|
William Dana Orcutt
Book designer, typographer and author (b. 1870, West Lebanon, d. 1953, Boston). Designer of French Round Face&Italic, Humanistic, Laurentian, Suburban French&Italic, and Verona. McGrew comments on each face: - Suburban French is one of Monotype's first independent recreations of typefaces from classic sources abroad. It was cut about 1911 at the suggestion of J. Horace MacFarland, prominent Pennsylvania printer, and was adapted to Monotype under the supervision of MacFarland and William Dana Orcutt, a well known typographer and book designer in New England. Its source is said to have been a Didot oldstyle first cut about 1804, but the Monotype typeface was first introduced under the name of Bodoni Roman. The double serifs at the top of lowercase vertical strokes are a distinguishing feature. Compare French Round Face.
- Verona is ATF's adaptation about 1951 of Bologna, which had been cut by Stephenson Blake in England in 1948. It is said to have been cut from Stephenson Blake's drawings, but lining figures were drawn to replace the hanging figures which Stephenson Blake had featured. The name was changed to avoid having disrespectful printers call it "baloney," yet retaining an Italian connotation. At the time ATF did not realize that Stephenson Blake had in turn adapted the design from an earlier ATF face, Humanistic (q.v.), drawn by William Dana Orcutt in 1904. With or without its later modifications, which are minor, this typeface retains more of the appearance of hand-lettering than almost any other cut in metal, and composes into a beautiful page with properly close spacing. Compare Freehand, Motto, Heritage, Thompson Quillscript. Incidentally, when ATF took Verona as a new name for Stephenson Blake's Bologna, they also overlooked the fact that Stephenson Blake uses the name Verona for their copy of BB&S-ATF's Munder Venezian.
- French Round Face, originally called Didot Roman or simply Modern, was one of the first revivals of the typefaces cut by Firmin Didot in France about 1784. This was cut for Monotype in 1910, under the direction of J. Horace MacFarland and William Dana Orcutt. The italic is unusual in that some lowercase letters have serifs like the roman. No. 16 on Linotype and Intertype is similar but heavier. Compare Suburban French.
- Humanistic was designed by William Dana Orcutt and privately cast by ATF in 1904 for the University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is a careful rendering into type of the round humanist writing of the Renaissance period, based in particular on the 1485 manuscript of Antonio Sinibaldi's Virgil in the Laurentian Library at Florence, Italy. This is considered by some to be hand-lettering in its most beautiful form, and occurred after the development of roman types as we know them. In 1940 this type was adapted to Monotype keyboard composition, under the direction of Orcutt and Sol Hess, the 21-point size being used for a large edition of Science and Health. The Monotype cutting, known as Laurentian closely follows the foundry version, including some but not all of the original alternate characters. A few years later the design was modified by Stephenson Blake in England, and issued as Bologna; this in turn was adapted by ATF as Verona (q.v.).
Note: Humanistic/Verona were digitally extended in 2006 by Ray Larabie as Mikadan (Typodermic). Klingspor link.
|
EXTERNAL LINKS
Klingspor Museum page
MyFonts search
Monotype search
Fontspring search
Google search
INTERNAL LINKS
Type designers ⦿
Type designers ⦿
Type scene in New Hampshire ⦿
Type scene in Pennsylvania ⦿
Type scene in Massachusetts ⦿
Modern style [Bodoni, Didot, Walbaum, Thorowgood, Computer Modern, etc.] ⦿
|
