History of the Monotype Corporation

£50 – click here to buy this book

Judy Slinn, Sebastian Carter, Richard Southall

& edited by Andrew Boag & Christopher Burke

This important new publication charts the history of the British Monotype Corporation in its significant years from 1897 to 1992. Its three sections cover the Corporation’s business history, typeface design history, and the technical history of Monotype’s composing machines. Written and edited by leading business and type industry experts, this is an indispensable reference for typographers and type designers, and for technology and business historians.

Tolbert Lanston, an American inventor, patented his Monotype system of type composition in 1897. The word ‘Monotype’ is synonymous with the highest standards of quality. Machine sales were boosted by an extra­ordinary programme of typeface design and development – advised by some of typography’s leading minds: Stanley Morison, Beatrice Warde, and John Dreyfus; with type designers like Eric Gill (Gill Sans, Joanna, Perpetua), Jan van Krimpen (Spectrum, Sheldon), Bruce Rogers (Centaur), and Berthold Wolpe (Albertus).

Contents

Foreword Andrew Boag
Prologue Christopher Burke

1 Business history of the Monotype Corporation Judy Slinn
1.1 The origins and early development of the Monotype machine
1.2 The establishment and early struggles of the Corporation
1.3 Consolidation and the First World War
1.4 The 1920s: depression, departures and developments
1.5 The golden age: Monotype in the 1930s
1.6 From keyboards and casters to guns and munitions: 1939–45
1.7 Reconstruction and growth: 1945–54
1.8 Before the storm: ‘a more agreeable stride’; 1955–71
1.9 The problems of the 1970s: attracting ‘the take-over boys’
1.10 The long road to survival and recovery
1.11 The Corporation’s last decade: 1982–92
1.12 Endings and beginnings: the legacy of the Monotype Corporation

2 Typeface design for the Monotype Corporation Sebastian Carter
2.1 Designing and making type before Monotype
2.2 Establishment of the Monotype Type Drawing Office, and the first typeface designs
2.3 Imprint, Plantin, and Caslon
2.4 The early Morison years
2.5 Display types, and Americans abroad
2.6 A ‘typographical reformation’
2.7 The Second World War: intermezzo
2.8 Jan van Krimpen and Giovanni Mardersteig
2.9 John Dreyfus, type adaptation, and the first fonts for the film era
2.10 Into the digital era

3 Technical history of Monotype composing machines Richard Southall
3.1 Background
3.2 Lanston and Bancroft: the caster from prototype to production
3.3 Keyboarding
3.4 Pierpont and punchcutting
3.5 Photocomposition
3.6 The Monophoto 600 filmsetter
3.7 The Monotype Lasercomp

Epilogue: the continuing legacy Andrew Boag and Sue Shaw
Appendix: list of directors of the Monotype Corporation, 1897–1990
References & bibliography

Monotype is a trademark of Monotype Imaging Inc. registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office and may be registered in certain other jurisdictions.

Monotype Imaging Holdings Inc. was not involved in the authoring of this book.