Why a bitten ‘t’ from 1889 was the inspiration for Fatype’s States

Fatype was founded in 2012 by Yassin Baggar and Anton Koovit, two TypeMedia graduates who launched the foundry to make typefaces with visual and historical relevance. States, in two versions and 28 styles, joins a catalogue already well stocked with excellent sans serifs. What sets it apart is where Anton went looking. Early sans serifs came in two flavours, the crude and loud kind made for posters and advertisements, and the plain, no-frills type set in small print. States brings both together, treating the imperfections of letterpress printing as features rather than flaws. It all started with a lowercase ‘t.’ Anton was researching American sans serif type from the late 1800s when he found a letter that looked as though someone had bitten a chunk out of its ascender. It belonged to Gothic N° 2, offered in 12 sizes by Boston Type Foundry in their 1889 specimen. The bite showed up in just one of the sizes, the 48-point – the largest on the page. Sober almost everywhere, odd in a single spot. That was the thing that set States going. By the early 19th century, sans serifs were nothing new, but in the United States, they grew up fast and without a map. Foundries put out Gothics in every style and size, original designs, imitations and straight copies, usually one weight across a handful of sizes, named with little more than the word Gothic and a number. Roughness seemed to be accepted as part of what a sans serif was. It can’t have been a question of skill, since the same specimens show serifs designed flawlessly, so either foundries hadn’t yet settled what a grotesque should be, or the roughness was intentional. That free-for-all came to an end with the founding of American Type Founders, the 1892 merger that consolidated much of the US type industry, and with the work of its chief type designer, Morris Fuller Benton. His grotesques arrived as tidy all-rounders, organised into families with multiple weights and widths, and the old single-style designs slipped out the back. States, however, goes back to the eccentricities.