There were few new innovations in typography within the ten year bracket of the turn to the 20th century, but the ones that did occur were important.
Sans serif fonts were becoming increasingly popular in the early 1890’s, leading to the Berthold Foundry’s launch of Akzidenz-Grotesk. Akzidenz-Grotesk is a family group of sans serif fonts often used for casual printing and advertising at the time. It was also useful for things like tickets and forms. It was not intended for use with fine printing, and was not elegant, rather functional. Akzidenz-Grotesk became popular due to its simplicity, with its consistent line weight and round edges; it exudes uniformity. This contrasted with many of the popular typefaces at the time, due to the influence of the art nouveau period which led to many form-over-function fonts that were eye-catching but relatively difficult to read, especially in advertisements or other quick-read formats. Akzidenz-Grotesk was the first in it’s typeface family, and is still in use today.
The Berthold Type Foundry, a publishing company that designs and publishes typefaces, was one of the leading type foundries in the modern era. While it had many successes in the 135 years that it was in business, Akzidenz-Grotesk was by far the most popular typeface family ever published by Berthold. It was published in 1898.
There were many different type foundries within the United States at that time, and so some of these companies decided to form the American Type Founders in 1892, which was a coalition of the majority of type foundries in the USA. The American Type Founders owned the largest collection of the world’s original typefaces. It was created and kept by Morris Fuller Benton.
The Berthold Type Foundry was not apart of the American Type Foundry, but there were many other companies. The establishing companies included names like Binny & Ronaldson, the Boston Type Foundry, and Farmer Little & Co. These type foundries were joined in the following years by Central Type Foundry, who joined in 1893, Bruce Type Foundry, who joined in 1901, Barnhart Brothers & Spindler, who joined in 1911, and Inland Type Foundry, who joined in 1912.
ATF held a prominent position in the world of printing and typography during the turn of the century, well into the 1900’s.
References:
https://www.myfonts.com/foundry/Kingsley_ATF/
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2843050