Characters of the Monotype Corporation

At Skylona, we hold a large collection of printed material from Monotype; in its day a pioneering force in the printing world. 

Our inventory includes Monotype Recorder and Monotype Newsletter journals, type specimen leaflets, technical guides, and other rare printed ephemera covering a century of Monotype’s history. View Monotype at Skylona >

From the outset, the company made a splash on both sides of the Atlantic, though arguably more so at its British operation, where it combined engineering and manufacturing prowess with the craft and creativity of superb typography. In this article we showcase some of the people who guided its typographic direction.

Founded on innovation

The story of Monotype began in Washington D.C. in 1887 when its founder, American inventor Tolbert Lanston (1844-1913), demonstrated his prototype of the ‘Monotype machine’. Lanston’s invention was an almost impossibly elaborate typesetting contraption that set individual characters of hot-metal type in justified lines, rather than full ‘slugs’ of type in lines, as the rival Linotype machine did.

Perfected by mechanical engineer John Sellers Bancroft, this brilliant, patented innovation enable the editing or replacement of individual characters – a revolution in efficiency at the time. It also produced sharper, higher quality print and allowed for mathematical formulas, foreign languages, and complex tabular work far more easily, since individual characters could be mixed freely. Linotype machines struggled with anything that deviated from standard text composition.

Over the pond

In Britain, the Lanston Monotype Corporation Limited opened its London headquarters in 1899, and its factory at Salfords near Redhill the following year. Initially the Salfords factory manufactured components called matrices, receiving the typesetting machines from its parent company in America. But from 1924 it began making and assembling its own machines, producing end-to-end products which were exported across Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia.

The company changed its name to Monotype Corporation Limited in 1931 to distinguish it from the American company, and was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1936.

Like other typesetting machine manufacturers, Monotype also produced typeface designs for their products, and in this field the British company excelled.

A dream team

Stanley Morison

The interwar period was Monotype’s golden age of type design. From 1923, the renowned typographic historian Stanley Morison (1889–1967) served as typographic consultant to Monotype. His work included the research and adaptation of historical typefaces – such as the revival of Bembo and Bell – and he pioneered a great expansion of the company’s range of typefaces.

Morison became one of the most consequential figures in the history of typography, both academically and commercially. As well as writing extensively on printing and typography, he also influenced the direction of type design through his work for Monotype, Cambridge University Press, and The Times.

Frank Hinman Pierpont

Monotype’s works manager, and later board member, Frank Hinman Pierpont (1830-1937) provided a practical counterweight to Morison’s scholarly idealism, at times challenging his artistic impulses. For example, he expressed his disdain for Gill Sans, which was in development at the time – an opinion that was overruled.

However, Pierpont’s own typographic contribution was substantial: he co-designed Plantin in 1913, which Stanley Morison later used as a direct model for Times New Roman, first used by The Times on 3 October 1932. Pierpont also supervised the revival of Morison’s Bembo, following his earlier Poliphilus and Blado designs, and also created Monotype Grotesque.

Beatrice Warde

In 1927, New York-born Beatrice Warde (1900-1969) joined the Corporation in London, in somewhat unconventional fashion.

Earlier, in order to get an article published in the male dominated printing world, Warde had adopted the male pseudonym Paul Beaujon. The article; “The Garamond Types, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Sources Considered” appeared in The Fleuron, a leading typography magazine, earning Beaujon a reputation as an authority of the subject.

The pseudonymous article also earned Beaujon a job offer as editor of the Monotype Recorder, Lanston Monotype’s long-running trade journal. Beatrice Warde accepted the role, to the astonishment of Lanston Monotype Corporation executives in London, who were expecting a man. Thankfully, despite this perceived impediment, Monotype did not withdraw the offer after Warde revealed her identity, and she took her place as one of the few women working in typography at the time. She also edited Monotype’s ‘The Newsletter’ and was later promoted to publicity manager, a post she retained until her retirement on her 60th birthday in 1960.

Throughout her career Warde wrote widely on lettering, typography and printing. A devoted missionary for her industry, she also visited printing schools across the country, promoting the need for good typography and printing. Beatrice Warde became known by many as the ‘first lady of typography’.

Eric Gill

Another significant figure in the Monotype’s typographic story was the English sculptor, stonecutter, printmaker and type designer, Eric Gill (1882-1940). His best-known type designs were produced by Monotype, although he also designed type for private presses.

Gill’s hand lettering had been noticed by Stanley Morison, who commissioned him to create a sans-serif typeface to compete with the widely popular Futura. Gill Sans was an immediate success following its commercial release in 1928. It formed an integral part of the cover identity for Penguin Books, and appeared on the majority of printed material for British Rail, quietly seeping into the British public subconscious. Gill also designed Perpetua and Joanna for Monotype.

Eric Gill’s diaries, published posthumously, revealed serious and deeply troubling abuses — and his legacy is now the subject of considerable debate.

Changing times

Like all other technology-driven industries, printing has always been subject to constant change, as new innovations supersede existing machinery and practices.

For a while Monotype manufactured machines for both the legacy hot-metal process, and the newer laser photo typesetting technology, whilst a separate division designed and sold typefaces.

But from the early 1970s through to the 1990s – and despite producing the first commercially successful digital laser imagesetter in 1976 – the Monotype Corporation struggled, was acquired by a trust, then by Agfa, and its assets ultimately sold to a private equity firm.

Today, the Monotype name remains as a digital font licensing company, with many of the type designs from its golden era carried forward.

And perhaps that is its legacy. Monotype’s machinery and engineering fell into obsolescence as all technologies ultimately do. What remains is the typefaces; timeless representatives of the creativity and passion of those typographic evangelists from the past.

Monotype at Skylona

Whilst designs and tastes changed across the decades, the commitment to design and production excellence at Monotype was a constant. This is very much in evidence across the material we hold in our inventory at Skylona, which covers the early origins of the company, through its pre- and post-war heydays, and on to the later years.