boston),
Lyman & Son (Buffalo),
Allison & Smith (Cincinnati),
Cincinnati Type Foundry (Cincinnati),
Cleveland Type Foundry (Cleveland),
Marder, Luse, & Co. (Chicago),
Union Type Foundry (Chicago),
Benton, Waldo & Co. (Milwaukee),
Central Type Foundry (St. Louis),
St. Louis Type Foundry (St. Louis),
Kansas City Type Foundry (Kansas City), and
Palmer & Rey (San Francisco).
Other foundries joined later. The key to the success of this merger was the inclusion of MacKellar, Smiths, & Jordan Co. of Philadelphia, with assets of over $6 million, the Cincinnati Type Foundry of Henry Barth, which brought with it the patents to his Barth Typecaster, and Benton, Waldo Foundry of Milwaukee, which included Linn Boyd Benton and his all-important Benton Pantograph which engraved type matrices directly instead of using punches and allowed the optical scaling of type. With the inclusion of the Barth Caster and the Benton Pantograph, ATF immediately became the largest and the most technologically advanced foundry in the world.
Conditions for the first few years were chaotic: while 12 foundries ceased separate operations immediately member foundries continued to operate as if they were independent firms. Real consolidation did not begin until 1894, when Robert Wickham Nelson, principal owner of the Throne Typesetting Machine Company and a new stockholder in ATF, became general manager. He immediately began to liquidate unprofitable ventures, eliminate duplications, and force the various branches to do business under the ATF name instead of retaining their former ones. Linn Boyd Benton's son, Morris Fuller Benton, was given the job of purging obsolete and duplicated type faces from the catalogs, and standardizing the point size and baseline of the types made. Nelson, realizing that display and advertising type (rather than the body type that was set so efficiently by the new line-casters) would be the mainstay of the foundry type business, immediately began an extensive advertising campaign and commissioned the production of new type designs. Joseph W. Phinney was put in charge of the design department and he supervised the introduction of Cushing, Howland, Bradley, and the William Morris-inspired Satanick and Jenson Oldstyle, the last of these being hugely successful. Young Benton was then commissioned to finish Lewis Buddy's Elbert Hubbard-inspired Roycroft, another successful introduction.
While Phinney often used freelance designers, like Will Bradley, T.M. Cleland, Walter Dorwin Teague, Frederic Goudy, and Oz Cooper, the bulk of ATF's catalog through the 1930s was developed in-house, under the direction of Morris Fuller Benton. Under Benton's direction, the company embarked on a program of developing historical revivals, including ATF's versions of Bodoni and Garamond, as well as the development of new typefaces such as Century and (most successfully) Cheltenham, which for the first time were organized systematically into "type families" with a schedule of styles such as weight or width.
Another key player at the ATF Co. at this time was the advertising manager (and informal company historian) Henry Lewis Bullen, who in 1908 began assembling a library of historical typography and type specimen books for designers to draw upon. This collection was turned over to Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library in 1936, and acquired by the university in 1941. The books form the core of the book arts collection at Columbia. There is also an archive of ATF materials in Columbia's special collections.
In 1901, Nelson consolidated casting operations in a purpose-built factory in Jersey City and the branches remained only as distribution centers. By the 1920s, ATF had offices in 27 American cities and Vancouver, British Columbia, where it sold not only type, but pressroom supplies and printing presses (their own Kelly line and those of other manufacturers) as well. It printed large specimen books, with many examples of good layout as examples for the advertising market. In 1923, at a cost of $300,000, ATF produced its largest and most superlative type catalog. Sixty thousand of these opulent books, printed extensively in color, were distributed, and to this day they are considered to be masterpieces of the art of letterpress printing. The first paragraph of its preface boasted:
The printing of 1923 is greatly superior to that of 1900. It has better style, more attractiveness and greater power and dignity...This great improvement has not come to pass without direction. There has been, in fact, very deliberate direction. There has been constant and forward thinking on behalf of the printing industry by the American Type Founders Company, which has a well defined policy with regard to the types it is making and has been making during the last quarter century. In what position, may we ask, would the printing industry be to-day without the great type families, known to fame as Cheltenham, Century [long list follows] and others? Are there anywhere any other type families? Would not your typography be barren in appearance and much less profitable to the advertisers if these great type designs had not been developed? There can be but one answer.
By the time Nelson died in 1926, the ATF Co. seemed to be on the path to permanent profitability.
Nelson's successor as president, Frank Belknap Berry (originally one of the founders of the Cleveland Type Foundry), was unpopular with the board and he was soon replaced by Joseph F. Gillick, whose first move was to shut down ATF's subsidiary Barnhard Brothers & Spindler in Chicago and bring their casting operations to Jersey City. Though the years immediately after Nelson's passing were disappointing, 1929 was the most profitable in ATF history.
From Wikipedia’s article on American Type Founders, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4