Oswald Bruce Cooper was an American letterer and typographic designer.
Background
Oswald Bruce Cooper was born on April 13, 1879 in Mount Gilead, Ohio, United States. He was the only child of Hannibal G. Cooper, cabinetmaker, and Ann Elizabeth (Bruce) Cooper. His father was of Dutch descent, his ancestors having first settled in Pennsylvania. His mother's forebears, of Scottish-English-Welsh stock, emigrated to Virginia before the American Revolution. Oswald's mother, a milliner, possessed unusual charm, a keen sense of humor, and a fine feeling for design. Much of his early childhood was spent with a literary aunt who read to him from the classics. The family, in moderate circumstances, moved to Coffeyville, Kansas when "Ossie" was six.
Education
He left high school at seventeen. Meanwhile he took a correspondence course in art and at twenty, influenced by the work of Will Bradley and J. C. Leyendecker. At Frank Holme's School of Illustration he floundered at figure drawing, then concentrated on lettering in a class taught by Frederic Goudy.
Career
After Holme's death in 1903, his school, financially shaky, was closed, and young Cooper as superintendent helped to settle its affairs. Then, over a period of several years he fulfilled the terms of every contract.
In 1904 Cooper joined Fred S. Bertsch in a partnership which furnished lettering and design service to advertisers. Gathering momentum, the firm added typesetting facilities in 1914, and in 1921 moved into swank new quarters with the largest and most complete art, design, typographic, and photographic service in the Middle West. Bertsch withdrew in 1924, but Cooper carried on until shortly before his death as an advertising typographer and designer, still under the firm name of Bertsch & Cooper, employing a maximum of fifty helpers, doing lettering, type designing, and layout, and supervising all the typography and printing done in his own shop.
He was ill for the last year and a half of his life, died of cancer in Chicago, and was buried there in Rosehill Cemetery.
Achievements
Personality
He was tall, lanky, with roughhewn features.
He believed in the power of understatement. Even so, advertising agencies sought his services as a copywriter, and one of them made him a standing offer. But he was not tempted. His writing, though touched with quaintness, was forthright and concise. It reflected a native gift that was sharpened--softened, too, no doubt--by his early experience in criticizing the efforts of sensitive students. He was unfailingly considerate of others. Affectionately referred to as Oz, but respectfully addressed as Mr. Cooper, he belonged to several art and trade organizations which he liberally supported with both talents and resources, though rarely with his presence.
The revived term calligrapher had not caught on in Cooper's day. To his contemporaries he was simply a lettering man--the supremely competent creator of "The Chicago Style. " But his evident study of traditional hands and forms, and the freedom, directness, and taste with which he adapted them to make letters useful and appropriate to his own day, place him among the finest of calligraphers. In marked contrast to certain extrovert characteristics apparent in his work, he was shy in the presence of strangers and whenever possible avoided social and even business contacts.
He was a "progressive" in the graphic arts, working with unquestioned authority, a high sense of ethics, and a genuine disregard of his own importance. Inquiring and tolerant of new tendencies, he had a vigorous personal style, but he could modify it with the most delicate nuances.
Connections
He had married Mary Lou Foster, a second cousin, in 1920; they had no children.