American Type Founders - Divestiture of The Foundry

Divestiture of The Foundry

By the 1980s the foundry in Elizabeth, New Jersey was down to only six employees and duplicator manufacture was the principle business of ATF-Davidson. In 1986 foundry was sold off to Kingsley Machines, a maker of foil-stamping type, and the merged company was renamed Kingsley/ATF. Immediately a bid was made to enter the field of digital typography with a software subsidiary being set up in Tucson. With its enormous library of type, and its patents on the optical scaling of type, a digital library of ATF types seemed to be a good investment. As the original drawings of the faces were mostly lost, these fonts had to be scanned from brass matrices, a daunting prospect. The work was well done, but slow, and only four faces (Wedding Text, Thompson Quill Script, Bernhard Fashion, and T.M. Cleland’s border designs) were ever issued before Kingsley/ATF sought bankruptcy protection in 1993. An auction was held on 23 August 1993 and all the assets of the foundry were sold off, most of the priceless matrices going to scrap dealers. ATF designs remain the property of Kingsley Holding Corporation and are now licensed through Adobe and Bitstream.

Though ATF is now defunct, some of their original type casting machines and matrix engraving equipment are still in use at The Dale Guild Type Foundry in Howell, New Jersey. This equipment was saved through efforts coordinated by Theo Rehak, the last person trained to run these machines at ATF's Elizabeth, New Jersey facility.