The innovative book and newspaper publisher John Bell, impressed by the sophistication and contrast found in contemporary French typefaces cut for
Firmin Didot, commissioned Austin to produce a new typeface to be sold by his British Letter Foundry. Austin was a former cutter of engraved letters who would develop a career as a punchcutter. Bell wanted a crisply serifed face, like
Didot in its crisp contrast of thick and thin strokes. The design is however, more traditional in style: Mosley writes that "the serifs, though sharply cut, are not the severe unbracketed strokes of the French type...a fusion of the new French style of roman with a flowing, cursive italic in the manner established by Baskerville".) While Austin went on to a successful career running his own foundry and selling punches to other companies, his later typefaces are different in style, some more "modern" in appearance. Some may have influenced the "Scotch Modern" style popular in the United States. From the early nineteenth century onwards, the Bell typeface remained in the collection of various companies and finally Stephenson Blake, generally overlooked and little used. , using the Bell type or one similar to it. While Bell's type was seldom seen after 1800 in England, it went on to become a favourite in the United States. When the Boston publisher
Henry Houghton went to Europe to purchase type for his
Riverside Press in 1864 he purchased the Bell from its then-owners the
Fann Street Foundry, who were at the time offering it for sale under the name "Old Face". Back in Boston the face was called
copperplate and copied by
electrotyping. In 1900, when
Bruce Rogers found the face at the Riverside Press, he used it for book work under the name "Brimmer".
Daniel Berkeley Updike used another font of this type at his
Merrymount Press where it was called "Mountjoye". Morison, who corresponded extensively with Updike, was impressed with the typefaces' quality and after researching their history arranged for Monotype to develop a revival for Monotype's
hot metal typesetting system, in collaboration with Stephenson Blake who held the original. The Monotype revival included a wide range of Austin's character variants, including swash versions of the italic
A, J, N, Q, T, V, and
Y. The designer
Jan Tschichold favored the typeface Bell in much of his book design, and mentioned it in his book
Typographische Gestaltung. == Foundry type ==