Type Founding Before ATF
By the beginning of the final decade of the nineteenth century type founding was in a state of crisis. With the introduction of the Linotype, which could cast whole lines of body type in-house, demand for hand-set type was down. Throughout the late 1880s prices were maintained by an informal cartel of foundries, but as the number of foundries increased and with the invention of hot metal type, prices dropped dramatically. Additionally, type at this time was not standardized, either to body size or to base line, and printers resented the incompatibility of types from different foundries. Leaders in the industry, notably Joseph W. Phinney of the Dickinson Type Foundry in Boston, set up a committee to address these problems, eventually recommending consolidation.
Read more about this topic: American Type Founders
Famous quotes containing the words type and/or founding:
“This type of man who is devoted to the study of wisdom is always most unlucky in everything, and particularly when it comes to procreating children; I imagine this is because Nature wants to ensure that the evils of wisdom shall not spread further throughout mankind.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)
“... there is no way of measuring the damage to a society when a whole texture of humanity is kept from realizing its own power, when the woman architect who might have reinvented our cities sits barely literate in a semilegal sweatshop on the Texas- Mexican border, when women who should be founding colleges must work their entire lives as domestics ...”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)