Fonts were not interchangeable between vendors and owning a good font collection with a lot of fashionable fonts could influence the system decision for the typesetting machinery. A type shop would often spend more money for the fonts than for the machinery (and the typeshop I was working for even had a dedicated insurance for the glas plates).Īll the modern copyright laws existed already at this time and the big problem was, that a certain fontstyle would become fashionable (like Helvetica!) in the designers world, but only one type foundry owned the font. A single typeface (like Helvetica 55) would cost around 800 German Marks (roughly 550 US$ today) as a mercury-metallized glas plate from Berthold, containing the full character set. All the time, they also provided the fonts for their machinery and this fonts were very expensive. Later they started to develop mechanical machinery for typesetting (especially Linotype) and soon after they started to develop machinery for fototypesetting (making way for the wide spread use of offset-printing, replacing letterpress printing). They created printing characters of lead.

The story is this: all the big typesetting companies, like Berthold, Linotype, Monotype and so on, have been type foundries originally. I had 19 of 20 (the Toyota-capitals are too hard to distinguish).

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