CostBentons2011 http://www.dunwichtype.com/?page_id=62 Book Review: The Bentons by Patricia Cost February 21st, 2011 by James Puckett The Bentons: How an American Father and Son Changed the Printing Industry Patricia Cost $24.95, 372 pages, Published by RIT Cary Graphic Arts Press ISBN 978-1-933360-42-3 Linn Boyd Benton and Morris Fuller Benton may be the most under-appreciated giants in the history of printing. The former was a natural engineer whose skills made him to printing what Tesla was to electricity. The latter was an engineer and one of the greatest type designers. Both were hardworking and humble men from Wisconsin. They cast a long shadow over printing and typography that has often been obscured by the lack of information they left about themselves. Linn Boyd Benton was a tinkerer who became infatuated with printing in his youth. A desire to improve quality and efficiency in typefounding resulted in a series of type-related patents stretching over nearly four decades. Many of his inventions enabled measurement and manufacturing with extreme precision. His most important invention first mechanized the process of cutting punches and later made punches obsolete. It also enabled composing machines like the Linotype to devastate the foundry type industry. When the foundry type industry collapsed Benton became one of the owners and leaders of the newly formed American Type Founders, a type trust that allowed American foundry type to survive for another century. On top of all that he also fathered Morris Fuller Benton. Like his father Morris Fuller Benton was an engineer. After graduating from Cornell he went to work at ATF. There he helped with examining the many typefaces owned by ATF and deciding what to salvage for future sale. The process familiarized him with the best and worst of American type, a great education in type design that assisted his rapid rise to head of type design at ATF. Morris Benton befriended Henry Lewis Bullen, librarian of ATF’s mammoth collection of historically significant printed materials. Morris Benton and Bullen quietly followed William Morris and led a charge to revive the works of earlier masters like Jenson, Garamond, Caslon, and Bodoni. Type families were not an entirely new concept in the 1890s, but nobody saw their potential like Morris Benton. He expanded Bertram Goodhue’s Cheltenham design to a family of twenty-one fonts. Nearly eight decades before Sumner Stone designed ITC Stone Morris Benton designed the first superfamily, Clearface—without the help of digital interpolation. Patricia Cost began researching the Bentons in the early 1980s as the subject of her master’s thesis. Cost’s research has continued in the years since, yielding a new biography: The Bentons: How an American Father and Son Changed the Printing Industry. Some of the information found in The Bentons has already been published. But as is often the case with printing history it is scattered online and in out-of-print and sometimes esoteric sources. Cost has gathered this information into a convenient package that will make it far easier for the Bentons to get the attention they deserve. The Writing Costs writes simply and without pretense. The Bentons is a plain and factual history appropriate to its subjects. Thoughtful pacing makes this an engaging read. Numerous photographs provide windows into both the family life of the Bentons and the working life at ATF. Cost cast a wide net for sources. Some, like Mac McGrew’s American Metal Typefaces of the Twentieth Century are obvious, but Cost also delved into hard to find copies of The Inland Printer and conducted personal interviews with surviving Benton family members and ATF employee and type caster Theo Rehak. Cost’s work pays off in a humanizing portrait of two geniuses who sought no fame and sometimes locked away their secrets in the form of proprietary machines. A good deal of information is provided about how type was actually made at ATF. Some of it is a stock description of punchcutting and typecasting, complete with the same Koch diagrams that appear in every other book about type. But Cost goes further than most and explains how different punchcutting, electrotyping, and matrix-cutting methods were all unified at ATF. This sheds helpful light for those who have known bits and pieces of this information but want it put together in context. Appropriately the book engages in a long attempt to describe and understand Linn Boyd Benton’s punch and matrix cutting machines. Cost provides better explanations of the machines than I have seen elsewhere. She also leaves us with the sad truth that nobody knows exactly how the machines work and that there is no documentation to allow surviving machines to be completely disassembled and put back together. An appendix transcribes a conversation between software engineer Raph Levien and Theo Rehak about the abilities of the cutting machines and the potential for a digital counterpart. Some of the Benton’s type designs are examined but without much detail. Cost discusses their origins and histories without dwelling on superlatives or design details. An entire chapter is devoted to the Century type family, a collaboration by both Bentons. A more in-depth examination of some of Morris Benton’s typefaces will be published later this year as a fine-press edition of Juliet Shen’s thesis Searching for Morris Fuller Benton which is available online at TypeCulture. The Bentons is a boon to researchers. Each chapter ends with a long list of succinct citations and notes. Tables provide useful lists of and details about the inventions of Linn Benton and the typefaces of Morris Benton. All images are credited, a bibliography is provided in addition to the citations, and the book is thoroughly indexed. Format Designer Marnie Soom crafted The Bentons as a handsome and inexpensive book. Its soft cover will disappoint some. But keeping the cost down should help The Bentons avoid obscurity as happens to many typography books that have better bindings, higher prices, and small print runs. The quality of the paper, printing, and image reproductions is better than is typical for the genre. They outshine the shock white paper and mediocre printing typical of more expensive books from Oak Knoll. Text is set in Monotype Bulmer with generous size, leading and margins. Numerous subheads make quick navigation easy. The Bentons is a great example of how a design history can look good, read well, and still be affordable. In Conclusion A lot of people have worked hard to keep the Bentons from falling into obscurity. Graphic designers like Paula Scher, Ivan Chermayeff and Roger Black have proven the timelessness of Benton typefaces. Type designers like David Berlow, Matthew Carter and Tobias Frere-Jones have shown how much can be learned and done by building on the work the Bentons left us. But getting the story of the Bentons in one place has taken too long. Patricia Cost has done an excellent job of telling much of that story and provided a great resource for the future historians who will bring to light the rest.