THE AMERICAN POINT system was proposed by Nelson C. Hawks of Marder Luse and Company in Chicago in the 1870s, and his point system used the same method of size division as Fournier's; viz. dividing 1 inch by 6 to get 1 pica, and dividing it again by 12 to get 1 point. However, the American Point System standardized finally in 1886 is different from Hawks' original idea in that 1 pica is not precisely equal to 1/6 inch (neither the Imperial inch nor the US inch), as the United States Type Founders' Association defined the standard pica to be the Johnson Pica, which had been adopted and used by Mackellar, Smiths and Jordan type foundry (MSJ), Philadelphia.
AS MSJ WAS very influential in those days, many other type foundries were using the Johnson Pica. Also, MSJ defined that 83 Picas are equal to 35 centimeters. The choice of the metric unit for the prototype was because at the time the Imperial and US inches differed in size slightly, and neither country could legally specify a unit of the other. The Johnson Pica was named after Lawrence Johnson who had succeeded Binny & Ronaldson in 1833. Binny & Ronaldson was one of the oldest type foundries in the United States, established in Philadelphia in 1796.
BINNY AND RONALDSON had bought the equipment of Benjamin Franklin's (1706–1790) type foundry established in 1786 and run by his grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache (1769–1798). The equipment is thought to be that which Benjamin Franklin purchased from Pierre Simon Fournier when he visited France for diplomatic purposes (1776–85).The official standard approved by the Fifteenth Meeting of the Type Founders Association of the United States in 1886 was this Johnson pica.
COLUMBA
Columba is a text family with weight and optical axes. It’s designed for print and covers extended Cyrillic, monotonic Greek and Latin. Columba started as an MATD project in 2019 and will be released in 2020. Columba won the 2019 Granshan Grand Prize for non-Latin scripts (Greek and Cyrillic). Shown here are the regular text, italic and bold cuts.
More info ︎
Available soon!
More info ︎
Available soon!