22 New Typefaces Specimen Book – Cooper & Beatty, 1937

The design of type specimen books that could be easily updated was an ongoing challenge for type shops. The most common solution was to use a three-, or more, ring binder that allowed the shop to send out pages that the client could add to the binder. By the time they printed this supplement Cooper & Beatty (C&B) had run out of space in their original seven-ring 1927 catalogue. This 24-page booklet fit neatly inside the back cover of the book (it was actually glued to the inside back cover of our copy). The 22 typefaces are primarily hand-set foundry display faces. Such a large number of new typefaces, in a fairly large range of sizes, would have been a substantial investment for the company, especially during the Great Depression, and indicates that they must have made serious inroads into the lucrative world of advertising. C&B held their dominant position with Toronto ad agencies for over forty years.

Directly under the name of each typeface is a line that reads; Foundry Type – For Plating Only. Foundry type was cast from harder metals at a higher heat and under greater pressure than was possible on a Monotype caster. Foundry type was hand-set and quite expensive. In order to prolong its life it was rarely used directly for printing. Instead, they would hand-set the foundry type, then electroplate the composed block of type and make a cast of the type in a softer metal for printing. Hard foundry type was good for roughly 100,000 impressions before beginning to show signs of wear, while softer metal Monotype was good for roughly 10,000 impressions, a large enough number to cover the majority of print runs. In the 1970s all the typesetting companies were getting rid of their metal type to make way for photo type. Most of that type went to scrap metal dealers although some was sold, at scrap metal prices, to operators of private presses.

In the late 1970s designer and letterpress printer Glenn Goluska purchased the thirty-point font of Othello from C&B. After Goluska’s death in 2011 that font was part of a collection of types that he bequeathed to Andrew Steeves at Gaspereau Press in Kentville, Nova Scotia, where it is still being used today. – Rod McDonald