Typographer Bruce Rogers and The Riverside Press

Typographer Bruce Rogers, who designed Centaur and Montaigne.

Bruce Rogers (1870 – 1957) came to Cambridge in 1895 to work at the Riverside Press, designing trade books and advertisements for the Atlantic Monthly.  Five years later, Rogers became the head of the Department of Special Bookmaking, designing 60 Riverside Press Editions, which were known for their decorative illustrations and ornamentation, printed on hand-made, damped paper.  It was during his tenure at the Riverside Press where Rogers set his first type, Montaigne, a venetian style face named for the first book it appeared in, a 1903 limited edition of the Essays of Montaigne.

In 1912, Rogers left the Riverside Press for New York City where he worked as an independent designer and a house designer for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  It was at the Met where Rogers designed the Centaur typeface, a renaissance style face named for Maurice de Guerin’s Centaur.  Rogers felt that Centaur was a refinement of Montaigne.  It is considered one of the best fonts created in America.

For more information on the history of typefaces, please borrow Daniel Berkeley Updike’s Printing Types:  Their History, Forms, and Use from the Cambridge Public Library:  http://library.minlib.net/search/?searchtype=t&SORT=D&searcharg=Printing+Types&searchscope=9.

Rogers’ Montaigne Type

Rogers’ Centaur Type

Works Cited

1. Updike, Daniel Berkeley. Printing Types:  Their History, Forms, and Use. Cambridge, Massachusetts:  The Belknap Press, 1966.

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Rogers_%28typographer%29.

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaur_%28typeface%29.

**Special thanks to Tim Connor, Reference Librarian at the Cambridge Public Library, for providing the sources for this post.

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