Tim,

In my copy of the very good reference book “Encyclopedia of Typefaces by Jaspert, Berry & Johnston (Blandford) I find the following info on Bruce Oldstyle as they are showing a Lanston Monotype version from 1909;

“Designed by Sol Hess from the Bruce Foundry’s Bruce Old Style No 20 which was first shown in 1869. The type is based on “Scotch” and similar faces.”

I’m working on a revival of the Bruce Old Style No. 20. It’s a assignment I’m doing in The Hague, based on a book I’ve found in a antiquarian. You can find original printings in the specimen of the Bruce Type Foundry 1869. As soon I’ve finished my essay I can send you an PDF via email.
Another source is pointing at the Old Style by Miller & Richards as a base.
Please watch as well: http://cg.scs.carleton.ca/~luc/bruce/index.html

My revival is based on the Long-Primer No. 20 and I’m not sure if I will add the italics and the small caps. The assignment was more about learning to do a revival than ending a finished type-family.

Unfortunately I was not able to find the designer or caster of the typeface.
So If you can help me in that case, would be grate.

Just looking in ’American Metal Type Faces’ and the Jaspert et al. ’Encyclopedia’, here is some guesswork about Bruce Old style.

Caslon—the original type it seems—was revived in the 1844 printing of ’Lady Willoughby’s Diary’, and caused a big splash as people had been only reading ’modern’ faces like Bodoni, Didot, and the Scotch romans. And some found Caslon more readable.

Caslon was first revived by some copying process in 1858, by Laurence Johnson of Philadelphia.

Not long afterward, in 1863, Franklin Old Style was cut by Alexander Phemister, at Miller & Richards. It is one of the first of many attempts to modernize Caslon and remove what was felt to be backward, but keep its readability. It has a more vertical stress, is widened, and has much shorter ascenders and descenders. Jaspert puts the date at 1860, and just calls it ’Old Style’.

This type was popular and widely copied. Though Johnson’s Caslon was originally called ’Old Style’ also, the types of this name in the 20th century on all seem to derive from Phemister’s face, including Bruce Old Style—which was one of the early derivatives of Phemister’s face.

According to ’American Metal Typefaces’ Bookman Old Style is also derived from a similar—or possibly the same—face also cut by Phemister, with thicker strokes. The Bookman we know seems to have come from versions by the Bruce foundry, originally called Antique 310. ATF added the famous swash characters, which were drawn by Wadsworth A. Parker.

Just looking at it, there may have been an influence of Clarendon on Phemister’s face—it looks like the offspring of a Caslon-Clarendon marriage. In any case, it is certainly a long-lived design. I think it has considerable merits, though it also has a certain dullness to it also.

As I say all this is guesswork based on those two books. If historian James Mosley is around, I suspect he could tell us a lot more.

From my friend and colleague George Laws:

“The notion of a designer as separate from the punchcutter did not exist until the late 19th century. Usually, the master punchcutter was an independent craftsman selling his own products, though occasionally accepting commissions, that would presume input from someone else. Punchcutters did not need finished drawings, just a general sense of purpose. Most likely, George Bruce worked on the punches with other engravers in his shop, and he certainly did his own casting and sold the type under the Bruce Type Foundry name.

The Bruce type foundry became part of the American Type Founders in 1901, so I assume that more information on the history can be found in the ATF archives. That collection is now part of the Smithonian Institution. The easiest place to start would be to talk to David Pankow (dppwml@rit.edu) at the Cary Library, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York.

David is erudite and very helpful.”