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American typography company

American Type Founders (ATF) Co. was a business trust created in 1892 by the merger of 23 type foundries, representing about 85 percent of all type manufactured in the United States at the time. The new company, consisting of a consolidation of firms from throughout the United States, was incorporated in New Jersey. The ATF Co. was not formed until 1892. All but six of the 23 foundries in the company were members of the ATF Association. The American Type Founders Co. 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 the ATF Co. in its period of dominance, including News Gothic, Century Schoolbook, Franklin Gothic, Hobo and Bank Gothic, remain 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 in decline. Throughout the late 1880s, prices had been maintained by an informal cartel of foundries, but as the number of foundries increased, prices dropped dramatically, a trend accelerated by the invention of hot metal typesetting. 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.

In 1918 Golding & Company, a type foundry that also manufactured the Pearl line of letterpress, was acquired by ATF. These presses continued to be made and sold by the Golding Press Division of ATF until 1927, when the division was sold off to Thomson National Company.

In addition to selling presses made by Chandler & Price, ATF produced the Klymax Feeder, which turned C&P's hand fed Gordon jobber press into an automatically fed press. As such presses were ubiquitous, sales of this feeder were robust throughout the 1920s.

In the post war years, ATF produced the Little Giant Automatic Cylinder Press, a smaller (12" x 18" sheet size), more compact press of much more modern design than the Kelly presses. Production of this press ceased in 1959.

Unfortunately for ATF, unlike printing consumables (like paper and ink), which must be purchased anew for each job, type wears slowly and its purchase can be postponed in hard times, while capital investment in new presses simply dries up, and so ATF was especially hard hit by the Depression. Also, the company had been over extended in the boom years, too much credit had been extended to the trade, inventories were bloated, and the corps of executives (many left over from pre consolidation days) were older and without vision. With the financial downturn after 1929 ATF began to see serious distress. In 1931 hours were cut at the factories. The following year, sales were down another 25% and salaries were cut. When major accounting errors showed the company to be even less profitable than was thought, Gillick was forced to resign. Thomas Roy Jones, a businessman with no experience in type founding, replaced Gillick. By 1933 the situation was desperate. Sales of type were less than 30% of 1926 levels while purchases of Kelly presses had plummeted to a mere 6.8% of what they had been. In October 1933 Jones filed a voluntary petition for bankruptcy. ATF was placed under the control of its creditors (chiefly consisting of several banks) and drastic measures were taken. Operations were consolidated, the Jersey City plant was closed and the typecasting operations moved to the Kelly plant in Elizabeth. Salesmen were put on a commission basis. Inventories were cut, faces discontinued, and production of several models of Kelly press as well as the Klymax Feeder was shut down. ATF was released from court supervision in 1936, and in 1938 a sales study was made making the following observations: the Kelly press was obsolete, body type was now the exclusive province of line casters and display type would have to be the mainstay of type production, almost half of what ATF was selling was other manufacturers' products that could easily be made in their own facilities, the acquisition of or merger with another firm in the letterpress industry would be desirable, as offset was a rising technology ATF needed to invest in that business. ATF also produced the first optically scanning typeface, OCR A, in 1969 and this remains the standard on printed bank checks to this day.

A venture was made into photocomposition with the ATF Typesetter. Introduced in 1958, the first model was the "A". Not many were produced because the character fit left much to be desired. The most common model was the "B". Character fit was improved by expanding the Friden Flexowriter "Justowriter" escape mechanism to seven units. The first seven unit typeface designed for the ATF Typesetter was a version of Baskerville by Tommy Thompson. The last and most advanced model based on the Friden mechanism was the "B 8", where an 18 increment system, was achieved by means of a series of electro mechanical relays that could add one or two increments which were one third of a unit to selected characters, without changing the basic mechanical escape mechanism of the model "B", except that it was scaled back to six units. This achieved an 18 unit system like that of the Monotype, but a single unit was called an "increment", while a group of three units was called a "unit" because those were the units dealt with in the Justowriter mechanism which previous models of the ATF Typesetter used exclusively. ATF also was the authorized sales agent in the United States and several other countries for another film setting machine, the Hadego, which was a headliner, manufactured in the Netherlands from 1951, under license from its inventor, Hans de Goeij. The last phototypesetter designed and produced by ATF was the Photocomp 20, so named because of its rated speed of twenty 11 pica newspaper lines per minute. It featured four stepper motors (1) to move the film across, (2) to move the type disk, (3) to advance the film to the next line, and (4) to set the size of one unit of escapement. Type disks contained four fonts, each including 17 pi characters. Its controller was the first ATF controller utilizing integrated circuits in place of relays. Circuitry was based on Motorola DTL integrated circuits. Machine styling of the Photocomp 20 was by Richard Arbib. Only 17 machines were sold: one in Vienna Austria, and the remainder in North America. ATF produced type disks with all their popular type faces. These disks were concentric rings of fonts on a transparent plastic material in negative form. Usually these disks contained roman, italic and bold versions of the same face. There was even a disk with the only Canadian type design at the time, called "Cartier". The ATF Phototypesetter was sold worldwide—in Canada, Germany, Italy, Denmark, France, Belgium, England, etc. In Denmark, several newspapers were produced on ATF Phototypesetters by a company named "Reprodan". As technology improved, ATF failed to keep pace and eventually the line was discontinued.

In the mid 1950s the small offset (duplicator) market was dominated by Addressograph Multilith's Multi 1250 almost without competition. A study undertaken by Whitin Machine Works, a manufacturer of textile making machinery looking to expand out of an industry depressed by the introduction of synthetic fabrics, suggested that "quick printing" done with duplicators was a growing market. Whitin thus acquired ATF in 1957, began to manufacture a small (10 x 15" sheet size) duplicator at their Whitinsville, Massachusetts facility, and to market this under the name ATF Chief 15. The basic design was by Louis Mestre, and it incorporated many large press features as he had free use of Webendorfer patents. As it gave large press performance, it was an immediate success with commercial printers (who were disdainful of duplicators), and the Chief line remained the best of the small presses until the introduction of Heidelberg's T Offset in the late 1980s. A larger Chief 17 was introduced in the 1960s and the 1970s saw "common blanket" two color models of both the 15 and 17. Both Chief models were made and sold in Europe by Gestetner Cyclograph Company, and were also marketed in the United States by the Itek and Ditto corporations. Though the Chief could produce superlative work, unlike the highly popular A. B. Dick 350, it required a skilled operator. Unfortunately for ATF, the quick printing industry had less use for such quality work and more need of a "fast and dirty" duplicator like the 350 and so its market penetration was limited. In 1966 White Consolidated Industries acquired the Whitin Machine Works and with it control of ATF. while it is unclear if Printer's Parts remains interested in reviving the Davidson line of presses.

Farmer, Little & Co., (1892, New York), (established 1810). Central Type Foundry, (1893, St. Louis), (established 1870). Boston Type Foundry, Boston, a subsidiary of Central of Saint Louis, (established 1817). Bruce Type Foundry, (1901, New York), (established 1813). H. L. Pelouze & Son Type Founders, (1901, Boston)
Barnhart Brothers & Spindler, (1911, Chicago), operated as an independent entity until 1929. Western Type Foundry (St. Louis), bought by B. B.&S in 1918. Advance Type Foundry (AKA Wiebking, Hardinge & Company), (Chicago), bought out by Western Type Foundry in 1914. Inland Type Foundry (1912, St. Louis)
Golding & Company (1918, Boston), bought by Thomson National Company in 1927 (established 1872). Webendorfer Wills Company (1938, Mount Vernon, New York), a manufacturer of offset presses and the Little Giant letterpress cylinder press.