American Type Founders

~ the obit ~

By 1890 the American type business was coming apart. The Linotype could cast a whole line of body text inside the print shop that needed it, so the thing foundries had always sold was suddenly something their customers made themselves. An informal cartel had been holding prices up through the late 1880s and it stopped working as the number of foundries grew. On top of that, nothing was standard. A printer who bought from two foundries got two different body sizes and two different baselines, and had to shim one of them to sit level with the other. Joseph W. Phinney of the Dickinson Type Foundry in Boston ran a committee on the problem, and its answer was to stop competing.

Twenty-three foundries signed into a single New Jersey business trust in February 1892. Between them they accounted for roughly eighty-five percent of all type manufactured in the United States. Two of the members were the reason the merger mattered. The Cincinnati Type Foundry brought the patents on Henry Barth's typecaster, and Benton, Waldo of Milwaukee brought Linn Boyd Benton and his pantograph, a machine that cut matrices directly instead of going through hand-cut steel punches and could scale a drawing optically as it went. Holding both at once made the new company the most advanced foundry anywhere.

The first years were a mess. Twelve of the foundries closed immediately and the rest carried on as though nothing had happened, under their own names, selling against each other. Robert Wickham Nelson took over as general manager in 1894 and forced every branch to trade as ATF. Benton's son Morris Fuller Benton got the job of throwing out duplicated and obsolete faces and fixing the point size and baseline across everything that remained. Nelson had worked out the strategic point before anyone else: line-casting machines had taken the body text, so the money was in display and advertising type. He spent heavily on advertising and commissioned new designs constantly. Phinney ran the design department and brought in freelancers like Will Bradley and Frederic Goudy, but most of the catalog came out of Benton's office. Cheltenham and the Century line came from there, along with the first types organized deliberately into families with planned weights and widths rather than released one size at a time.

The decline took forty years and was almost entirely a story about other machines. Phototypesetting removed the reason to cast metal at all, and digital type removed the reason to have a foundry. After the war ATF tried diversifying into furniture, of all things, and bought Lanston Monotype in 1969 without doing anything with it. By the 1980s the Elizabeth foundry was down to six employees and the profitable part of the business was making office duplicators.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the 1923 book ~

If you want one object that marks the top of this company, it is the specimen book it printed in 1923. ATF spent $300,000 producing it and distributed sixty thousand copies, printed in color throughout, with the layouts doubling as worked examples for the advertising trade. Letterpress people still treat it as one of the high points of the craft, and it has been scanned and put online for anyone to page through, so a sales catalog has ended up as a reference work. In the same decade the company had offices in twenty-seven American cities plus Vancouver and sold presses and pressroom supplies alongside the type.

~ the auction room ~

In 1986 the foundry was sold to Kingsley Machines, which made type for foil stamping, and the merged company became Kingsley/ATF. The idea was sound on paper. ATF owned an enormous library of faces and the patents on optical scaling, so a digital version of that library looked like money sitting on a shelf. A software operation was set up in Tucson to do it. The problem was that the original drawings were mostly gone, so each face had to be scanned off brass matrices and reconstructed. The work was careful and it was slow, and only four of them ever shipped.

Kingsley/ATF filed for bankruptcy protection in 1993 and the foundry was auctioned in August. Sources disagree about whether the hammer fell on the twenty-third or the twenty-fourth. Nobody with a reason to keep that detail straight was in the room. Matrices that represented a century of cutting were bought for the value of the brass. Greg Walters and a handful of other people got several complete production lines out intact and kept a record of what passed over the block, and the census they published the following year is most of what anyone now knows about what was lost. The Elizabeth factory is apartments now.

~ still in the menu ~

This company was finished five years before I first got online, and the work that made it mattered was finished decades earlier still. Nothing about my life reaches it directly. What does reach it is the font menu. The rights to the designs stayed with Kingsley Holding and got licensed to Adobe and Bitstream, so ATF drawings went straight into the digital libraries that operating systems started shipping with as standard.

Franklin Gothic is in Word. News Gothic has set more interface text than anyone has bothered to count. The US Supreme Court still asks for briefs in the Century family, which is a drawing office in New Jersey reaching into a courtroom a hundred and thirty years later. A company can be auctioned down to the value of its brass and still have its output open on a few hundred million screens on a Tuesday morning, which is the only kind of survival on offer to something that made shapes instead of objects.

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