Frank Hinman Pierpont

Frank Hinman Pierpont (born 1860, New Haven, Connecticut – died 11 February 1937, England) was an American engineer and typeface designer.[1][2] He worked primarily in England for the Monotype Corporation of Britain.[3][4][5]

Frank Hinman Pierpont
Born1860
New Haven, Connecticut, United States
Died1937
England, United Kingdom
NationalityAmerican
Known fortypography
Notable work
Plantin

After training as a mechanic in Hartford, Connecticut, Pierpont began employment in 1886 with a patent office where he worked on a typesetting machine. Leaving for Europe in 1894, by 1896 he became a director of Typograph Setzmachinen-Fabrik, a German manufacturer of typesetting machines.

Beginning in 1899 and continuing until 1936, a year before his death, Pierpont first helped to establish and then act as factory manager and later board member of the British branch of Lanston Monotype in Salfords, Surrey, England.[6][7][8] While working for Monotype he supervised the reproduction of revivals of classic type designs and new designs such as Times New Roman.[9][10] He reportedly had doubts about the artistic ambitions of Monotype's artistic adviser Stanley Morison and publicity manager Beatrice Warde, complaining in one 1920s memo of the Gill Sans typeface, then in development, that "I see nothing in this design to recommend it and much that is objectionable."[11][12][13][14]

In his spare time Pierpont enjoyed growing roses. He retired as Works Manager in 1936 and became Consulting Engineer with a seat on the board, an occasion marked by a dinner at the Savoy Hotel, but died the following year.[15]

Typefaces designed by F. H. Pierpont

All faces cut by British Monotype:

gollark: I think it's some apple thing.
gollark: And firefox supports *that*.
gollark: webm is just a subset of mkv.
gollark: mkv seems to be the nicest container format, but firefox is annoying and lacks support.
gollark: Also its file handling generally, I guess.

References
  1. Slinn, Judy; Carter, Sebastian; Southall, Richard. History of the Monotype Corporation. pp. 202–3 etc.
  2. Wallis, Lawrence. "Frank Hinman Pierpont (1860-1937): An Unsung Pioneer of Mechanical Typesetting". Bulletin of the Printing Historical Society (32): 8–14.
  3. Mosley, James (2001). "Review: A Tally of Types". Journal of the Printing Historical Society. 3, new series: 63–67. That it was Pierpont himself who was central to this drive for quality is made abundantly clear by the abrupt changes that are seen after his retirement in 1937. All the types produced during the brief period before the Second World War, although they naturally have many fine features, are more or less flawed.
  4. Rhatigan, Dan. "Time and Times again". Monotype. Retrieved 28 July 2015.
  5. Mosley, James (2003). "Reviving the Classics: Matthew Carter and the Interpretation of Historical Models". In Mosley, James; Re, Margaret; Drucker, Johanna; Carter, Matthew (eds.). Typographically Speaking: The Art of Matthew Carter. Princeton Architectural Press. pp. 31–34. ISBN 9781568984278.
  6. Neil Macmillan (2006). An A-Z of Type Designers. Yale University Press. p. 147. ISBN 0-300-11151-7.
  7. "Monotype 1897-1937" (PDF). Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  8. Dreyfus, John (1995). Into Print: Selected writings on printing history, typography and book production (1st hardcover ed.). Boston: David R. Godine. pp. 116–7. ISBN 9781567920451.
  9. Friedl, Frederich, Nicholas Ott and Bernard Stein. Typography: An Encyclopedic Survey of Type Design and Techniques Through History. Black Dog & Leventhal: 1998. ISBN 1-57912-023-7..
  10. Dreyfus, John (1973). "The Evolution of Times New Roman". The Penrose Annual. 66: 165–174. [In developing Times New Roman, Stanley] Morison was fortunate in being able to produce a new type for the newspaper at great speed and with a high degree of technical excellance...an exceptionally able team had been built up by Frank Hinman Pierpont, an American martinet of wide experience.
  11. Mosley, James. "Eric Gill and the Cockerel Press". Upper & Lower Case. International Typeface Corporation. Archived from the original on 29 July 2012. Retrieved 7 October 2016.
  12. Mosley, James. "Eric Gill's Perpetua Type". Fine Print.
  13. Mosley, James (1989). "Eric Gill's Perpetua Type". In Ginger, E.M. (ed.). Fine Print on Type. Lund Humphries. pp. 54–58.
  14. Wardle, Tiffany (2000). The story of Perpetua (PDF). University of Reading. p. 5. Archived from the original (PDF) on 10 November 2006. Retrieved 26 March 2009.
  15. "Frank Hinman Pierpont 1860-1937: A Memoir and Tribute" (PDF). Monotype Recorder. 36 (1): 13–16. 1937. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  16. Morison, Stanley (7 June 1973). A Tally of Types. CUP Archive. pp. 22–24. ISBN 978-0-521-09786-4.
  17. "Horley Old Style MT". MyFonts. Adobe. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  • Jaspert, W. Pincus, W. Turner Berry and A.F. Johnson. The Encyclopedia of Type Faces. Blandford Press Lts.: 1953, 1983. ISBN 0-7137-1347-X.
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