The Mayor’s Office has declared July 18–24 “Type Week,” in honor of TypeCon, a typographic conference to be held at the Parsons School of Design, and organized by the Type Directors Club and SOTA, the Society of Typographic Aficionados. Linotype Library is pleased to sponsor this event, which allows it to celebrate a homecoming of sorts. After all, it was in New York on July 3, 1886, that a German immigrant to Baltimore named Ottmar Mergenthaler installed the world’s first successful typesetting machine inside the New York Tribune composing room. Linotype was born and with it, a new age for printed communication.
The groundbreaking “Linotype” machine revolutionized the Tribune’s production system. A single operator sitting in front of a typewriter-like keyboard could set the machine in motion. Just two years later, the Tribune’s 30 Linotype machines had cut production costs by $80,000 annually (equivalent to about 1.6 million dollars in today’s currency).
Almost 120 years later, Linotype celebrates “Type Week” in New York. A special t-shirt bearing the title “Type and the City” pays tribute to the great City of New York and portrays the famous city skyline, with familiar buildings made up of the names of Linotype originals.
Linotype is the source of many of the most popular typefaces in the world. Aside from their beloved positions among the graphic designers, many of these fonts, including Palatino, Optima, Univers, Frutiger, Helvetica, and Sabon, are either used or read by Americans everyday.
The “Type and the City” t-shirt, designed as a tribute to Type Week in New York, was freely distributed on Wednesday July 20th at 1pm in Times Square, New York. The t-shirt features the familiar skyline of New York with the buildings made up of the names of Linotype originals.
This article was last modified on January 10, 2022
This article was first published on July 22, 2005
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