Souvenir
ITC Souvenir
Year: 1971
Designer: Ed Benguiat (after the original Souvenir designed by Morris Fuller Benton for American Type Founders)
Foundry: International Typeface Corporation
The International Typeface Corporation was founded in 1971 by Aaron Burns, Edward Rondthaler and Herb Lubalin, the master of expressive typography. ITC was a groundbreaking typographic venture as it was one of the first type foundries to never have created metal type.
ITC also boasted a stable some of the most inventive and productive type designers of the 1970s and 80s. Foremost among these was Ed Benguiat, the prolific designer who was responsible for the creation of over 600 typefaces. Among those was this reworking of American Type Founders’ Souvenir, originally drawn by Morris Fuller Benton. (The reference to Oswald Cooper is a not merely a trick of exploiting a convenient rhyme. Oz was a contemporary of Benton’s who was perhaps most famously responsible for the creation of Cooper Black.)
When Souvenir was introduced by ATF in 1920, it was not a big hit and quickly fell into obscurity. Fast-forward a half-century, and ITC is not only creating new typefaces but also reviving classics for a new era of photo- and computer-based typesetting. Faces such as Clearface, Bookman and Souvenir found new life and a new audience in that resurrection. Souvenir proved so popular that it joined the ranks of the overused, and by the 21st century was considered quaintly passé. Its own popularity proved to be its kryptonite.
Typographer Allan Haley, himself an alum of ITC, once called ITC Souvenir “a typographic nice-guy” and described it as “sort of like a Times Roman dipped in chocolate.” My illustration echoes the theme of a reliable powerhouse cloaked in a friendly facade.