American Type Founders

American Type Founders (ATF) Co. was a business trust created in 1892 by the merger of 23 type foundries, representing about 85 percent of all type manufactured in the United States at the time. The new company, consisting of a consolidation of firms from throughout the United States, was incorporated in New Jersey.

The American Type Founders Co. should not be confused with the American Type Founders' Association, also called the Type Founders' Association of the United States. Both institutions are identified by the same acronym, ATF. The ATF Association was formed in 1864 and was responsible for establishing the American point system in 1886 based on 83 picas exactly equal to 35 cm. The ATF Co. was not formed until 1892. All but six of the 23 foundries in the company were members of the ATF Association.

The American Type Founders Co. was the dominant American manufacturer of metal type from its creation in 1892 until at least the 1940s; it continued to be influential into the 1960s. Many fonts developed by the ATF Co. in its period of dominance, including News Gothic, Century Schoolbook, Franklin Gothic, Hobo and Bank Gothic, remain in everyday use.

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 in decline. Throughout the late 1880s, prices had been maintained by an informal cartel of foundries, but as the number of foundries increased, prices dropped dramatically, a trend accelerated by the invention of hot metal typesetting. 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.

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. The Chicago Tribune (February 12, 1892) listed the 23 foundries as:

Other foundries joined later. The 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.

Conditions for the first few years were chaotic: while 12 foundries ceased separate operations immediately member foundries continued to operate as if they were independent firms. Real consolidation did not begin until 1894, when Robert Wickham Nelson, principal 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 force 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 baseline 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 freelance 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 developed in-house, under the direction of Morris Fuller Benton. Under Benton's direction, the company embarked on a program of developing historical revivals, including ATF's versions of Bodoni and Garamond, as well as the development of new typefaces such as Century and (most successfully) Cheltenham, which for the first time were organized systematically into "type families" with a schedule of styles such as weight or width.