#4 Morris Fuller Benton (Franklin Gothic)

Welcome to Titans of Type, the podcast about history's most influential typefaces and the stories and designers behind them. I'm your host, Joshua Rose. Morris Fuller Benton shaped the visual language of America's industrial age. But who is the man behind the letters? That fueled his precision and innovation and how did his work quietly influence generations of designers. Join me in this conversation as we uncover the life and legacy of Morris Fuller Benton, master craftsman, innovator, and unsung type of type. The American type founders company, formed in 1892, was not the first to revive historical styles of type. Nor the first to exploit type designs in large families of weights and widths. Nor the first to reconcile the design with technology of type. Nor the first to understand the importance of marketing to the success of type. However, if it did not invent these things, it practiced them so well that the result amounted to ATF's real invention, the modern type business. In the history of type making, ATF in its heyday came very close to that paradigm. It had a great boss in Robert W. Nelson, an engineer of genius in Lynn Boyd Benton, a fine and prolific type designer, Morris Fuller Benton, and a brilliant publicist in Henry Lewis Bowen, a master of ATF's typographic library, the best historical resource ever housed at a type company. The legacy of ATF's business model, chiefly in the form of type faces design, wholly and partly by Morris Benton, survives to this day. So that was a short excerpt from the book I'm going to be talking to you about the day. Let's split that one out quick. But entitled The Bentons, how an American father and son changed the printing industry. So I'm holding this book in my hands right now. Super excited to talk to you about it. It's been a number of months since the last episode was released. I've finally found time to be able to record this. So let's jump right into it. So as I've been working through these different type designers and kind of really learning from the ground up, it's really helped me to be able to kind of compare them to other figures that I've seen in kind of the entrepreneurship space, business space, design space, and one figure that continually comes to mind, as I've learned about specifically the personality of Morris Fuller Benton, the son in the story, the figure that comes to mind is Henry Royce. So I'm going to read a short excerpt here from this is this is a book called Rolls Royce, the Magic of a Name. It's one of the the biographies kind of a business biography. It focuses a lot on Henry Royce, who was one of the co-founders of Rolls Royce, and I see so many parallels between Morris Fuller Benton and Henry Royce. So that's kind of a comparison. I'm going to be just being making throughout over the course of this story. Yeah, just to kind of help us understand what made Morris Fuller Benton so great. So this is from the Magic of a Name. There was nothing revolutionary about Royce's car. He had not taken the best of current automobile, he had taken the best of current automobile design and improved on every aspect of it. I do not think that Royce did anything of a revolutionary nature in his work on motor cars. He did, however, do much important development and a considerable amount of redesigning of existing devices. So that is motor cars were far and away better than anyone else's motor cars. He paid great attention to the smallest detail and the result of his personal consideration to every little thing resulted in the whole assembly being of a very high standard of perfection. So this is one thing that one kind of theme is just thinking about this, this very high standard of attention to detail and yeah, high standard of perfection. It is rather to Royce's thoroughness and attention to even the smallest detail than to any revolutionary invention that his products have the superlative qualities that we all know so well. So I wanted to introduce this character at the beginning of this story to kind of just help us think through the beauty of Morris Fuller Benton's work and the work that he did kind of at large in his father for the type design industry. So they kind of a high level they both work together at ATF, the American type founder's company. That is where his father, Morris Fuller Benton, sorry, Lynn Boyd Benton, he spent most of his career, Morris on the other hand spent his entire career working for this company. So he did a number of typeface designs you are definitely familiar with at least some of them. There's over 200, but he designed Franklin Gothic, news Gothic, bank Gothic, clear face, cloister old style, the Jeltonham family, hobo and so many others. So the Benton family raised high achievers, the father, Lynn Boyd Benton, he was kind of forced for an early age to just provide for himself because his mother died at a very, very early age, I think he was, he was, he was only five years old when his mother passed away. And then his son, Morris, suffered from significant childhood illness, which really set him apart from his peers and just caused him to, yeah, just really focus heavily on work and studies and, yeah, he eventually studied mechanical engineering, which we'll, we'll dive into. Overcoming adversity gave both of the Bentons a strong character and played a part in shaping who they would become. So to kind of understand the sun, I'm going to start out just talking a little about, a little bit about boy, Lynn Boyd, so yeah, it's kind of a little snapshot of him. As we'll definitely see as the story goes on, the story of the father is just intimately embedded in the sun. I really like how Paul Johnson kind of talks about this idea and his biography of Mozart. He says, it's no use asking what if Mozart had an ordinary, normal father. Mozart without his father is inconceivable and there is no point in considering it. Mozart himself was a unique phenomenon. So Leopold was a unique father and the two created each other. That's just kind of an idea that I'd like to kind of keep in your mind as we're working our way through the story. So although Boyd Bentons early years were full of changes, he was a playful child who was fascinated by puzzles and mechanical things. His family moved around quite a bit, looks like he studied in little falls in Milwaukee. He went on to actually study at Galesville College in Galesville, Wisconsin. He studied Latin and Greek and other advanced subjects for about two years with the private tutor. He was determined not to be taught by books all day, so he arranged his tutor to study in the mornings, so he could do as he wished in the afternoon. So this is one important attribute that kind of noticing with Flynn Boyd is from a very early age, he's just taking responsibility, taking responsibility for his education here, thinking about the most effective way to learn and also just balance it with time in the afternoon to do personal work. Boyd worked as a two stone cutter in La Crosse during one of semester's off, first observing and then cutting Roman letters into tombstones, so this is kind of his first exposure to type design. Evidently, he was not particularly apt. His mistakes had to be chiseled off and this two stone smoothed down and the work started over, which he all paid, he paid for all out of his own salary, so that's kind of a little bit unfair, I'd say, but surely it taught him a lesson how to work with precision. He later told his granddaughter that he never heard of any cash money because he ruined so many tombstones, although he did learn a lot about letters. So when he was 16, he completed his formal education and began lettering a set of type in the office of Charles Seymour's lacrosse Republican, while also working as a bookkeeper for a leather house in lacrosse. So then he was later hired by Josiah a Newton's Northwestern type foundry in Milwaukee as a bookkeeper. It's kind of his first full exposure to the type design world professionally. So he met his wife while working at this type foundry. While out one night he heard some music playing down the road. He walked over and found a group of women playing on the porch and boyd happened to recognize an old friend from childhood, Jesse Elizabeth Donaldson. This surprised sparks of romance which resulted in courtship and then they eventually got married. So boyd was 27, Jesse was 22 and Morris Fuller Benton was born the next year. So the two planned for a large family but they were only able to actually just have one. So their only child was Morris Fuller Benton. So Lynn Boyd was quite entrepreneurial and when the owner of the type foundry he was employed for went bankrupt in 1877. The depression of 1877, he acquired the foundry for himself with his partner Edward Craier. So at the time he had no training in type founding but was but still handled the manufacturing side of the business. He began to slowly master the difficult art of type founding improving the operations at the foundry with the series of important inventions. And then later his partner sold ownership in the company to the southern guy Frank and Grove was a naval officer who knew nothing of the type business but he actually proved to be a very, very successful and popular salesman. So oh sorry not not Grove it's it's Gov GOV. So Gov handled the business side of things and Benton continued to learn everything he could about the manufacturing type in a highly competitive market. So Boyd was totally up for the challenge as we kind of saw with this today you know in his early childhood he was kind of paving his own way. So he definitely was up for the challenge and Dove headfirst into the world precision. He wasn't just crunching numbers he mastered decimal fractions and could nail measurements down to a tenth of a thousand of an inch. He didn't just understand fine details he had almost a sixth sense about how even the tiniest factors like the warmth of your breath on steel could mess with those crucial dimensions. It wasn't just knowledge it was a genuine heart ache for him because he desperately wanted to eliminate these uncontrollable variables. So wow he's clearly spending a lot of time to just learn and develop this very specific task of producing the mechanical type. Yeah it's incredible that he is he's noticing like the warmth of your breath that's down to very, very high detail. While most folks were content with a little wiggle row Benton saw even the smallest slip as a catastrophic event. This unwavering dedication to perfection set him apart in the world of type. So there's a little kind of story here about just kind of how this this played out in other ways. So he had a reputation for being perfectionist. This is something that we see in in Lynn Boyd also in his son Morris. But there was a story about a young boy who grew up working in the Milwaukee Foundry named Will. Will's earliest task was to sharpen 15 pencils and have them ready on Boyd's drawing table each morning so that he could so so that when he arrived at the Foundry he could examine them under a magnifying glass. This is insane. So he he had this expectation that there would be 15 pencils every single morning when he arrived. If five of the 15 were accepted, well it was lucky. Wow. So small fraction. Most of them would be considered too flat, too round, or too sharp. Boyd knew he wanted what he wanted and trained his people to give it to him without compromise. So if you again with with Henry Royce for Rolls Royce, this is exactly how he he worked as well. Real quick just kind of quick aside. I'm also reading Fiona McCarthy's biography of Eric Gill for a future episode. His father was also obsessed with properly sharpened pencils. I don't know if there's just a a thing back back at the end of the 19th century or you know what it was but thought that was kind of interesting. So another quick quick story from the magic of a name, Henry Royce from Rolls Royce. This is a story on the quality of work in detail from one of the first apprentice apprentices at Rolls Royce. So this is interesting. Someone who's working under Henry Royce's story about Henry. My favorite story of Rolls Royce's workmanship is design and quality to the Americans when they ask me about it as they do often is the use of taper bolts instead of rivets. I remember Royce carefully explained to me how a hot rivet never filled a hole when it cooled and a cold rivet was punishing the metal too much. So we made taper bolts and we fitted them perfectly in hand in a hand-wrapped hole. It is such detail that explains the difference between Rolls Royce and other cars. It was Royce himself who taught us all the principles which carried on in the whole organization. So it's stuff like this just attention to like incredibly small details that I mean the people working with these guys are remembering these things these are memorable like training events for them. So it was actually really inspiring to kind of think about this where this is encouraging to have excellence in every facet of the process. So back to the book. Soon after they joined his partners so Benton and Gov they began producing a house publication the Northwestern for patrons friends and potential clusters. It contained editorials, news of the printing business, whimsical essays, jokes, political commentary, types specimens and advertisements for the presses and inks the companies also sold. Benton Gov and company also issued types specimen books in 1876 and 1882 copies of which are preserved today in a rare books collection at Columbia University Library in New York. So Gov passed away in '82 and Benton sold a third of the company to Robert Van of Valkenberg Waldo. A wholesale brochure who liked Gov knew nothing about type. They changed the name to Benton Waldo and Co and continued to issue additional specimen books to promote the types. So it's interesting like the collaboration between Benton and these other guys like they clearly have business expertise. Yeah, we're up running their other various businesses. So it's kind of cool that they're I'm sure able to bring these these ideas of like successful promotional materials and what works. So kind of jumping to Morris. So that was a little bit about Lynn Void able to see kind of his personality and how it it influenced his work. So yeah diving into a a little bit more about Morris Lynn Void's son. So his boy had learned to set type at age 11 with the help of his father. So also Morris bed time at his youth working in his own little printing shop in the family's home. I just I love that. I love this like multi-generational discipline here. I'm just working together in the home as a family. I think that's awesome. He designed and printed at Benton's tickets for children's music classes and for neighborhood shows receipts for work. He'd did for his father and booklets of riddles. Porus was not a strong boy and suffered a variety of childhood ailments, including scarlet fever. As a result of his poor health, the doctor recommended that they actually move away to from Lake Michigan. So they were in Milwaukee right along Lake Michigan. So the Benton's actually relocated a few miles west of Milwaukee, and again, as a child, Morris set up a printing workshop as well as small dark room. So he was kind of an avid amateur photographer and he documented it. Many aspects of family life. So if you're kind of looking through this book here, there's a number of photographs of his family. There's a really cool photo on page 25 of the Benton's in their backyard. They're kind of hanging out in a hammock. The women are sitting in the hammock, men are standing around. They're all dressed up and yeah, there's a guy in the background here with a bowler hat on and he's got a cigarette coming out of his mouth. Just really helps you like immerse yourself in the time period. If you look through the rest of the book, too, there's just a number of photographs. So very helpful resource to have in your library, and also with his love of Taipei, he made a stamp to mark the back of each of his photographs with his family name. So that just really cool is his interesting like in pet preserving, preserving history. Yeah, there's like really no way to be super interested in type design without also being interested in history. The two are so intimately tied together. Being away from Milwaukee eventually began to take a toll on the family's social life. The city was several hours away via Forson Buggy, and the last train back on left too early for them to go to the evening theater. So this, this is an interesting situation here. So like I mentioned before, lean boy, the father is just very extroverted and loves to have a life outside of work. So he came up with a plan to kind of solve and remedy this, this issue of not being able to stay out late. So he and a few entrepreneurial buddies purchased a train from the Milwaukee Railroad, allowing them to do things on their own schedule. So this is so cool. In the evenings, the Bettens and their friends would take the train into the city. They'd go to events and the theater and then return home just before midnight. Yeah, and this became a incredibly popular that they expanded the train from a single passenger card to three. So just think about that. Like all of these, these families kind of hanging out together, they have their own personal little rail line, and they would fry it into the city and stay there until midnight. And then of course, you know, the Bettens were a working family. So or a full or a lean boy, get up the next morning and just return to work. It's like really, really cool. So one of the things I really loved about this book is it just kind of provides such a snapshot into and look into like the family life and family dynamic and it's not explicitly about about work to really enjoy that. A few years later, the Bettens moved back to Milwaukee and had a house built within a block of Boyd's patent attorney whose daughter would later become Morris's wife. So in 1892, Morris Fuller-Bettin, he was almost 20 years old and he left for college. He went to Cornell in New York. So it was around this time that there was a giant merger of type foundries, which I think today would be considered a monopoly and illegal in the US. But yeah, back in 1982 or 1892, there was a giant merger which created the American type founders company based out of New York City. So lean Boyd stayed in Milwaukee for a few months kind of after this happened, but then eventually was needed to kind of relocate to New York City. So lean Boyd was actually a lot more involved in the industry kind of reshaping than I realized at first. So this is actually from Stanley Morrison's biography, a little section on lean Boyd Benton. So it says, "Lin Boyd Benton invented a punch cutting machine in 1884 to aid himself in self-spacing types. By agreement, this machine was used for making punches for the newer composing machines. It is odd that Benton did not foresee that by this action he was signing the death warrant of the type foundries. And in particular, the one which he was associated, ATF. Perhaps the threat was not immediately apparent as the composing machine companies did not attempt to design their own type. They kind of relied on copies of those available from the type foundries. It was when they began to enter the field of type design that competition became fierce and ATF eventually went under." So this is kind of creating the overarching story of ATF here in a snapshot, but lean Boyd was kind of a powerhouse in the printing world. So Morris Fuller Benton is at Cornell and after the Christmas vacation during his freshman year, he wrote back to Ethel Bottom who I mentioned earlier was his father's daughter. So she was back in Milwaukee and he asked for permission to correspond with her. About a year later they were engaged, happened so quickly. So Morris's best grades at Cornell were a mechanical drawing. He actually designed a cannon and built a model and fired it every year at the 4th of July. So he graduated after four years with the degree in mechanical engineering and took a number of prizes in freehand drawing and mechanical drawing. Soon afterwards he started to work with his father at the American type foundries company in New York. So this is perfect. So he kind of goes from Cornell straight to ATF. So he was hired as the assistant manager of the general manufacturing department under his father and worked as an engineer and draftsman for ATF. So a lot of his early work here was kind of just in helping his father with his various inventions. And then he was kind of assigned to basically like standardized the various type lines that ATF acquired from the other type foundries. So it's here that he really just kind of gets to get his hands dirty and experience in type and in quite a variety of type. So he's basically just like working to organize all these disparate working parts on the ATF, you know, now owns through the merger. So Morris and Mary Ethel have a three year engagement and then finally get married. Ethel turned 20 and although her college education was unfinished, she had her parents permission to marry. The uncouple took up residence in a small somewhat dingy apartment on Staten Island, ten walks away from the senior bedents. This is great. Each morning I would absolutely love this, it sounds so just so awesome. Each morning Morris and his father would meet and take the ferry to New York. ATF was located at the time on the south southern most type of Manhattan. So this is so cool that they're able to work together and commute together. Elizabeth Boyd was born the following year, so this is Morris and Ethel's daughter. And shortly after the baby's birth, the young family moved in with Boyd and Jessie who had bought a large house. The two families lived, lived together on Staten Island for nine years. So this is a lot more common back then. Yeah, it's just really cool that they're just kind of living and working together, like clearly a very, very close family. So ATF eventually moved across the river to New Jersey and then the bedents decided to leave Staten Island to be closer to work, so this is kind of after a long while. Boyd rented a home for the whole family and then eventually purchased a large Victorian house on the street. down the street. Boyd has always wanted a large family, and he and Jesse were pleased with the three-generation arrangement. So a Morrison Ethel, they spent a lot of time reading out loud together. So this is, you know, how they would spend some other time. They, both of them, were had more home bodies than Lynn Boyd and his wife. But yeah, they spent a lot of time reading together, which included Winston Churchill, the Saturday evening post, and Mark Twain. Morris, like, he might like to American Folk Wisdom, and often quoted Ben Franklin. So Ben Franklin, like, is actually a figure that I would really love to have on this podcast. Because he actually desired professionally to be known as a printer before anything else. So if you've ever been to Philadelphia, right? Just north of the city hall, there is actually a statue of Ben Franklin kind of working with a printing press, which is really cool. I mean, there's so much more to Ben Franklin's story, you know, with politics and science, and he was, he was just very involved holistically in his community. And this is actually something that we see kind of play out with the Bentons as well. So some Morris actually belonged to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the National Rifle Association, and the Cornell Club of New York City. Oh, and the Plainfield Country Club. He also attended a Presbyterian church and was a Republican. Morris and Ethel also belonged to a Card Club in Plainfield. So they're super involved in the community and their church. Yeah, just have kind of a very balanced life. So there's a little bit more about Morris's personality and kind of how that played out in the home. So he, he was a patient man who explained things carefully to his daughters. He drew diagrams for them, or after dinner, he would move the salt and pepper shakers around the table to explain in simple terms some complex piece of machinery. So this is something I just always love seeing this when, you know, parents are trying to like teach their their kids. And just like the various ways that that, you know, they kind of do this. I have another number of friends right now who have young kids. It's just like makes you think, causes you to, you know, have to like step into someone else's world and just just think creatively about the core elements of an idea. So this is also really cool. So when Caroline asked her father about his work, he picked up a current magazine and pointed out page after page of advertisements and articles using his designs. So she says, I was so proud and excited. And he seemed very pleased at my enthusiasm. So this is so cool, like such a common experience, you know, talking about your work with your kid and, you know, you kids just like so proud and excited. And yeah, this is cool to see. The younger Benton's frequently took Sunday outings in the family car. His daughter later shared. So this is also, you know, as I talked previously about his attention to detail, just, just take note of this here. The series of cars the family owned beginning before my birth in 1902 consisted of mechanical problems, which my father was expected to solve. Each car was expected to run perfectly. My father did all the work on them himself for many years and carefully recorded and careful records were kept in all of on all repairs and adjustments made in addition to records on fuel consumption, oiling, greasing, tires, etc. Hours might be spent and much conversation with my mother on the road, tracking down elusive body squeaks or a strange pain or birdie in the engine. Yeah, so this, this is kind of a cool story. It's just like reinforces the notion that like Morris, Morris is like meticulous attention to detail and desire for perfection was very much an essential part of his, his character. So jumping back to Henry Royce, let me just kind of again, paint this picture for comparison. Royce is striving for perfection in everything he did was epitomized by a comment made to a local priest in wittering after he had stripped and rebuilt the flicker's lawnmower. The actual words were not recorded, but they inspired the priest's son. So listen to this, they inspired the priest's son, the famous sculptor and type designer, Eric Gill. To paraphrase them as, whatever rightly done however humble is noble. Gill obtained access to Royce's house and carved the Latin inscription in a stone mantle piece. Okay, this is like super interesting for a number of reasons. First, it's talking about, you know, Royce's dedication to quality, however humble the task. So first of all, that's really cool. Second of all, just stumbled across this, but this man he's making the comment to is Eric Gill's father. So Eric Gill definitely coming up and line up, he's also a very significant type designer. But yeah, I just further solidifies the reason for kind of including Henry Royce in this. There's there's a number of connections to Morris Fuller Ben. So even though the advent of the lineau type and other composing machines began to erode the demand for foundry type in the early 1900s, Robert Nelson decided to maintain type as ATF's chief product. So we definitely for saw this this growth in the type industry, just because of, you know, advertising, how much of a reliance that had on new type new faces to kind of carry carry these new new messages in new ways. Yeah, so this this publicity type is advertising type was was used for text pages, text pages, and display. So Morris Ben definitely kind of carried out Nelson's plan and created more type faces than any other American designer. So this is this is definitely one of the reasons why Ben's work is just so well known today is there just there's so many touch points, you know, with all the all the type faces that he's designed. So up until this point, we we've talked a lot about his family life and upbringing and his father his father's work and influences and just influence in the industry. Get a dive a little bit more into his type, Morris Ben's type practice specifically. So many of his type faces were kind of restorations of classical European types that had originally been developed for printing on wet paper and had been cut at only a few sizes. Because of the efforts of one of his colleagues, Henry Lewis Bowen, Benton had access to many examples of these types right at the ATF plant. So so Bowen did an incredible job at massing this this library. He had begun working at ATF right after the merger in 1892 and he started ATF's free typographic library in museum in 1908 with the collection of specimen specimen books and other early printed matter that the original foundries had gathered. Bowen regularly added to the collection and in time it contained type specimens from around the world histories of printing and publishing biographies of famous printers and books from early precedents and many other historical items. Morris Benton spent, so this is this is like gold right here. Morris Benton spent every Saturday in the library and it was his primary source of inspiration. So that's like definitely one of the goals of this podcast here is to not only immerse ourselves in in the work and the visual just results of these masters but also into their their stories and their historical contacts and their lives and just want to understand them kind of holistically. So I've come back to this quote so many times I just love repeating it in this podcast because I think it's so pertinent to to what you and I are doing together as we're studying the history of type design comes from General Jim Mattis. Living in history builds your own shock absorber because you'll learn that there are lots of old solutions to new problems. If you haven't read hundreds of books you are functionally illiterate and you will be incompetent Because you're personal experiences alone aren't broad enough to sustain you. So that's exactly what you and I are doing. That's exactly what Moore spent and did, spending his Saturdays in the library, reading biographies, histories of printing and publishing, looking at types of specimens. This is how he got his inspiration. You know, it's how Fred Gowdy got his inspiration. He traveled around Europe, looked at history, just immersed himself in the world of type design and the type designers. Bettens' historic type revivals became popular for advertising typography. The Inland printers' typographic scoreboard consistently ranked Bettens' Badoni in Caramonde as the most popular faces for advertisements in the Saturday evening post. And yet at the time, Morris Benton was not regarded as one of America's important type designers. That distinction usually went to Frederick W. Gowdy who we talked about in last episode. The famous type designer who worked out of his small studio deep dean. So it's kind of interesting, you know, as we're kind of comparing and contrasting Morris with his father and how, you know, Morris, you know, they have similarities and being kind of this perfectionist, but also they contrast each other in a number of ways. I think it's also important to kind of compare Morris Fuller Benton to the previous designers that we talked about. So in the previous episode, Bart Gowdy was incredibly great at kind of promoting his own work and marketing. I mean, he worked as a freelancer that so that was definitely part of how he got his work. But on the other hand, Morris Fuller Benton worked a very long stable career with one company. So he is not really as well known because he didn't have to be, he didn't have to promote his work. He was very content, you know, just just kind of keeping a very humble quiet life, living a humble quiet life. So some sources give Morris Benton credit for his invention of the type family, but the concept concept actually predates Benton. Perhaps the earliest example of his type family is the Pierre Simon Fournier in France is from Pierre Simon Fournier in France. So definitely I have Fournier's type design biography. So I'll certainly be covering that in the future, but it says here he showed various sizes and weights of the same basic force in his manual type typore a feat. Wow, I probably butchered that one. More than a hundred years later in Italy, Gian Batista Badoni followed for his example and also cut types in various weights. So Bowen, as you remember the gentleman who opened the ATF library, he wrote in an Inland printer article that it was JW Finney of Boston who came up with the type family concept later introducing it to ATF. He then switched gears and wrote that Robert Nelson had invented it. So you know, there's not much consensus about who exactly came up with the type family, but on top of that, Bowen's assistant in the ATF library said that Bowen himself invented the concept of the type family and that Benton put it into practice. So regardless, regardless of where the concept originally originated, it is generally agreed that Morris Benton's handling of Shelton hand type, the value of the type family began to take hold. So he executed this so, so well. Belt, the Benton design Shelton hand bold in 1904 and at least ten other variations by 1913. Eventually, the type became practically a household word far beyond the confines of the nation's composing rooms. And Benton, such a humble guy, did not need the credit. He wasn't looking to get recognition for this. Just he, yeah, in one of the interviews, he was kind of being asked about the credit for this work. And he says, let's see, Morris Benton seems to be one of the most difficult, okay, so this is the interviewer talking. Morris Benton seems to be one of the most difficult men to interview. I have ever talked to and I have interviewed thousands in my time. Wow. So try to pin some honor on him or give him credit for some achievement. And he will modestly sidestep with the remark that Lady Luck helped me a lot there. So that's, that's definitely interesting. He had no desire to be in the spotlight. I mean, of course, if you actually did something, take credit for it. That actually is humility to take credit for what you've done. So probably not the best response there. But in addition to Shelton, him, Morris collaborated with his father on a variant of century Roman number two. By 1924, he had expanded that family to at least 16 offerings. Like his father, Morris Benton was interested in solving problems in industry. They did much of it together. So that's super cool to see, you know, their continual collaboration over the course of both of their careers. So there's a, a quote here from, from Morris's daughter. And they're sitting at the table. And she asks basically if, if, you know, Morris ever used his engineering training to help grandpa to help his dad with the machines. And Morris says, yes, I worked on almost all of them. So later in his, his career has worked with ATF included inventing a number of type founding devices, processes, and machines. So he, you know, he focused specifically on type design and kind of, you know, of course, partnered with his dad to, you know, spend time in the more mechanical space. Morris Benton's last projects at ATF were tests involving type hardness and effect of age on this factor. And then there's just some, some more notes on his personality here. He was a reserved man whose outward manner seems stern. He was shy and modest when among peers. So that, I remember, I've been not seeing this right here. I didn't make a note of this. But what, there is one story in the book about Morris being at a party with his wife. And he was stressed up. I can't remember which, which character he was stressed up as. But he didn't say a word the entire party. So no one knew who, who the character was that, you know, it was kind of covering his face and whatnot. But yeah, very shy. He was fine kind of just being quiet, mining his own business to continue himself. But of course, did incredible work. The inland printer wrote about Morris. What shall be said of the younger Benton? Whose designs cover every requirement of typography. Who has produced the greatest type, success of the century, yet has considered these achievements as all in a day's work, and has never sought or received any notoriety through advertising's artful aid? No other designer has done such good work with less pretension. No other type designer has produced so many designs that are in daily use by the predators everywhere. So that kind of just closes out this section on Morris's personality, his career, how he's working with his father. And then I just have a number of, I guess, highlights on different types he worked on, and then kind of the different stories for each of these. So the section is kind of kicked off by three parameters identified by Herman's Op, three parameters within which a type designer must work. So I think these three areas were definitely mastered by Benton. So the designing of a type-based man's knowledge of a historical trends of the evolution of type design. So one, he spent a very large amount of time every single Saturday in Henry Lewis Bullins library at ATF. The second is artistic perception. So Benton loved to sketch. He also had other creative hobbies, including photography that I've kind of mentioned. And then lastly a thorough understanding of type-founding techniques. So, because his father was so mechanically inclined, he was exposed to this at a very early age. Another way that we've seen Morris kind of remembered in type design is through his legibility studies, which resulted in clear phase, the century schoolbook family, and news gothic. These typefaces were judged to be the most legible phase by Barbara Rothline's famous 1912 type legibility study. He also produced some of his types all the way down to five points, which helped him kind of push the boundaries on legibility. So, most of ATF's productions only went down to six, so Morris was certainly pushing the boundaries here. So, the first typeface I kind of want to talk about here is Franklin Gothic. So, as I've kind of mentioned earlier, as we've looked at the personality of Benton, he and his wife, were both big fans of Benjamin Franklin, and read quite a lot of his literature. Anyway, it kind of just worked its way into inspiring this typeface here. So, in 1902, he designed Franklin Gothic, which really could be called like the patriarch of modern American gothic. So, it was copied by a wide array of institutions, including monotype, lino type, inner type, and Ludlow. And then, you might also know it just from a number of logos, it's been used quite widely. But in 1964, the Museum of Modern Art in New York chose Benton's original Franklin Gothic as the typeface for its logo. So, that happened in '64, and it's persisted kind of until this day. Franklin Gothic #2 is one of the grandest and most familiar American typefaces, designed by Benton in Jersey City. Franklin is simultaneously muscular with an imposing weight and humanist, with letterforms reminiscent of the strokes of the calligraphers pen, rather than a mechanical compass. So, to put it simply, it's a modern face with deep roots. So, as I've been kind of like frapping for this episode, I've had the Franklin Gothic lore case A, as the wallpaper on my phone, and which is, I don't know why I haven't done this before, but it's really helped me to just look at the typeface for a significant chunk of time. And yeah, the width in the stroke of the lore case A is so beautiful, there's so much nuance there, and boldness. Yeah, I've really come to love this typeface even more. You can really sense the hand of a maker in this typeface, and there's also this standing and looking into the future, but also digging into the roots of the past. So, I think these few things are kind of why MoMA selected the typeface for their logo type. So, the next typeface on the list here is News Gothic, and it was designed six years later, in 1908, ATF introduced it, and it's very similar to Franklin Gothic, except for the queue. The tale in News Gothic is center aligned, whereas in Franklin Gothic, it's just kind of more on the right side. News Gothic also doesn't really have quite as much stroke contrast, so it just feels a little bit more condensed in nature than Franklin. So, Ben designed kind of three versions. He did a condensed, an extra condensed, and extra condensed title. And then, additionally, so that typeligibility study that I was talking about a few minutes ago, kind of also referred to as the Clark University study, they found that of the 26 typefaces studied, News Gothic was the most legible out of all of them. This is a little quote here, it says, "If legibility is to be our sole criterion for excellence of a typeface, the study stated that News Gothic must be regarded as our nearest approximation to an ideal face, and so far as the present investigation is able to decide this question." So, yeah, at the time, it was determined to be the most legible face, so these faces actually, yeah, were met with pretty considerable commercial success. The two families weathered several decades of typographic change and were still popular in the '60s. Today, the major type distributors offer both faces. And then, for a few days here in May 2007, which is almost 100 years after Benton designed it, on Bitstream, their digital version of News Gothic was number five on its in-house list of online bestsellers. It's pretty incredible, so Bitstream was founded by Matthew Carter and eventually acquired by Monotype, I think in like 2013, somewhere around there. Yeah, so this is pretty incredible. Nearly a hundred years later, it is number five on a Foundry's bestseller list. So, incredible typeface, highly recommend checking it out, and I'm going to continue on. So, the next type we have here on the list is Cheltenham. I think I was pronouncing it a little bit wrong during the rest of the podcast. Anyway, so although Morris Benton's name is associated with the great Cheltenham family of type, he did not design the original face. Cheltenham Old-style was drawn by Bertram Grasvener Goodhew, an architect who designed St. Thomas Church in New York, the Nebraska State Capital, and some buildings at the US Military Academy at West Point, New York. He was also interested in the graphic arts and designed the Marymount typeface for Daniel Berkley-Uptikes Marymount Press. So, we talked a little bit about this in last episode of Titans with Fred Riccowdy, if you haven't listened to that episode, highly recommend checking it out. But yeah, so this guy, this architect, Bertram Goodhew, I will be having him on some episode of the podcast, added him to the queue, might be a little ways down. But yeah, so he originally designed this Cheltenham typeface, which Morris took, and then used to build out an entire family. And he, you know, as we mentioned before, is by some attributed to be the first to design a type family. The Mergenthaler type company eventually picked up a version of the type and cut sizes which could be composed on the line of type. ATF was commissioned to manufacture only the sizes that could not be composed on the line of type. This license was ignored, and ATF proceeded to cut all sizes of the Cheltenham design from six points upward. The Mergenthaler line of type organization certainly regarded this as piracy. So, yeah, quite a bit of controversy kind of around the typeface, large. In learning about this, I really wasn't too surprised to hear that this, this was actually Morris Fuller Benton's first type assignment at ATF. And he was in no way a junior designer at this point, you know, he kind of came in as a manager. Because, you know, he was working with his dad. So, he's in no way exempt from criticism, but I mean, this was his first project. So, there's just some interesting things going on here. So, to continue, Cheltenham's legibility made it a natural for advertising work. And when Benton expanded it into a family, it sales increased dramatically. So, Benton's Cheltenham variations had much greater popularity in sales than the parent design, and the family was becoming a goldmine for the Foundry, so for ATF. So interesting, wow, there was not a printing office in the land that didn't proudly accommodate one or more fonts of shelf. So, Benton did not take credit for the original design in his 1936 list of typefaces, but he did include these Cheltenham variations. Bold, bold italic, bold condensed, bold extended, bold extra condensed, medium, medium, metallic, and wide. So Cheltenham was kind of overused and started to lose popularity in the 20s. Some of the characters were criticized, including the capitals A and G, the lower case A, and the final trilled R. And at this time, Gowdy Bold was introduced in 1917, which greatly slowed up the sales of Cheltenham. Okay, and the last typeface I'm going to talk about here is Cloister Old Style, and I think this one actually has the most interesting story. So when Morris Beton began his research for an ATF version of William Morris' type, he did not turn to the golden types, but went back to the Jensen's original. Beton was a long-time admirer of Jensen and found the work a labor of love. So his father kind of, he mentioned that it was actually had Rilo as Bowen, who suggested to Beton in 1913 that he revive the Jensen type. And he says here, Bowen says here, "Through my initiative, the printers are enjoying the use of the Cloister Old Style series." So this, this for me, was the gold mine of the book, stumbling upon this paragraph. It's on page 213 if you get yourself a copy. Beton's preparatory work was exhaustive. He read extensively in the literature of the period, saturated himself with the Venice of 1470, which was the year Jensen established his press, and tried to put himself in Jensen's place by visualizing the conditions under which he worked. Then, according to John Murphy, he asked himself, "What would Jensen do if he had the facilities of a type foundry like ATF?" In the process of designing ATF's version of Jensen's type, Morris Benton gave full and untrammeled expression to the artistic side of his nature. The result was Benton's favorite type, Cloister Old Style. A face that captured the beauty and grace of the original Jensen letter. Alexander Lawson characterized it as having many of the recognizable features of the Jensen letter, but none of the oddities of the golden type. So this is this is such a beautiful thing here because what what Morris Benton was after was getting kind of an understanding and world view of this original type designer of Jensen and his world view back in 1470 in Venice. And that's exactly what gets me so jazzed up about. Just reading these biographies is we as contemporary type designers are able to kind of through these narratives, jump back into the history and context of the past and the type designers of the past. So to kind of just wrap up my notes here on this typeface. The design was praised by typographers all over the country. Up the productions of the American type founders company in later years, none can compare with the Cloister Old Style this was written by Harry Hillman, his editor of the Inland Press. It is without doubt one of the three most popular typefaces available today. With this typeface a typographer worthy of his soul may build typefors of exceeding beauty and dignity. It reflects the great credit on Mr. Benton as a type designer in the American type founders company as producer. So Benton he received a wide number of raving reviews kind of praising the quality of the type and his attention to detail. And then so Cloister was also designed with an alternate version a bit later to kind of support an antique paper that was distorting type. Benton's engineer mind understood the concept of backward compatibility. So if you're interested in kind of reading more stories on Benton's wide array of typefaces highly recommend you pick up this book. So I'll just kind of begin to wrap up this story here. Just talking about the Benton legacy at large. So while some early 20th century typeographers considered type design to be an art form certainly the Bentons did not regard themselves as artists. They expected type to express profound ideas but remain the servant of those ideas and they felt that in the text matter a typeface's own particular beauty should not intrude upon the reader. So this is this is definitely the mission of the graphic cider. We're serving the greater cause of the message not trying to glorify ourselves in our own design ability and unique quality. So yeah. When the printed page conveys information to the reader without attracting attention to itself it is ideal. But he also realized that type for advertising has different requirements. So yeah, this is an important distinction here. The design for a display type is often made to attract attention not only to itself but what it proclaims by its boldness and beauty and sometimes even by its ugliness. Yeah, if you if you just scroll around for a few minutes on fonts and use, you'll for sure see this to be true. While father and son were largely responsible for revolution in the way type was made, they were also plain spoken, hardworking, highly disciplined and even secretive Protestant Americans with a quiet unassuming way of going about their lives. They were interested in their work and they weren't looking for publicity. And I think that's where I'll leave it. If you have any interest in learning more about the Benton story, the relationship between father and son, highly recommend grabbing yourself a copy of the book. Talk to you soon.