Support John D. Berry’s ATypI History Project

Briefly: I am raising funds to complete the history of ATypI (Association Typographique Internationale) that I began before the pandemic, including research, writing, and publication in final form. Tracing the history of ATypI also traces the history of type in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

More fully: ATypI is the world’s preeminent typographic organization, representing typographers, type designers, font engineers, and educators from all countries. It was founded in the 1950s during a time of commercial and technological change, with the goal of protecting the rights of the designers and manufacturers of typefaces – an ongoing and unresolved struggle.

The impetus for founding such an organization was the spread of phototypesetting technology and the subsequent ease of copying typeface designs – something that had been done since the earliest days of hand-set type, but that was about to become much easier to do. Charles Peignot, director of the Paris type foundry Deberny & Peignot, saw an international organization as a way of preserving both the traditions of the craft and the practical business of manufacturing and selling type.

Since then, the development of ATypI has embodied, mirrored, and influenced the development of typography for the last seven decades. From an organization focused on Western European type and typography, it has grown to become a forum and a resource for type design and development around the world, in all the languages and scripts of the world.

I am setting up this GoFundMe campaign in order to recount that history and make it public. I am a former President of ATypI and have written extensively about the history of type & design. The ATypI board originally commissioned me to begin writing a history in 2018. I began digging into the archives, several of which had been misplaced or forgotten, and before the pandemic shut everything down I completed an initial chapter about the founding and purposes of ATypI. This draft chapter was published on Medium.

Now I want to get it back on track. It’s not something that I can complete on a purely voluntary basis, and the Association is not currently in a position to back it, so I am trying to raise money to help me get it done. (Note that this is not meant in any way to detract from or compete with direct financial support of ATypI itself, which I encourage.)

If this seems worthwhile to you, please contribute. And please let others know about this campaign.

[I gave a talk about this project at the 2019 ATypI conference in Tokyo, just before the Covid-19 pandemic upended so many plans. Take a look.]

[Photo by Michelle Mengsu Chang, at the Face/Interface conference at Stanford University, January 2025.]