Oswald Bruce Cooper
Encyclopedia
Oswald Bruce Cooper was an American
type designer, lettering artist, graphic designer
, and teacher of these trades.
but moved to Coffeyville, Kansas
when quite young. He left high school at seventeen to become a printer’s devil. He studied illustration at Frank Holme’s School of Illustration, first as a correspondence student, then moving to Chicago
to study in person. While doing poorly at drawing, he did so well in a lettering class taught by Frederic Goudy
, that he soon became director of the correspondence department for the school. After Holme died in 1903, the school closed due to financial difficulties, and Cooper took it on himself to provide correspondence education to prepaid students.
and Anheuser-Busch Breweries
, with Cooper providing distinctive hand lettering and sometimes the copy writing as well. In 1914 the firm became a full-service type shop. By the time Fred Bertsch retired in 1924, Bertch & Cooper employed more than fifty people and was the largest art production facility in the Middle West. As he showed considerable talent for writing, many advertising agencies sought his services as a copywriter, but he wrote only for himself and his own firm.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
type designer, lettering artist, graphic designer
Graphic designer
A graphic designer is a professional within the graphic design and graphic arts industry who assembles together images, typography or motion graphics to create a piece of design. A graphic designer creates the graphics primarily for published, printed or electronic media, such as brochures and...
, and teacher of these trades.
Early life and education
Cooper was born in Mount Gilead, OhioMount Gilead, Ohio
Mount Gilead is a village in Morrow County, Ohio, United States.Mount Gilead's population was 3,290 at the 2000 census. It is the county seat of Morrow County and the center of population of Ohio. The village was established in 1832, eight years after white settlers arrived in the region...
but moved to Coffeyville, Kansas
Coffeyville, Kansas
Coffeyville is a city situated along the Verdigris River in the southeastern part of Montgomery County, located in Southeast Kansas, in the Central United States. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 10,295...
when quite young. He left high school at seventeen to become a printer’s devil. He studied illustration at Frank Holme’s School of Illustration, first as a correspondence student, then moving to Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
to study in person. While doing poorly at drawing, he did so well in a lettering class taught by Frederic Goudy
Frederic Goudy
Frederic W. Goudy was a prolific American type designer whose typefaces include Copperplate Gothic, Kennerley, and Goudy Old Style. He also designed, in 1938, University of California Oldstyle, for the sole proprietary use of the University of California Press...
, that he soon became director of the correspondence department for the school. After Holme died in 1903, the school closed due to financial difficulties, and Cooper took it on himself to provide correspondence education to prepaid students.
Career
In 1904 Cooper and Fred S. Bertsch formed the design firm of Bertch & Cooper, providing ad campaigns for such accounts as the Packard Motor Car CompanyPackard
Packard was an American luxury-type automobile marque built by the Packard Motor Car Company of Detroit, Michigan, and later by the Studebaker-Packard Corporation of South Bend, Indiana...
and Anheuser-Busch Breweries
Anheuser-Busch
Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc. , is an American brewing company. The company operates 12 breweries in the United States and 18 in other countries. It was, until December 2009, also one of America's largest theme park operators; operating ten theme parks across the United States through the...
, with Cooper providing distinctive hand lettering and sometimes the copy writing as well. In 1914 the firm became a full-service type shop. By the time Fred Bertsch retired in 1924, Bertch & Cooper employed more than fifty people and was the largest art production facility in the Middle West. As he showed considerable talent for writing, many advertising agencies sought his services as a copywriter, but he wrote only for himself and his own firm.
Personal life
Tall, lanky, homespun, Cooper was a shy man, avoiding social situations and even unnecessary business contacts. Those close to him called him "Oz," to everyone else, he was "Mister Cooper." In 1920, he married his second cousin, Mary Lou Foster. They had no children. For the last year-and-a-half of his life, Cooper was ill with cancer, dying in Chicago of the disease.Typefaces
- Cooper series (BB&SBarnhart Brothers & SpindlerBarnhart Brothers & Spindler Type Foundry was founded as the Great Western Type Foundry in 1873. It became Barnhart Brothers & Spindler ten years later. It was a successful foundry known for innovative type design and well designed type catalogs. Oz Cooper, Will Ransom, Robert Wiebking, and...
later ATFAmerican Type FoundersAmerican Type Founders was a business trust created in 1892 by the merger of 23 type foundries, representing about 85% of all type manufactured in the United States...
) When Barnhart Brothers & Spindler Type Foundry (BB&S) approached Cooper with a proposal to design a complete type family based on his lettering, Cooper had doubts over the deal, but Fred Bertsch saw it as opportunity to gain exposure for Cooper's work and to further promote the design studio, so the deal was made.- Cooper (1918) originally Cooper Oldstyle Roman
- Cooper Italic (1924) included swash characters.
- Cooper Black seriesCooper BlackCooper Black is a heavily weighted, old style serif typeface designed by Oswald Bruce Cooper in 1921 and released by the Barnhart Brothers & Spindler type foundry in 1922. The typeface is drawn as an extra bold weight of Cooper Old Style. Though not based on a single historic model, Cooper Black...
(1922, BB&SBarnhart Brothers & SpindlerBarnhart Brothers & Spindler Type Foundry was founded as the Great Western Type Foundry in 1873. It became Barnhart Brothers & Spindler ten years later. It was a successful foundry known for innovative type design and well designed type catalogs. Oz Cooper, Will Ransom, Robert Wiebking, and...
later ATFAmerican Type FoundersAmerican Type Founders was a business trust created in 1892 by the merger of 23 type foundries, representing about 85% of all type manufactured in the United States...
). Called by designer as a font "for far-sighted printers with near-sighted customers," it was hated by conservative typographers, but was popular among graphic designers, to the point that the foundry had problems making enough fonts.- Cooper Black (1922), this became ATF'sAmerican Type FoundersAmerican Type Founders was a business trust created in 1892 by the merger of 23 type foundries, representing about 85% of all type manufactured in the United States...
second-best-selling type, after Copperplate GothicCopperplate GothicCopperplate Gothic is a typeface designed by Frederic W. Goudy and released by the American Type Founders in 1901. While termed a "Gothic" , the face has small glyphic serifs that act to emphasize the blunt terminus of vertical and horizontal strokes...
. - Cooper Black Italic (1922)
- Cooper Hilite (1922)
- Cooper Black Condensed (1926)) 20% lighter than the Cooper Black, the designer described it as “condensed but not squeezed.”
- Cooper Black (1922), this became ATF's
- Cooper Fullface series Cooper yearned to create a heavy “modern” face- akin to Broadway and other display types in height and proportion, but more nuanced while being a dense, black type. The Barnhart Brothers & Spindler foundry, for whom Cooper had designed a number of typefaces, saw the potential of the typeface as a big seller. Richard McArther, General Manager of the foundry, referred to it as “the hotsy stuff”, though he was highly critical of a number of characters in the original design. He requested a successive number of modifications, including the addition of Dwiggins-inspired serifs to the face to make it stand apart from similarly-weighted typefaces then on the market. He wanted to imbue the face with a considerable amount of “old-timey” flavor in order to impart a sense of originality to the face and have it sell across both Modern and Bodoni/Didot market segments. The resulting typeface was called Cooper Fullface, a jaunty and swollen caricature of a Didone with great potential for display advertising work. The final form of the face was a regulated and consistent balance of cartoonishness and earnest visual braggadocio, the bouncy, circus fairway-like swing of the original drawings of the letters taken down considerably and figures redrawn and redrawn for maximum readability. A specimen sheet was mailed out in 1929, and generated moderate sales, but too late- Barnhart Brothers & Spindler closed its foundry division shortly thereafter as part of ATF’s corporate roll-up of manufacturing. The American Type Founders continued to produce the face and sell it at a decent pace, renaming it Cooper Modern.
- Cooper Fullface (1929, BB&SBarnhart Brothers & SpindlerBarnhart Brothers & Spindler Type Foundry was founded as the Great Western Type Foundry in 1873. It became Barnhart Brothers & Spindler ten years later. It was a successful foundry known for innovative type design and well designed type catalogs. Oz Cooper, Will Ransom, Robert Wiebking, and...
) - Cooper Fullface Italic (1929) Cooper designed a matching italic for Cooper Fullface, but it was never released. The BB&S foundry closure resulted in the foundry equipment being shipped to New Jersey a few weeks shy of the typeface’s completion. It is unfortunate, as the accompanying italic is perhaps Cooper’s masterpiece, a lively Bodoni-esque italic with more than a bit of influence from 19th Century display types, particularly in the treatment of the ball serifs on the uppercase “A”, “J”, “M”, and “N”. Cooper Fullface Italic stood as the missing bookend to Cooper’s career as a type designer for over a half-century. A digital version based on Cooper's original drawings was released by the Wordshape Type Foundry in 2010.
- Cooper Fullface (1929, BB&S
- Boul Mich (1927, BB&SBarnhart Brothers & SpindlerBarnhart Brothers & Spindler Type Foundry was founded as the Great Western Type Foundry in 1873. It became Barnhart Brothers & Spindler ten years later. It was a successful foundry known for innovative type design and well designed type catalogs. Oz Cooper, Will Ransom, Robert Wiebking, and...
)) In 1927 Cooper was asked by the foundry to take an advertising headline from a newspaper clipping and fill it out into a design for a complete alphabet, which he did, disclaiming any credit for the original design. The face was named Boul Mich, after Michigan BoulevardMichigan Avenue (Chicago)Michigan Avenue is a major north-south street in Chicago which runs at 100 east south of the Chicago River and at 132 East north of the river from 12628 south to 950 north in the Chicago street address system...
in Chicago where many of the cities advertising agencies were located. Digital version released by Wordshape, 2010
- Pompeian Cursive (1927, BB&SBarnhart Brothers & SpindlerBarnhart Brothers & Spindler Type Foundry was founded as the Great Western Type Foundry in 1873. It became Barnhart Brothers & Spindler ten years later. It was a successful foundry known for innovative type design and well designed type catalogs. Oz Cooper, Will Ransom, Robert Wiebking, and...
) Digital version released by Wordshape, 2010
- Dietz Text (c. 1927, BB&SBarnhart Brothers & SpindlerBarnhart Brothers & Spindler Type Foundry was founded as the Great Western Type Foundry in 1873. It became Barnhart Brothers & Spindler ten years later. It was a successful foundry known for innovative type design and well designed type catalogs. Oz Cooper, Will Ransom, Robert Wiebking, and...
) Original drawings made by August DietzAugust DietzAugust Dietz was a philatelist, editor and publisher, who specialized in the study of mail and postal history of the Confederate States of America.-Early life:Dietz was born in Prussia on October 19, 1869...
were not suitable for making patterns, so Cooper spent two months making them ready for matrix cutting. It was the last of Oswald's fonts released by BB&S before the foundry was closed in 1929.
Other “Cooper Faces”
- Packard (1913, ATFAmerican Type FoundersAmerican Type Founders was a business trust created in 1892 by the merger of 23 type foundries, representing about 85% of all type manufactured in the United States...
) Cooper's anonymous hand-lettering for Packard ads formed the basis of the Packard font prepared at the direction of Morris Fuller BentonMorris Fuller BentonMorris Fuller Benton was an influential American typeface designer who headed the design department of the American Type Founders , for which he was the chief type designer from 1900 to 1937...
of American Type FoundersAmerican Type FoundersAmerican Type Founders was a business trust created in 1892 by the merger of 23 type foundries, representing about 85% of all type manufactured in the United States...
.
- Cooper Tooled Italic (BB&SBarnhart Brothers & SpindlerBarnhart Brothers & Spindler Type Foundry was founded as the Great Western Type Foundry in 1873. It became Barnhart Brothers & Spindler ten years later. It was a successful foundry known for innovative type design and well designed type catalogs. Oz Cooper, Will Ransom, Robert Wiebking, and...
) was not designed by Oz Cooper, but was actually a knock-off of a "Cooper Italic" by a German foundry.
- Cooper Tooled (1928, Lanston Monotype) designed by Sol HessSol HessSol Hess was an American typeface designer. After a three-year scholarship course at Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Design, he began at Lanston Monotype in 1902, rising to typographic manager in 1922. He was a close friend and collaborator with Monotype art director Frederic Goudy,...
and based upon Cooper Hilite, though with the white line on the opposite side.
- Cooper and Cooper Black were also copied by Monotype under the same names
- Rugged Black + Italic were Intertype’sIntertype CorporationThe Intertype Corporation produced the Intertype, a typecasting machine closely resembling the Linotype, and using the same matrices as the Linotype...
copies of Cooper Black + italic