22 Popular Foundry Type Faces – type specimen booklet, Cooper & Beatty, 1937

Designing type specimen books that could be easily updated was a constant challenge for type shops. The most common solution was to use a three– or more – ring binder. However, by the time Cooper & Beatty (C&B) printed this supplement, their original seven-ring 1927 catalogue had run out of space. Rather than design and produce an entirely new specimen book – a costly endeavour – they created this 24-page booklet, which fit inside the back cover of the existing book (in our copy, it was actually glued to the inside back cover).

In both the 1927 specimen book and this supplement, Cooper & Beatty used varied layouts for each typeface. In later years they adopted a standardized page layout for all typefaces.

The 22 typefaces featured in this supplement were primarily hand-set foundry display faces. Acquiring such a large selection of new typefaces – across such a wide range of sizes – would have been a significant investment for C&B, particularly during the Great Depression. This expansion indicates that they had established a strong foothold in the lucrative world of advertising typography. C&B would maintain its dominant position with Toronto ad agencies for over forty years.

On the specimen pages, directly beneath each typeface name, is a line that reads: Foundry Type – For Plating Only. Foundry type was cast from harder metals at higher temperatures and under greater pressure than was possible with a Monotype caster. As a result, foundry type was considerably more expensive. The hard metal of foundry type could withstand approximately 100,000 impressions before showing signs of wear, whereas the softer metal of Monotype was good for around 10,000 impressions – a much smaller number but sufficient for most print runs. Foundry type was rarely used for printing, instead, the type would be hand-set, then electroplated and recast in a softer metal for printing.

By the 1970s, the large typesetting companies were selling off their metal type – which had already been replaced by phototype. Unfortunately, while much of this type was scrapped, some was sold – at scrap metal prices –to private press operators. In the late 1970s, Toronto designer and letterpress printer Glenn Goluska purchased C&B’s thirty-point font of Othello, along with several other typefaces. Following his passing in 2011, he bequeathed his types, a Linotype Model 31 and his Vandercook proof press to Andrew Steeves, who employed them between 2011 and 2025 at Gaspereau Press, and after that at the Press of the Varying Hare in Black River Lake, Nova Scotia. – Rod McDonald