Washington, Baltimore and New York, 1872 to 1894.

Linotype is named after what its machine produced: a line of type. The Neue Deutsche Biographie, in an entry on Ottmar Mergenthaler by Ernst H. Berninger published in 1994, says Mergenthaler trained as a watchmaker with his uncle in Bietigheim, Württemberg, and travelled to the United States in 1872 to work at his cousin August Hahl’s electrical-instrument works in Washington. The firm moved to Baltimore in 1875.

The Neue Deutsche Biographie says the idea came from a commission. In August 1876 Mergenthaler improved a lithographic writing machine built by Charles T. Moore, meant to speed up the setting of news. He then tried to apply the same goal to letterpress printing, with financial backing from the Washington bankers James O. and Louis Clephane. By 1878, it says, he was working on a machine that would form a printing surface by casting a whole line at once, instead of having a compositor assemble single letters by hand. His early attempts stamped letters into a soft papier-mâché mould, and the results were uneven.

In 1883 Mergenthaler left his cousin and set up his own business in Baltimore, the National Typographic Company. The answer, the Neue Deutsche Biographie says, was to use metal matrices. An operator worked a typewriter-style keyboard that released the matrices from an ordered magazine; they were assembled into words and lines, spaced out to full width by wedges, and cast in type metal as a single finished line, which was ejected seconds after it cooled. The matrices then returned to the magazine automatically, ready for the next line.

By October 1885, the entry says, the machine was ready for series production and had been given the name Blower. A new company, the Mergenthaler Printing Company, was formed to build it. On 3 July 1886 the Blower was used to set the New York Tribune, and the paper’s publisher, Whitelaw Reid, introduced the name Linotype. The Blower Linotype received a US patent dated 28 February 1888, and an improved model, the Simplex Linotype, followed in 1890.

The name crossed the Atlantic quickly. The Neue Deutsche Biographie says the Mergenthaler Setzmaschinen-Fabrik GmbH was founded in Berlin in October 1894, and that Linotype went on building Mergenthaler’s machines until 1976. Mergenthaler died in Baltimore in 1899.

From hot metal to a font library.

The company behind the name went through several forms. Wikipedia says the Mergenthaler Linotype Company was formed in New York in 1895, with Philip Tell Dodge as president until 1928, when his son Norman Dodge replaced him. In Britain, The Linotype Company was formed in 1889 by Joseph Lawrence, publisher of The Railway Magazine; it opened a factory at Broadheath, Altrincham, in 1899, and in 1903 merged with the Machinery Trust to form Linotype & Machinery Ltd.

The machine’s method shaped its use. Wikipedia’s account of the rival Monotype system notes that a Linotype slug, a whole line cast as one bar, was easy to move around a page, which suited newspapers, while correcting a single letter meant resetting the line. Wikipedia says Linotype issued a Legibility Group of typefaces for newspaper text, and that it released the Arabic typeface Simplified Arabic, later called Yakout after the thirteenth-century calligrapher Yaqut al-Musta’simi, in 1956.

Printing then changed twice: to phototypesetting, and later to digital type. Wikipedia says the Mergenthaler company supplied phototypesetting equipment from the late 1950s, including laser typesetters, raster image processors and scanners. In 1969 the British Linotype company merged with K. S. Paul to form Linotype-Paul Ltd, which developed Linotron phototypesetters using cathode-ray tube technology. In 1987, it says, the US company became part of the German Linotype-Hell AG, and in the United States the name changed to Linotype Co.

The type library was then separated from the hardware. Wikipedia says the printing-press maker Heidelberger Druckmaschinen took over Linotype-Hell in the late 1990s, and that a new company, Linotype Library GmbH, based in Bad Homburg vor der Höhe, was spun off to acquire, create and distribute digital fonts and related software, while Heidelberg kept the older typesetting business. In 2005 it shortened its name to Linotype GmbH. Wikipedia lists typefaces in the library including Palatino and Optima by Hermann Zapf; Frutiger, Avenir and Univers by Adrian Frutiger; and Helvetica by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann. It also produced the FontExplorer X font manager for Mac OS X.

A newspaper machine that became a type library.

A type foundry’s identity lives in places a consumer brand rarely has to think about. The first is the specimen: a printed or on-screen sheet that sets a typeface at many sizes and in running text so a designer can judge it. For a foundry, the specimen is both a sales tool and a statement of taste, and its layout, paper and paragraph choices often say as much about the house as any logo.

The second surface is the catalogue or house publication. Foundries have long issued booklets, newsletters and magazines that show their faces in use, and some of these publications became better known than the businesses behind them.

Third, the type names themselves work as brand names. A family name has to be distinct, easy to say, and able to sit in a licence agreement, a menu in a design app and a credit line.

Finally, the digital storefront carries the identity day to day: licensing pages, type testers and downloadable trial fonts are where most people now meet a foundry, so their typography, tone and terms form part of the brand.

Monotype ownership and the name today.

Monotype Imaging has owned Linotype since 2006. In a press release dated 2 August 2006, Monotype Imaging, of Woburn, Massachusetts, said it had acquired Linotype GmbH, a subsidiary of Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG and home of the Linotype Library, naming Helvetica, Frutiger and Optima among its designs. The release said Linotype and its employees would stay in Bad Homburg and operate as a wholly owned subsidiary, with Bruno Steinert continuing as managing director. Steinert was quoted saying Linotype’s corporate identity would not change.

Wikipedia says Linotype GmbH was renamed Monotype GmbH in 2013. The Linotype name stayed in use as a library brand and as an online store. When Monotype introduced a new company palette in December 2012, Creative Bloq reported, its colours were drawn from the company’s library brands, Linotype among them.

The store went next. In a press release dated 30 August 2023, Monotype said it would retire its Linotype, FontShop and Fonts.com sales platforms over the following year and move customers to MyFonts.com. Monotype said some of its legacy platforms no longer met its quality standards, and that it would work with figures from Linotype, FontShop and Fonts.com to host the stories of those foundries and sites. In the release, Henning Krause, a senior product manager for Monotype’s libraries, said Monotype would continue to provide a home for their type and their foundry stories. Linotype’s news archive, including the 2006 acquisition release, is now kept on MyFonts as legacy content from Linotype.com.

The machine itself is held as history. Wikipedia points to the Mergenthaler Linotype Company Records at the Smithsonian’s Archives Center in the National Museum of American History, and to a 2012 documentary, Linotype: The Film.

For a design guide, Linotype shows how a machine’s name can outlast the machine, passing from a newspaper composing room to a font library and then into another company’s catalogue. Compare Monotype, the single-letter rival that has owned it since 2006, and Hoefler&Co., another library now under the same owner. For this guide we use press blue, brass and lead grey with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Linotype’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.