22 New Typefaces Specimen Book – Cooper & Beatty, 1937

The cover must have been quite striking in its day. The bright magenta on green would have been an unusual colour pairing, as would the ‘modernist’ layout. Cooper & Beatty would use 20th Century (Futura) for much of their advertising up to the mid 1950s when Type Director, Allan Fleming began to use Monotype Grotesque and News Gothic.

The somewhat mis-named Gillies Gothic is a sturdy non-connecting monoline script from the New York designer, William S. Gillies. It was released in two weights, Light and Bold, in 1934–35 by the Bauer Type Foundry in Germany. In the early years Cooper & Beatty used different layouts for each typeface in their specimen book, later they would adopt a standard format for all typefaces.

Designed in 1934 by Morris Fuller Benton for American Type Founders (ATF), Othello is a reworking of an 1884 design from the Central Type Foundry in St. Louis, Missouri. A bold ‘slab-sided’ display face it is designed to be tightly set. To maintain such tight spacing the endings on the return strokes of characters such as ‘C’, ‘G’, are cut at extreme angles. The ‘J’ and ‘L’ have long upward returns on their normally open sides. ‘V’ and ‘Y’ are also designed to fill-in normally open areas.