Nothing’s worse than researching an arcane topic, only to scan down over forums and long posts to unanswered questions. That’s what it must have been like in 1896 to read The Inland Printer’s column on designers and engravers of type because, for technical limitations, none of the work of these designers could be shown.

This column was created by William E. Loy, a San Franciscan printing equipment salesman and scholar. For three years Loy compiled through correspondence the biographies, photographs of the artists, and lists of the type they designed or cut.

As we’d imagine Loy would have wanted it, Nineteenth-Century American Designers & Engravers of Type compiles all of both the bios and type (over 800 faces) into one book. It’s good for an historical log and a fascinating view of type design trends of the time.

Nineteenth-Century American Designers & Engravers of Type

By Loy E. William

Edited by Alastair M. Johnston & Stephen O. Saxe

Published in New Castle, Delaware by Oak Knoll Press

First Edition 2009

Hardcover with Dust Jacket

9 × 12 inches

164 Pages

Typeset in Electra, Designed by William Addison Dwiggins and issued by Linotype in 1935
ISBN 978–1–58456–261–0
$59.95

While attending the Type Directors Club Book Fair this past May, I had the pleasure of speaking with Doug Clouse about his new book Mackellar, Smiths & Jordan: Typographic Tastemakers of the Late Nineteenth Century. It’s a full-length study of the American type foundry, Mackellar, Smiths & Jordan. Doug told me about his research, his work into the book’s design, and his travels and discoveries along the way. Having a slight fetish for historical analysis of type, I had to read it. Plus, it’s aptly named with Typographic Tastemakers. Though not the intention of the title, cats in Williamsburg would give their Brooks saddle to set their next tattoo in an original Mackellar, Smiths & Jordan face.

The beginning of the text gets straight down to historical facts of Mackellar, Smiths & Jordan (MS&J) being a descendant of the first successful American type foundry, Binny and Ronaldson (established 1796) that later merged with American Type Founders in 1892. Though it’s not these broad facts that pull you in, but the extensive historical documentation of how the business was run and how its type evolved over time. MS&J kept thorough business records of which Doug has masterfully pieced together to give a complete picture of MS&J’s business and how its type evolved and impacted society at the time.

To document this story, the book employs maps of real estate, architectural drawings of the foundries, photographs of tools and and factory floors, and a completely illustrated appendix of MS&J’s patented typefaces. The appendix contains lots of type specimens. I imagine much of Doug’s work was done managing this large collection. To quote Doug, “Studies of typefaces tend towards classification and issues of provenance, since the first step in understanding them is sorting them. Despite the tendency for their obvious utility to overshadow their expressiveness, typefaces are design, and their history is a sort of design history, a chronological succession of forms set against economic and social backgrounds.”

Some interesting bits:

• The photos show MS&J’s factory floors filled with mostly boys and just a few men. Initially, the boys were assigned simple tasks like rubbing burrs off newly cast type. Later they graduated to tasks performed by the trained men. Women were employed in the correspondence and administrative offices.

• The American point system of type size adopted in 1886 was based on MS&J’s pica point.

• MS&J sold type by the pound. They sold fonts varying in size from twenty five to thousands of pounds, depending on the needs of the customer.

Mackellar, Smiths & Jordan was typeset in the following faces:

Principal text: Documenta, designed by Frank E. Blokland in 1986
Captions: Kievit, designed by Michael Abbink in 2001
Running Feet: Centennial Script, designed by Herman Ihlenburg in 1875 and redrawn by Rebecca Alaccari of Canada Type in 2007
Folios: Numbers Depot, designed by Hoefler & Frere-Jones in 2006

The book is 176 pages, casebound with a dust jacket, and measures 8.5 × 11 inches.

Mackellar, Smiths & Jordan: Typographic Tastemakers of the Late Nineteenth Century
Written & Designed by Doug Clouse
First Edition 2008
Published in New Castle, Delaware by Oak Knoll Press
ISBN 978–1–58456–232–0
$65.00