An Evening of Typeface Revivals

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 —

A Modest Man

I’m happy to report that my book about Linn Boyd Benton and Morris Fuller Benton is currently in the design phase at the RIT Press.

During the course of my most recent research for editing the book, I found an anonymous June 1893 Inland Printer article entitled “L. B. Benton,” which gives a brief summary of his life up to that point and a description of his famous punch cutter. One sentence in the article jumped out at me: “Mr. Benton is, like most men who have accomplished much, modest in discussing his achievements.” This succinct and eloquent description of Benton’s temperament is discussed at some length in my book. Linn Boyd Benton has been called a mechanical genius: “He was one of those people who could see with his hands.”[1] But despite this gift, modesty and humility were perhaps the salient characteristics of both Linn Boyd and his son, Morris Fuller Benton, endearing them to their associates but frustrating more than one writer who was trying to tell their story.

That 1893 Inland Printer sentence reminded me of a Greek proverb that my mother-in-law, who also doesn’t like to boast, has often repeated: Τό καλό φαίνετε (Toh kaló fénete), which she translates as, “The good shows.”

Recently I was talking with an RIT student who was raised in Japan. She told me that one of her favorite Japanese proverbs conveyed a similar sentiment. In Japanese it’s written like this:  能ある鷹は爪を隠す。(Nou aru taka wa tsume o kakusu.) A loose translation: “An eagle who knows how to use them well hides its talons.”

After thinking about the Bentons for more than 25 years, I have to say that I’m most impressed by this disposition of theirs. Even from the stories of Linn Boyd Benton’s exceptional childhood, told to me by his granddaughter Caroline Benton Gregg, I got the sense that not only was he a precocious child, but that as a child he was also already beginning to learn humility from his experiences. It may not be considered by many people an essential character trait these days, but St. Augustine wrote that, of all the virtues, the three most important were humility, humility, and humility.

---

[1] Theo Rehak, in conversation with Linn Boyd Benton’s granddaughter Elizabeth Benton Swain, October 1987.

More on optical scaling

My last post (4/23) explained that some digital type designers today are interested in the way Morris Benton’s fonts, and indeed all the metal types produced by the American Type Foundry in the early 1900s, were optically scaled. Optical scaling was easily accomplished at ATF by adjusting certain settings on Linn Boyd Benton’s matrix engraving machine. Linn Boyd Benton explained in an essay he wrote in about 1906:

The adjustments are such that the operator is enabled to engrave the letter proportionately more extended or condensed, and lighter or heavier in face, than the pattern. All these variations are necessary for the production of a properly graded modern series containing the usual sizes. In fact, on account of the laws of optics, which cannot be gone into here, only one size of a series is cut in absolutely exact proportion to the patterns.

The illustration of optical scaling reproduced below was made in 1989 by ATF’s successor, the Kingsley/ATF Type Corporation. At the time, Kingsley/ATF was embarking on a program of digitizing typefaces, including the optical scaling characteristics of the original metal types. Ultimately, the company went bankrupt in the early 1990s, but that’s another story.

The illustration uses the capital M from Morris Benton’s Wedding Text, designed in about 1901. In the earlier “metal type” days at ATF, the set of Wedding Text patterns, one image for each letter (these particular patterns, by the way, are now part of RIT’s Benton Collection), were used to produce matrices for every type size. According to the handwritten “daybook” of general engraving machine settings for cutting the matrices for 228 ATF typefaces, no size of Wedding Text was cut exactly proportional to the pattern. Instead, the matrices for each type size were either condensed or expanded in relation to the pattern. (In most other typefaces, one size, usually somewhere in the middle of the range of sizes for that face, was “normal,” i.e., the letters were cut exactly proportional to the images on the patterns, not condensed or expanded.)

To generate this illustration, Kingsley/ATF photographically enlarged these three sizes of a Wedding Text capital M to a uniform height, so that customers could then easily compare them. Notice that the smaller the size, the more expanded the character. This is necessary simply for legibility, although in the days of metal type mechanical parameters also dictated that smaller sizes be expanded.

In addition to the expansion or condensation of the letter, the “set width” of letters in different sizes also had to be adjusted for good optical scaling. The set width is the total amount of horizontal space (width) on a piece of metal type. In order for the eye to be able to read very small type, more white space is needed around each letter, so the type needs to be relatively wide.

Kingsley/ATF produced the following illustration, also in 1989, to show its customers this aspect of optical scaling. Because enlarging this sample will perhaps also distort it, I’ve left it at its original size; I apologize for the very small 6-point example. But hopefully it is understandable. I’ve re-typed the Kingsley/ATF caption to this illustration below it in case the original caption is too small to decipher.

Kingsley/ATF’s original caption: “Notice the difference between a true 6-point type enlarged to 24 points and a true 24-point type. The true sizes were created using Optical Scaling. Typeface: Wedding Text”

More later …

The invention of coated paper

The other day I noticed that I needed to add a footnote to my book about the Bentons, in order to substantiate the fact that Theodore Low De Vinne commissioned the S. D. Warren Paper Company to make a coated paper for his printing press. This came up because I wanted to show several examples of De Vinne’s propensity to act as a catalyst in a new venture or invention. (In about 1893 or 1894 De Vinne asked the American Type Founders Company, and Linn Boyd Benton in particular, to help him design and cut a new typeface for his Century magazine, because he was not satisfied with the types he was using.) I found the reference in Eugene Ettenberg’s Type for Books and Advertising (1947) and added it to the text. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it, so I dug a little deeper.

In 2005, David R. Godine published a book by Irene Tichenor entitled No Art Without Craft: The Life of Theodore Low De Vinne, Printer. Tichenor writes that “Charles M. Gage, the actual inventor, made it clear that he had invented paper coated on both sides in Massachusetts in late 1874 or early 1875 at the specific request of De Vinne … who needed it for a catalogue with colored wood-engraved illustrations.” (page 114; Tichenor’s book is on Google Books.)

De Vinne’s desire and subsequent request to Charles Gage profoundly affected the future of the printing industry. Who doesn’t handle several if not tens or even hundreds of coated printed pages every day? Apparently De Vinne later decided that he didn’t like the paper at all, and “although he had been a pioneer in the use of dry paper to meet the exigencies of speed, he admitted to a ‘returning kindliness for damp paper.’”

The advent of coated paper in the 1870s came out of one person’s idea, desire, and drive. No doubt it would have been invented later on if De Vinne hadn’t pursued it at that time. But that desire, at that time, unpredictably brought forth something that quickly changed the direction of the paper industry, the printing industry, and even the way we are presented with information today. It reminds me of chaos theory. And it reminds me of the Bentons, too.

I go on at some length in my book about the other pantographic engraving machines that were being used to engrave matrices (not very successfully) at the same time that it was dawning on Linn Boyd Benton that the best way to produce his new ‘self-spacing type’ would be with a pantographic machine that cut the models for electrotyping matrices. (This was around 1882.) Ultimately it was Benton who succeeded in building a machine that could do the job easily and well, which in turn (within a matter of just a few years) enabled another machine, the Linotype, to become viable, and to gradually replace most of the foundry type in the world with machine-set type– in effect, eroding the business that Linn Boyd Benton’s machine was invented for! Without Benton’s ambition, Ottmar Mergenthaler’s Linotype machine might have never been successful, and we might have taken a completely different route to where we are today, or to somewhere else we can’t imagine.

Mergenthaler too had a lot of desire, an almost manic drive to make something that would work. His story takes up many pages in my book about the Bentons.

When I started revising the Benton manuscript a few years ago, I thought that the process would take maybe three to five months. How wrong I was. At the moment I’ve put on the brakes, and now am trying strictly to clean up the loose ends and finish the illustrations. But it is fascinating to think about all the other stories that pop up.

More later …

The No. 55 Benton matrix engraver

Linn Boyd Benton’s No. 55 matrix engraver, as described in the American Machinist for December 16, 1909, consists of “two housings between which swings a long pendulum or arm … delicately suspended in a compound yoke by means of gimbal screws which gives it a toggle-joint effect.”

---

At the Dale Type Foundry last Saturday, the No. 55 was in the middle of a job. The grease around the machine’s cutting tool (which spins like a dentist’s drill at a speed of 8,000 to 10,000 revolutions per minute) seemed ready to splash onto the empty cutting platform (the matrix jig had been removed), and had even spilled over into the bowl of the yoke above the pendulum arm. “Wow,” I thought. “This machine is really being used. It really works.”

The empty cutting platform.

I visited the Dale Type Foundry on a Saturday, which was great because no one was working and it was quiet enough to talk to Theo Rehak about the machines. Here were the inventions I had been thinking about for years. I went around the foundry announcing to my son Roger what they were. “Here is a stereotyping set-up; this is a fitting machine; there’s the horizontal Benton engraving machine.” Even though I had visited ATF in 1984 and taken photographs of a row of matrix engravers at that time, last Saturday was completely different. I held a follower in my own hand and traced around the outline of a 16-point Tory Text “H,” designed by Frederic Goudy in 1935. That’s a complicated letter!

I held a “quill” assembly (they hold the cutting tools), and then looked at the point of its cutting tool through the foundry’s Louis Pasteur-type measuring microscope from the 1890s (all cast iron). The measuring microscope magnifies the point of a cutting tool so that you can tell whether it needs to be re-ground.

“Across the center of the face or lens of the microscope, is arranged a fine scale [ruled] in [increments of] 0.0005 of an inch,” the American Machinist explained. This is about half the thickness of a cigarette paper. A cutting tool looks like a heavy nail under this microscope, and so the cutting tools can easily be gauged by eye—the 0.080-inch tool covers 160 lines on the scale, and the 0.001-inch tool covers two lines. The point of the cutting tool we looked at covered seven lines.

More later …

 

 

---