Oswald Bruce Cooper - Typefaces

Typefaces

• Cooper series (BB&S later ATF) When Barnhart Brothers & Spindler Type Foundry (BB&S) approached Cooper with a proposal to design a complete type family based on his lettering, Cooper had doubts over the deal, but Fred Bertsch saw it as opportunity to gain exposure for Cooper's work and to further promote the design studio, so the deal was made.
  • Cooper (1918) originally Cooper Oldstyle Roman
  • Cooper Italic (1924) included swash characters.

• Cooper Black series (1922, BB&S later ATF). Called by designer as a font "for far-sighted printers with near-sighted customers," it was hated by conservative typographers, but was popular among graphic designers, to the point that the foundry had problems making enough fonts.
  • Cooper Black (1922), this became ATF's second-best-selling type, after Copperplate Gothic.
  • Cooper Black Italic (1922)
  • Cooper Hilite (1922)
  • Cooper Black Condensed (1926)) 20% lighter than the Cooper Black, the designer described it as “condensed but not squeezed.”

• Cooper Fullface series Cooper yearned to create a heavy “modern” face- akin to Broadway and other display types in height and proportion, but more nuanced while being a dense, black type. The Barnhart Brothers & Spindler foundry, for whom Cooper had designed a number of typefaces, saw the potential of the typeface as a big seller. Richard McArther, General Manager of the foundry, referred to it as “the hotsy stuff”, though he was highly critical of a number of characters in the original design. He requested a successive number of modifications, including the addition of Dwiggins-inspired serifs to the face to make it stand apart from similarly-weighted typefaces then on the market. He wanted to imbue the face with a considerable amount of “old-timey” flavor in order to impart a sense of originality to the face and have it sell across both Modern and Bodoni/Didot market segments. The resulting typeface was called Cooper Fullface, a jaunty and swollen caricature of a Didone with great potential for display advertising work. The final form of the face was a regulated and consistent balance of cartoonishness and earnest visual braggadocio, the bouncy, circus fairway-like swing of the original drawings of the letters taken down considerably and figures redrawn and redrawn for maximum readability. A specimen sheet was mailed out in 1929, and generated moderate sales, but too late- Barnhart Brothers & Spindler closed its foundry division shortly thereafter as part of ATF’s corporate roll-up of manufacturing. The American Type Founders continued to produce the face and sell it at a decent pace, renaming it Cooper Modern.
  • Cooper Fullface (1929, BB&S)
  • Cooper Fullface Italic (1929) Cooper designed a matching italic for Cooper Fullface, but it was never released. The BB&S foundry closure resulted in the foundry equipment being shipped to New Jersey a few weeks shy of the typeface’s completion. It is unfortunate, as the accompanying italic is perhaps Cooper’s masterpiece, a lively Bodoni-esque italic with more than a bit of influence from 19th Century display types, particularly in the treatment of the ball serifs on the uppercase “A”, “J”, “M”, and “N”. Cooper Fullface Italic stood as the missing bookend to Cooper’s career as a type designer for over a half-century. A digital version based on Cooper's original drawings was released by the Wordshape Type Foundry in 2010.

• Boul Mich (1927, BB&S)) In 1927 Cooper was asked by the foundry to take an advertising headline from a newspaper clipping and fill it out into a design for a complete alphabet, which he did, disclaiming any credit for the original design. The face was named Boul Mich, after Michigan Boulevard in Chicago where many of the cities advertising agencies were located. Digital version released by Wordshape, 2010

• Pompeian Cursive (1927, BB&S) Digital version released by Wordshape, 2010

• Dietz Text (c. 1927, BB&S) Original drawings made by August Dietz were not suitable for making patterns, so Cooper spent two months making them ready for matrix cutting. It was the last of Oswald's fonts released by BB&S before the foundry was closed in 1929.