Daniel Berkeley Updike

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Daniel Berkeley Updike (14 February, 1860 — 29 December 1941) was an American printer and historian of typography.

Updike was born at Providence, Rhode Island. In 1880 he joined the publishers Houghton, Mifflin & Company, of Boston as an errand boy. He worked for the firm's Riverside Press and trained as a printer but soon moved to typographic design. He set up on his own in 1893, and renamed his enterprise the Merrymount Press in 1896.

Initially he followed the style of William Morris and the Kelmscott Press but soon turned towards the historical printing of the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He began to acquire fonts of his own, including some specially cut for him — Montalegro and Merrymount. He made his name as a liturgical printer for the Episcopal Church, but also undertook general jobbing and ephemeral work. John Bianchi became a partner in the press in 1915.

Updike was greatly interested in the history of printing types, and in 1922 published Printing Types: Their History, Forms and Use. An extensively revised second edition was published in 1937. He was involved in the Anglo-American 'Typographical Renaissance' of the time, together with Frederic Goudy, Stanley Morison, Bruce Rogers and Theodore Low De Vinne.

[edit] References

• David McKitterick, ed., Stanley Morison and D. B. Updike: Selected Correspondence 1990, ISBN 0-85967-589-0, Introduction at pp ix-xxxiv.