American Type Founders - Consolidation and Early Years

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. 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.

Unfortunately, conditions for the first few years were chaötic, with member foundries continuing to operate as if they were independent firms. Real consolidation didn’t begin until 1894 when Robert Wickham Nelson, principle 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 forced 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 base-line 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 free-lance 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 the creation of Morris Fuller Benton. Though he never became well known, even within the printing industry, Benton enjoyed a record of successful type introductions unparalleled by anyone, much to the profit of ATF. Benton, though he did not invent either idea, was the most successful designer of revivals of historical type designs (such as his re-cutting of Bodoni and Garamond) and he perfected the creation of “type families” (such as Century or most successfully Cheltenham) were a basic face would be offered in italic, light, bold, extended and condensed variations.

Another key player at ATF at this time was the advertising manager (and informal corporate historian) Henry Lewis Bullen who created a typographic library of historical examples for designers to draw upon. This impressive collection was turned over to Columbia University in 1936. The books are integrated into the main Columbia collection, but there is an archive of ATF materials as well in Columbia's special collections.

In 1901 Nelson consolidated casting operations in a purpose build factory in Jersey City and the branches remained only as distribution centers. By the 1920s, ATF had offices in 27 American cities and Vancouver, B.C., where it sold not only type, but pressroom supplies and printing presses (their own Kelly line and those of other manufacturers) as well. In 1923, at a cost of $300,000, ATF produced its largest and most superlative type catalog. Sixty thousand of these were distributed, and to this day they are considered to be masterpieces of the art of letterpress printing. By the time Nelson died in 1926, ATF 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.