Cooper Black

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 & Spindler type 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 (1971) and David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust (1972), and in the opening credits of The Bob Newhart Show, Dad's Army, Diff'rent Strokes, Garfield, M*A*S*H, Enos, The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, Everybody Hates Chris and other shows. The font is used for the Disney Sing-Along Songs from the intro. As a result, Cooper Black has become emblematic of late-1960s/early-1970s style. It is also known in railroading for its association with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway "Yellowbonnet" paint scheme, also dating to the early 1960s, which had "Santa Fe" in large yellow letters on locomotive sides.

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" serif lettering, 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.