Cooper Black^163
Oswald CooperEvery designer has used the typeface Cooper
Black at least once in his or her professional
life. It is as indelibly part of design as ritual is
of religion. Once one of the world’s most
ubiquitous metal typefaces—and the heaviest,
owing to its great mass—Cooper Black is a
truly twentieth-century type, as emblematic
as Futura or Univers. While it was not the
first type to have rounded serifs, it is the most
authoritative of the so-called fat faces. Used
for advertising and editorial display, Cooper
Black is as eye-catching as a charging bull
and as loud as a carnival barker. If there had
never been a Cooper Black, the world might
never have known Ultra Bodoni, one of the
many behemoths designed to compete in the
ever-widening fat face market during the
mid- 1920 s.
The man who designed Cooper Black
is Oswald Cooper ( 1879 – 1940 ), Oz or Ozzie
to his friends. Cooper was a native of Coffeyville, Kansas. In his teens he
settled in Chicago to pursue illustration. He eventually became one of the
leading practitioners of what became known as the Chicago style. In the
early 1920 s and 1930 s American design was a mélange of regional dialects,
each emanating from a big city under the influence of a single person’s
mannerism or the confluence of a few. Lettering, typography, and
illustration were the defining media, and advertising was the primary
outlet. The Boston style was attributable to W. A. Dwiggins and the New
York style to Frederic W. Goudy (both of whom spent time in Chicago),
but the Chicago (sometimes called the Midwestern) style was founded by
Cooper. He combined calligraphic skill with typographic expertise to create
advertisements that were modern in character and classic in form. While
respecting tradition, he understood the needs of an expanding mass
commercial market.
Cooper stumbled into his lifelong vocation by accident. He left the
comforts of his Kansas home at eighteen, bound for Chicago to study at