About the Benton Family at the American Type Founders Company

Morris Fuller Benton (November 30, 1872 –June 30, 1948) was an influential American typeface designer who headed the design department of the American Type Founders (ATF), for which was the chief type designer from 1900 to 1937. Benton designed more than fifty typefaces, ranging from revivals of historical models like ATF Bodoni, to adding new weights to existing faces such as Goudy Old Style and Cheltenham, and to designing original designs such as Hobo, Bank Gothic, and Broadway. Benton's large family of related neogrotesques, which he termed "gothics", includes Alternate Gothic, Franklin Gothic, and News Gothic, all of which were more similar to, and anticipated, contemporary realist sans-serif typefaces like Helvetica than the early grotesque types of his contemporaries.

In addition to his strong aesthetic design sense, Morris was a master of the technology of his day. His father, Linn Boyd Benton, invented the pantographic engraving machine, which was capable not only of scaling a single font design pattern to a variety of sizes, but could also condense, extend, and slant the design. Morris worked on many of these machines with his father at ATF, during which these machines were refined to an impressive level of precision. Theo Rehak, the current owner of most ATF equipment and author of the definitive treatise "Practical Typecasting", explains that the Bentons demanded that any deviation in machining or casting be within two ten thousands of an inch. Most modern machine shops are equipped to measure down to a one thousandth inch variance. As an advertising device, in 1922 ATF manufactured a piece of type eight points tall containing the entire Lord's Prayer in 13 lines of text, using a cutting tool roughly equivalent to a 2000 dpi printer.

For more detailed information on the Benton Family at ATF, click on the following link: http://www.printinghistory.org/htm/journal/articles/
31-32-Cost-Benton.pdf

The Final Quote

" A design for a type alphabet that maybe successful for the size for which it is drawn, cannot be successfully applied to all other sizes of the same series. It is often bettered by modifications made by the feeling and taste of the designer."

- D. B. Updike

Initial Research on the emergence of Letterpress Printing in America

The story of letterpress printing in Lancaster County, PA, is a powerful and mysterious history. It is the story of hometown printers who harnessed the magic of Gutenberg's Black Art to create a revolutionary Free Press. It is the story of religious mystics who printed landmarks of American book arts. It is the story of small-town printers who mastered the power of the printed word to help create a nation.

Please click on the following link for further information on the printers: http://www.lancasterlyrics.com/

About D. B. Updike - The man who said the quote

DANIEL BERKELEY UPDIKE (1860-1941) has been described as the most distinguished American printer.He was one of a handful of highly successful and influential book designers of the twentieth century and proprietor of the Merrymount Press in Boston. Updike aesthetic philosophy and commitment t o quality in the making of books have a special relevance today at a time of rapid change in the media arts.

The Well-Made Book is a substantial and timeless collection of virtually all of Updikes writings on the art of the book. William S. Peterson has researched, unearthed and assembled this wealth of material such of which will be new even to those readers who are familiar with Updike? writings. Until the publication of The Well-Made Book, many of these important and revealing essays have been hard to find, and some of Updike? writing featured in this book appears here for the first time. There is a complete index, annotations, and a new scholarly introduction by Peterson

This essay by Daniel Berkeley Updike, the founder of the Merrymount Press and the author of Printing Types, was published in The Dolphin, no. 2 (1935), 208-16, from which it has been scanned. Updike's footnote symbols have been converted into numbers within brackets, which are linked to the notes at the end of the piece. (Please observe that it is possible to return to the footnote number in the text by clicking on the left-arrow button at the end of each note.) There are also links to the illustrations that accompanied the essay in The Dolphin. -- W.S.P.]

The Merrymount Press was a printing company, both scholarly and craftsmanlike, founded and run by Daniel Berkeley Updike in Boston, Massachusetts, and extant during the years 1893–1941. It was perhaps the finest representative of the Arts and Crafts movement in American book arts, influenced by William Morris and founded "to do common work well."

Updike established his own studio in 1893, first with the idea of designing type fonts, but soon after as a printing company. He called it the Merrymount Press in honor of Mount Wollaston just south of Boston. In 1896, Updike commissioned font designer Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue to design the Merrymount font for an Episcopalian Altar Book. In 1904 Herbert Horne designed Montallegro for him, and noted graphic artist and print designer Rudolph Ruzicka (1883–1978) also produced designs for the Press.

In 1896 Updike also purchased the Caslon face; other types employed included Scotch Roman, Janson, Mountjoye and Oxford. Merrymount Press was the first American firm to use the Times New Roman font.

In 1899 the Merrymount Press printed Edith Wharton’s novels for Charles Scribner's Sons, which firmly established the press as a going commercial concern. The Press's finest work is generally considered to be the Book of Common Prayer (1930) financed by J. Pierpont Morgan. Without decoration, except a typographic leaf, initial letters, and rubrication, it was an austere and handsome quarto.

Updike estimated that Merrymount Press produced some 14,000 pieces of printing during its existence. Much of it was for the private collectors’ market and limited-editions clubs, but it also printed Christmas cards, bookplates, and advertising ephemera, as well as work for publishers, libraries, churches, and other institutions.

Most of the Merrymount Press archives are conserved in the Boston Athenaeum.

Daniel Berkeley Updike (14 February 1860—29 December 1941) was an American printer and historian of typography.

Updike was born at Providence, Rhode Island. In 1880 he joined the publishers Houghton, Mifflin & Company, of Boston as an errand boy. He worked for the firm's Riverside Press and trained as a printer but soon moved to typographic design. He set up on his own in 1893, and renamed his enterprise the Merrymount Press in 1896.

Initially he followed the style of William Morris and the Kelmscott Press but soon turned towards the historical printing of the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He began to acquire fonts of his own, including some specially cut for him — Montalegro and Merrymount. He made his name as a liturgical printer for the Episcopal Church, but also undertook general jobbing and ephemeral work. John Bianchi became a partner in the press in 1915.

Updike was greatly interested in the history of printing types, and in 1922 published Printing Types: Their History, Forms and Use. An extensively revised second edition was published in 1937. He was involved in the Anglo-American 'Typographical Renaissance' of the time, together with Frederic Goudy, Stanley Morison, Bruce Rogers and Theodore Low De Vinne.

Born: Providence, Rhode Island, 1860
Died: Boston, Massachusetts, 1941

Boston printer, typographer and typographic historian of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Proprietor of the Merrymount Press, which he founded in 1894. His classic book Printing Types: their history, forms and use appeared in 1922 (2nd edn. 1937), based on a lecture series he gave at Harvard University from 1910 to 1916.

Between 1880 and 1893 Updike worked for the publisher Houghton Mifflin and from 1892 was at that company's Riverside Press. He then started his own commercial venture and published the Humanist Library, a series produced in a Renaissance style, in the early part of the 20th century. Selling books did not please Updike, however, and he dropped that portion of his business and concentrated on manufacturing books for others. Merrymount Press soon acquired a reputation for its superior designs and excellent printing, and trade publishers and book clubs became customers.

Updike's book designs combine the functional and the beautiful. They are noteworthy for their clarity of organization, easy readability, and excellent workmanship, based upon the use of a few carefully selected typefaces and immaculate presswork. His masterpieces are a complex folio edition of The Book of Common Prayer (1930) and an edition of Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler (1928). He taught printing history at the Harvard Business School, and his Printing Types: Their History, Forms, and Use (1922) became an authoritative text.

D. B. UPDIKES WROTE, 'Truth is the daughter of time'. That was Updike's dismissive prediction Kennerley Oldstyle would never stand the test of time.

Well, what did Updike ever know about time anyway?

There are few modern book type faces worthy of been called original. Kennerley by contrast is the epitome of original in every sense of the word. This type face is an American classic, a strong participant in everything that is good in American culture.

There lacks substantive supporting evidence that Kennerley Oldstyle suffers from Updike's predicted lack of long term popularity. Its' reputation is one of 'resilient' success.

It exudes character, charm and warmth reminiscent of nothing except for itself. It finds itself standing timelessly comfortable amongst the engines of advertising promotions or quiet dignities in book publishing.

On the right Mitchell Kennerley is shown signing a contract for the cutting of a type face by the Lanston Monotype Machine Works. (American Monotype.)

Kennerley's elevations as a distinguished New York art dealer was in addition to his became an illuminating figure in American book publishing circles. Frederic Goudy and Mitchell Kennerley developed much more than a commercial relationship. They were to become close friends.

Unlike Updike, Mitchell Kennerley, knew about time. He was the original publisher of Aldous Huxely's 'The Time Machine'.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, there is a clock and several calendars in the office? What type face?