the Frank Holme School of Illustration. There he was inspired by his
lettering teacher, Frederic W. Goudy, to pursue a broader practice. Goudy,
the most prolific of all American type designers and director of Holme’s
typographic department, befriended Oz and helped him earn his tuition by
assigning him jobs setting type for correspondence course booklets. This
was a happy career move since Cooper had realized that he wasn’t very
good at drawing pictures but had a real knack for the lettering arts. Soon
he was appointed as a lettering teacher.
While teaching at Holme, Cooper met a young man, Fred Bertsch,
who ran an art-service agency next door to the school. Bertsch loved
Cooper’s work and in 1904 they entered into the perfect partnership;
Bertsch, a consummate salesman, and Cooper, the gifted artist, formed
Bertsch & Cooper with the goal of establishing a full-service typeshop,
including typesetting, layout, copywriting, and design. But opening a
typeshop was expensive even then; and while they had plenty of ambition,
money was in short supply. As a small studio Bertsch & Cooper based its
initial reputation on hand lettering for small local jobs and later large
national campaigns. Eventually, their financial success allowed them to
open the full-service shop they had dreamed of, which gave Cooper the
opportunity to test his other talents. “Cooper, of course, had brilliant
capacities as a craftsman in the field of printing and of advertising layout,”
wrote typographer Paul Standard in The Book of Oz Cooper(The Society of
Typographic Arts, Chicago, 1949 ). “But in his endowment was also a gift
for language, and through its discipline a power of clear and forthright
expression... his text sought to persuade, not stampede.”
The quality of Cooper’s lettering was equal to the strength of his
writing. Cooper’s letterforms were not simply novelties, but “lessons in
structural form, in free and friendly balance,” wrote Standard. Cooper
created as many new designs as he could, yet he had an instinctual distrust
of things superficially modish and conceptually strained. “Types too
dexterous, like tunes too luscious,” he once waxed, “are predestinated [sic]
to short careers. If William Caslon had improved his types as much as they
have since been improved by others they would not have endured, for sleek
perfection palls on the imperfect persons who buy and use type.”
Actually, Cooper stumbled into type design almost as accidentally as
he did lettering. His first type was drawn and cut, unbeknownst to Cooper
and without his permission, in 1913 by one of Morris Fuller Benton’s staff
artists at American Type Foundry (ATF). Cooper had routinely created
customized lettering in advertisements for one of Bertsch & Cooper’s largest
clients, the Packard Motor Car Company. The ads were so widely seen that
the lettering caught Benton’s eye. Type pirating was a fact of life and ads
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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