Oswald Bruce Cooper

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Oswald Bruce Cooper (1879, Ohio - 1940) was an American typographer and creator of the Cooper Old Style and Cooper Black typefaces.

He studied at Chicago's Frank Holme School of Illustration, first as a correspondence student, then in person, with an interest in illustration. Feeling that this was not his forte, he pursued design, and after taking a lettering class from Frederic Goudy, pursued a career in type and design. In time he became Director of the Correspondence School of Typography for the Holme School. When the school closed due to financial difficulties, Cooper took it on himself to provide correspondence education to prepaid students.

With Fred Bertsch he formed the design firm of Bertch & Cooper after 1904, providing ad campaigns for such accounts as the Packard Motor Car Company and Anheuser-Busch Breweries, with Cooper providing distinctive hand lettering and sometimes the copy writing as well. In 1914 the firm became a full-service type shop. Cooper's anonymous hand-lettering for Packard ads formed the basis of the Packard font prepared at the direction of Morris Fuller Benton of American Type Founders. In the 1920s he created the very popular Cooper Black for the Barnhart Brothers & Spindler Type Foundry, saying that the extremely heavy weight font was "for far-sighted printers with near-sighted customers."^[1]