The following is a list of typefaces designed by Frederic Goudy.
Goudy was one of America's most prolific designers of metal type. He worked under the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement, and many of his designs are old-style serif designs inspired by the relatively organic structure of typefaces created between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, following the lead of earlier revivalist printers such as William Morris. Eric Sloane, who was his neighbour as a boy, recalled that he also took inspiration from hand-painted signs. He also developed a number of typefaces influenced by blackletter medieval manuscripts, illuminated manuscript capitals and Roman square capitals carved into stone. This means that several of his most famous designs such as Copperplate Gothic and Goudy Stout are unusual deviations from his normal style.
Goudy's taste matched a trend of the period, in which a preference for using mechanical, geometric Didone fonts introduced in the eighteenth and nineteenth century was being displaced by a revival of interest in the 'old-style' serif fonts (preferred by Goudy) developed before this, a change that has proved to be lasting, especially in book body text.Lawson, A. (1990). Anatomy of a typeface. Boston: Godine, p.200.
Again unusually for type designers of the period, Goudy wrote extensively on his work and ambitions, partly in order to publicise his work as an independent artisan. He completed A Half-Century of Type Design and Typography, a two-volume survey of all his designs, late in life, in which he discussed all of his work. Not all Goudy's designs survive or have been digitised: several, often designs never cut into metal, were lost in fires which burned down his studio in 1908 and again in 1939. Indeed, in his autobiography Goudy sometimes said he had little memory of some of his earlier designs. He worked extensively with his wife Bertha, who particularly collaborated with him on printing projects. He listed his typefaces with numbers in a similar way to the opus numbers used by composers.
Career
Unlike most type designers of the metal type era, Goudy worked as an independent designer not permanently employed by any one company, giving him particular latitude to work on his own projects. He generally avoided sans-serif designs, though he did create the nearly sans-serif Copperplate Gothic, inspired by engraved letters, early in his career and a few others later. As an independent artist and consultant, Goudy needed to undertake a large range of commissions to survive, and sought patronage from companies (and, especially later in life, universities) who would commission a typeface for their own printing and advertising. This led to him producing a large range of designs on commission, and promoting his career through talks and teaching. As a result, many of his designs may look somewhat similar to modern readers.
Goudy's career took place at a time of progress in printing technology. New pantograph engraving technology made it easier to rapidly engrave matrices), the moulds in which metal type would be cast or the punches used to stamp them in copper. This gave much cleaner results than pre-pantograph punches, which had to be carefully hand-carved at the size of the desired letter, with less difficulty and the ability to prepare designs more easily from large plan drawings. As Douglas McMurtrie wrote in 1924 in a book to which Goudy wrote the preface:
The production of new type designs, by reason of the increasing scarcity of competent punch cutters, was becoming more and more difficult when, about thirty years ago, Linn Boyd Benton of Milwaukee invented and perfected the first punch cutting machine. This machine works on the principle of a pantograph, a guide, following the outlines of a large scale pattern of the type design, directing the movement of a fine revolving tool cutting the metal of the punch or matrix in greatly reduced scale but in exactly the same design. This machine or machines similar to it are now in use in all typefoundries and the matrix departments of all composing machine manufacturers throughout the world.
During the early years of Goudy's career, hand typesetting was being superseded, especially for body text composition, by hot metal typesetting, and his client Monotype was one of the most popular manufacturers of these systems, in competition with that of Linotype. Both allowed metal type to be quickly cast under the control of a keyboard, eliminating the need to manually cast metal type and slot it into place into a printing press. With no need to keep type in stock, just the matrices used as moulds to cast the type, printers could use a wider range of fonts and there was increasing demand for varied typefaces. However, many of Goudy’s designs were used in hand-setting also.
While most of Goudy's designs are 'old-style' serif faces, they do still explore a wide range of aspects of the genre, with Deepdene offering a strikingly upright italic, Goudy Modern merging traditional old-style letters with the insistent, horizontal serifs of Didone faces of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and several such as Goudy Old Style being sold with a swash italic for display use. His sans-serif series, Goudy Sans, adopts an eccentric humanist style with a calligraphic italic. Quite unlike most sans-serif types of the period, it was unpopular in his lifetime but has been revived several times since by both LTC and ITC.
Goudy started his career as a full-time type designer later in life, creating his first font in his early thirties. In his earlier career he had worked first as a bookkeeper, and then as a printer and lettering artist.
Critical assessment The printer Daniel Berkeley Updike, while respecting some of his work, echoed Goudy's student Dwiggins' comment that his work lacked 'a certain snap and acidity'. He also wrote that Goudy had "never gotten over" a desire to imitate medieval books.
The British printer Stanley Morison, also a veteran of fine book printing whose career at Monotype had moved in the direction of blending tradition with practicality, admired much of Goudy's work and ethos but wrote that Goudy had "designed a whole century of very peculiar looking types", and that he was glad that his company's Times New Roman did not look "as if it has been designed by somebody in particular — Mr. Goudy for instance." Goudy felt in his later life that his career had been overshadowed by new trends, with modernism and a trend towards sans-serifs and sharp geometric type leaving his work out of favor.
Walter Tracy, a leading historian of type design, devoted a section of his book Letters of Credit to a critical assessment of Goudy's work. He was impressed by Goudy Old Style, the blackletter Goudy Text, Goudy Heavy and to a certain extent Deepdene, but felt that Goudy was over-fond of eccentric detailing, such as a "restless" tilted 'e' common in early printing, and felt that Goudy's prolific work rate had prevented him from critically assessing his designs. He noted as an example how his "Bertham" type, named in memory of his late wife ("Bertha M."), was drawn and engraved in sixteen working days: "there cannot have been much time for the objective scrutiny which every design should undergo before it is allowed to emerge from the workshop."
Goudy gave his blackletter designs the adjective text, short for 'textura'. This designation was common in Goudy's time; it is now avoided due to confusion with fonts intended for body text.
Typefaces designed by Goudy
1896 to 1904 Camelot (1896, Dickinson Type Foundry), Goudy designed only the capitals, lower-case letters were later added, presumably by Dickinson's type designer Joseph W. Phinney or his team. A delicate Art Nouveau-inspired display face with small wedge serifs. Unnamed (1896) this was a second set of drawings sent to Dickinson Type Foundry that he sent them after they had accepted Camelot. It was neither accepted nor cast, but Goudy numbered it among his faces. Display Roman (1897, nc), based on some lettering in an issue of the British magazine The Studio. Goudy numbered it among his designs, though even he was unsure of what exactly it was beyond being "a display letter leaning to the bold side" or if it had ever been manufactured. DeVinne Roman (1898, Central Type Foundry, ATF), a book face based on a display type that had been earlier commissioned by Theodore Low De Vinne.
Pabst Old Style or Pabst Roman (1902, ATF), based on hand lettering done by Goudy for advertisements for the Pabst Brewing Company, though commissioned by Schlesinger & Mayer, a Chicago department store. Cast by ATF with the proviso that the department store would have the exclusive use of the font for a time before it would be offered to the public. The design had a strikingly low x-height. Pabst Roman Italic (1903, ATF), a companion to the above. Cut by Robert Wiebking, who would work extensively with Goudy in the following years.
Powell (1903, Keystone Foundry), commissioned by one Mr. Powell, then advertising manager for Mandel Brothers department store (earlier he had commissioned Pabst Old Style for another store), and named after him. Another display type, partially inspired by lettering Goudy had done for the children's book Mother Goose, a design which Goudy felt had been pirated by the Inland Type Foundry as their font 'Hearst'. To give the font a different colour to Pabst or the 'Hearst' font, Goudy attempted to balance the x-height and height of the ascenders and descenders differently. Goudy reported in his autobiography that Keystone later created a matching italic. The Village series was a family named after Goudy's own Village Press, which came to use it. Village (1903, Wiebking, Harding & Co.Lawson, Alexander, Anatomy of a Typeface. Boston: David R. Godine, Publisher, 1990. . p. 112.), cut by Wiebking. It was originally designed for Kuppenheimer & Company for advertising use, who later decided it would be too expensive to cast, and later bought by Frederick Sherman. The design was very much under the influence of William Morris's 'Golden' type, itself influenced by the 1470s printing of Nicolas Jenson, as well as other (mostly British) fine printers such as the Doves, Montaigne and Merrymount presses. The matrices are still extant and cast by Dale Guild Foundry. Village No. 2 (1932, Continental, later Lanston Monotype), cut by Goudy for an edition of Theodore Low De Vinne's The Old and the New, later marketed by Monotype. Village Italic (1934, Continental + Lanston Monotype), cut by Goudy. A companion to the No. 2 face. Cushing Italic Goudy thought that Clarence C. Marder asked him to draw an italic to complement ATF's existing Cushing Roman sometime after 1904. However, Goudy was unsure whether they ultimately used his design, and ATF catalogs show it as existing as early as 1898. Barron's Boston News Letter (1904, ATF), a private face cut for Clarence W. Barron's financial newsletter, matrices cut by Wiebking. Goudy wrote in 1946 that he had no knowledge of what became of the design and little memory of what it was. Engravers' Roman (1904, nc), inspired by copperplate engraving. Goudy was uncertain if this type had ever been cast.
Copperplate Gothic (1905, ATF), originally designed for Marder, Luse, & Co., ATF immediately adopted it and made it the first in a hugely successful series: Clarence C. Marder and Morris Fuller Benton later cut dozens of variations for ATF. 'Gothic' was a contemporary term for sans-serif typefaces; it has nothing to do with blackletter writing, also sometimes called 'gothic'.Master printer J.L. Frazier, no great fan of sans-serif types, wrote of it in 1925 that it was a popular choice for the stationery of professionals such as lawyers and doctors: "a certain dignity of effect accompanies...due to the absence of anything in the way of frills."