American Type Founders
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| Defunct | |
| Industry | Type foundry |
| Founded | 8 February 1892 |
| Defunct | 23 August 1993 |
| Headquarters | Elizabeth, New Jersey, U.S. |
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Key people
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Linn Boyd Benton, Morris Fuller Benton, Joseph W. Phinney, Charles H. Becker, Wadsworth A. Parker |
American Type Founders (ATF) was a business trust created in 1892 by the merger of 23 type foundries, representing about 85% of all type manufactured in the United States.
ATF was the dominant American manufacturer of metal type from its creation in 1892 until at least the 1940s; it continued to be influential into the 1960s. Many fonts developed by American Type Founders in its period of dominance, including News Gothic, Century Schoolbook, Franklin Gothic, Hobo and Bank Gothic, are still in everyday use.
By the beginning of the final decade of the nineteenth century type founding was in a state of crisis. With the introduction of the Linotype, which could cast whole lines of body type in-house, demand for hand-set type was down. Throughout the late 1880s prices were maintained by an informal cartel of foundries, but as the number of foundries increased and with the invention of hot metal type, prices dropped dramatically. Additionally, type at this time was not standardized, either to body size or to base line, and printers resented the incompatibility of types from different foundries. Leaders in the industry, notably Joseph W. Phinney of the Dickinson Type Foundry in Boston, set up a committee to address these problems, eventually recommending consolidation.
By the late 1880s, there were some 34 foundries in the United States. In 1892, 23 foundries were brought together to form the American Type Founders Company. Key to the success of this merger was the inclusion of MacKellar, Smiths, & Jordan Co. of Philadelphia, with assets of over $6 million, the Cincinnati Type Foundry of Henry Barth, which brought with it the patents to his Barth Typecaster, and Benton, Waldo Foundry of Milwaukee, which included Linn Boyd Benton and his all-important Benton Pantograph which engraved type matrices directly instead of using punches and allowed the optical scaling of type. With the inclusion of the Barth Caster and the Benton Pantograph, ATF immediately became the largest and the most technologically advanced foundry in the world.
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