The Monotype Chronicles
1907 – 1916

1907

1908 Monotype D Keyboard incorporating several improvements, notably adoption of the universal typewriter layout of buttons allowing speedier touch operation and a simplified internal mechanism reducing the number of air valves from 225 to 33. The price was £135.

Scotch Roman (Series 46).

First Cyrillic font cut as Cushing (Russian), Series 17 based on a design by the American Type Founders Company.

Punch-cutting machines, designed by Frank H. Pierpont and made in the Salfords factory, displaced the earlier Benton-Waldo equivalents. The replacements made 8-times as many punches in a given time than their forerunners and worked to much finer tolerances with less skilled labour.

Job Type Attachment for Monotype Caster allowing the production of sorts for case from 14 to 36 point.

Government Printing Office in Washington placed another order for 12 Monotype Casters and 50 Keyboards bringing the aggregates respectively to 124 and 162: the largest installation in the world.

Railway goods siding built to connect with the Salfords factory.

Thompson Type Machine Company established in Chicago to market the Thompson Type Caster (see 1929).

1908
Monotype 38E by Frederic W. Goudy. Produced for the original Life magazine. It became known variously and informally as Goudy Light and Goudy Old Style.

Monotype Duplex Keyboard featuring two unit-registering counters and two paper spool perforators, but with a single set of keybanks. It enabled a job to be set simultaneously in two different type sizes and to two different measures.

Low-quad mould for Monotype Caster. By reducing the height of cast spaces, the risk of them rising on the press to printing height and spoiling the sheets was lessened. Other improvements to the low-quad technology were made in 1913, 1920, and 1933. Partial kerning introduced for the left-hand side of characters on the Monotype Caster.

Business structure of the Lanston Monotype Corporation Ltd. consolidated signifying an end to the pioneering years. Such a move was underpinned by a large battery of machines being installed at The Times newspaper in London; the typeface delivered was the Modern (Series 7) first produced in 1902. Monotype Anzeiger issued as an external house magazine by the German dealer.

1909
Composition range on Monotype Caster increased to 14 point (but not for American use).

1910
First Greek font cut as Greek Upright, Series 90 based on a design of the Schelter & Giesecke typefoundry.

Special area set aside and fitted out at the Salfords factory as a Type Drawing Office which formalised the activity.

Reverse delivery mechanism for Monotype Caster permitting composition of the Semitic languages which read from right to left, notably Arabic and Hebrew.

John Sellers Bancroft died on 29 January.

1911

1912 Imprint (Series 101) cut for The Imprint, a short-lived periodical edited by F. Ernest Jackson, Edward Johnston, J. H. Mason, and Gerard Meynell. It was the first innovative type design for mechanical composition. Goudy Lanston (Series 279) by Frederic W. Goudy. Cut by Robert Wiebking. Largest composition type size on Monotype Caster increased to 18 point. Lanston Monotype Machine Company had constructed and moved into its own building at 24th and Locust Streets in Philadelphia. It was enlarged in 1918.

First attempt to originate a new roman and italic took the form of Veronese, Series 59. It was a design brought to the Corporation by the publisher J. M. Dent, who produced the Temple Classics and the Everyman’s Library.

Forum Title (Series 274) by Frederic W. Goudy. Cut by Robert Wiebking, but offered commercially by the Lanston Monotype Machine Company.

Mechanical solution developed for kerning characters on the Monotype Caster. It allowed the rendering of fluent and elegant italics which were denied to line-casting machines unable to provide similar facilities.

First formalized Monotype School established in the basement of 43 Fetter Lane in London under the direction of Billy Wigg. It provided a model for several other similar institutions in subsidiary offices around the world. Both day and evening classes were offered, unlike the more restricted activities dating from 1900.

1913
Plantin (Series 110), an original contribution to general commercial typography, prompted by Frank H. Pierpont, the Works Manager at Salfords.

Monotype Display Type Caster (later known as the Type and Rule Caster) enabled printers to stock hand-composing rooms with fonts of type, quads, leads, and rules.

Display Matrix Lending Library established in London by the Lanston Monotype Corporation for the convenience of printers. Hiring a font for one week cost 15 shillings (75 pence).

Tolbert Lanston died on 18 February in Washington.

Monotype, an external house journal, started in the USA.

First production model of the Intertype line-caster installed at the Journal of Commerce.

Evening Post in Chicago installed the first Ludlow line-casting machine.

1914
Largest composition type size on Monotype Caster increased to 24 point.

Edward E. Bartlett (owner of the Bartlett-Orr Press in New York) appointed Director of Typography by the Mergenthaler Linotype Company in the USA.

1915
Lead-and-rule attachment developed for Monotype Caster using a novel technique of incremental fused casting of type metal to unlimited lengths, as developed in America by Lester Waldon.

Factory at Salfords given over to the making of precision parts for machine guns which necessitated expansion of the facilities under Government subsidy. Salfords railway station opened to aid war effort and serve Monotype plant.

1916
Caslon Old Face (Series 128).

Monotype Users’ Association established.

The book Typographical Printing-Surfaces: the Technology and Mechanisation of their Production by Lucien A. Legros and John C. Grant published. It has remained the standard and most authoritative work on hot-metal casting and composition technology.

International Typesetting Machine Company, the makers of the Intertype line-caster, went into receivership. Its stock was bought for $1,650,000 leading to emergence of the Intertype Corporation.