#oz cooper

[uwmspeccoll]

Typography Tuesday

Here are some more typefaces from the Book of American Types published in 1934 by the American Type Founders (ATF). The designs shown here are:

Boul Mich: Named after Michigan Boulevard (now Michigan Avenue), Chicago, and designed by Oz Cooper (1879-1940) in 1927.

Parisian: Designed by Morris Fuller Benton (1872-1948) in 1928.

Adonis: Designed by Willard T. Sniffin in 1930.

Antique Shaded: Designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1910.

Hobo: Designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1910.

ATF was the predominant producer of metal type in America for the first 50 years of its existence beginning in 1892, producing about 85 percent of all type manufactured in the United States at the time, and remained influential in the industry almost until its closing in the early 1990s. Our copy of Book of American Types is another donation from the estate of our late friend Dennis Bayuzick.

View another post from the Book of American Types.

View other type specimen books.

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[uwmspeccoll]

Typography Tuesday

OSWALD BRUCE COOPER

Almost every printing shop has at least one of the ubiquitous Cooper typeface families, a standard of the type cabinet, but few know the personality behind them, Oswald Bruce Cooper (1879-1949), known to those who worked with him as "Oz." Cooper designed about fifteen major typefaces, mostly for Barnhart Brothers & Spindler and American Type Founders, that inspired many knockoffs and redesigns.

His own obscurity is mostly due to his intensely private and introverted personality, but he was much beloved by those who worked with him, and when he died of cancer in 1949, his colleagues produced this festschrift in his honor, The Book of Oz Cooper, An Appreciation of Oswald Bruce Cooper, published in Chicago by the Society of Typographic Arts in 1949. It includes an unfinished autobiography, supplemented by his wife Mary Lou Foster; several memorial essays by his colleagues and friends, including Frederic Goudy and W. A. Dwiggins; and several essays on his typefaces. The preface notes:

The book is the work of men who knew him, worked with him, understood his strength, and his character, and loved him. They take pride in paying him this tribute. He lives in our hearts and memories; may this book bring him to others who could not meet and know him in his life on this earth.

Our copy is another donation from the estate of our late friend, Dennis Bayuzick.

View other books from the collection of Dennis Bayuzick.

View more Typography Tuesday posts.

[stewf]

Two Coopers: lettering examples by Oswald (“Oz”) Cooper, of Cooper Black fame, and Frederick G. Cooper, who inspired Oz and many other lettering artists and cartoonists of the early 1900s. Leslie Cabarga, who wrote the book on F. G. Cooper, is selling a massive archive of his work. Images found in Lettering (1916), by Thomas Wood Stevens