Cooper Black is an ultra-bold serif typeface intended for display use that was designed by Oswald Bruce Cooper and released by the Barnhart Brothers & Spindlertype foundry in 1922. The typeface was drawn as an extra-bold weight of Cooper's "Cooper Old Style" family. It rapidly became a standard typeface and was licensed by American Type Founders and also copied by many other manufacturers of printing systems. Its use in pop culture increased worldwide since 1966, when the Beach Boys used it for the cover artwork of their album Pet Sounds. It was then featured in the Doors’ L.A. Woman and David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, and in the opening credits of The Bob Newhart Show, Garfield, M*A*S*H, The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, and other shows. The font is used for the Disney's Sing Along Songs from the intro. As a result, Cooper Black has become emblematic of late-'60s/early-'70s style. Cooper Black followed on from Cooper's career as a lettering artist in Chicago and the Midwest of America in the 1920s. Cooper Black was advertised as being "for far-sighted printers with near-sighted customers", as well as "the Black Menace" by detractors. While very bold, Cooper Black is based on traditional "old-style" seriflettering, rather than the hard-edged "fat face" fonts popular in the nineteenth century, giving it a soft, 'muddy' appearance, with relatively low contrast between thick and thin strokes.
Cooper Hilite
Cooper Hilite is a version of Cooper Black originally designed by painting white relief impressions into a printed proof of Cooper Black. It has been digitised by ParaType and Wordshape.
Imitations and variants
Cooper Black was immediately popular and spawned imitations, including Goudy Heavy Face from Frederic Goudy, Ludlow Black and Pabst Extra Bold. Cooper Black remains popular: the editors of the typography discussion website Fonts in Use report more submissions of its use than any other face that is not a sans-serif, although outnumbered by Times New Roman once its many variants are added up. Many unusual versions of Cooper were created in the phototypesetting period of the 1960s and 1970s, a period of explosion in production of display faces. These included "Ziptop Cooper Black" from Photo Lettering Inc., a version with the top bolder than the bottom, and other distorted variants. Many digitisations of Cooper Black exist from companies including Bitstream, Adobe and others. Soap, designed by Ray Larabie of Typodermic, is a uni-case variant. A version from URW, which does not include an italic, is bundled with many Microsoft products. Cooper Old Style has been digitised by URW.
