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.
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.
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.
1911 to 1926.
From 1911 to 1926 (with a few exceptions) Goudy's designs were cut by Robert Wiebking. Some were private commissions, others were cut first and then offered for sale.
Kennerley series.
The Kennerley Series, named for New York publisher Mitchell Kennerley, was Goudy's first major success in his own style. ;br ;Goudy described the design as extremely loosely suggested by the 'Fell Types', a set of type in the Dutch style collected by Bishop John Fell of Oxford for the Oxford University Press: "comparison of my type with the Fell letter will disclose little more than an identity of spirit." Others have compared it in some details, notably the tilted understroke on the 'e' of which Goudy was fond, to the type of late 15th century Venetian printer Nicolas Jenson. Many revivals and digitisations have been released since.
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1915 to 1926: Cut by ATF.
"In 1915 and 1916, Goudy was on retainer for American Type Founders and all of his matrices were cut in house by ATF."
Goudy Old Style.
Described as 'an instant best-seller' by Lawson in "Anatomy of a Typeface", Goudy Old Style (1915) has remained popular since its creation for ATF as a body text and display face. Goudy described the design as influenced by capitals on a painting, but later said he was unable to find which, although he thought it was by Hans Holbein (Goudy did not say which). The dots (tittles) on the 'i' and 'j' are diamond-pattern, and the descenders were kept short at ATF's insistence to allow tight line setting on their common line system. Many revivals have been released. Goudy later also designed an italic, and A.T.F. a bold weight and a medium, named 'Goudy Catalogue'.
Goudy Old Style became particularly commonly used for display and advertising use. Indeed, in 1937, the printing textbook "26 Lead Soldiers" described the bold as 'better known' than the regular.
Garamont.
One of Goudy's most popular typefaces in his lifetime, Garamont (1921, Lanston Monotype + 1927, Continental) was loosely based on metal types in the Imprimerie nationale, the French government printing-office, that were at the time thought to be the work of Claude Garamont. Research by Beatrice Warde, published in 1926, revealed that actually these designs were the work of Jean Jannon, working more than fifty years after Garamond's death. An elegant sample created by Bruce Rogers was shown in a spring 1923 issue of Monotype's magazine. Garamont features a large range of swash characters. Mosley has described it as "a lively type, underappreciated I think." LTC's digitisation deliberately maintained its eccentricity and irregularity true to period printing, something Goudy had insisted on in his original design, avoiding perfect verticals.
1926 to 1929.
"From 1926 until his death, Goudy cut all of his own faces (at least in the pilot sizes). From 1927-1929, Goudy cast type at his own Village Letter Foundry and marketed them through the Continental Type Founders Association. After 1929 he ceased casting his own fonts and they were cast for Continental by the New England Type Foundry."
Deepdene series.
A crisp design inspired by a typeface designed in the Netherlands, which Goudy's Paul Bennett wrote was Jan van Krimpen's Lutetia. One of Goudy's more popular designs, with several digital revivals, although as of 2016 only LTC's includes the swash capitals and small caps of Goudy's original design conception. Named after Goudy's home in Marlborough.
1935 to 1938.
University of California Old Style.
Goudy's 'California' font (1938, Continental) was cut for the University of California Press. It is a 'Venetian' typeface, loosely inspired by the work of Nicolas Jenson. One of Goudy's most popular designs, several releases exist.
After the original type was commissioned for private use, 'California' was released publicly by different companies, first in 1958, by Lanston Monotype as 'Californian' and then famously under the name of 'Berkeley Old Style' by ITC.
In digital versions, 'California' was released by ITC under its pre-existing brand, as 'Californian' by LTC and Font Bureau (in different digitisations) and by Richard Beatty under the name of 'University Old Style'.
"Goudy" faces designed by others.
Goudy also cut the matrices for Foster Abstract, an ultra-bold Art Deco block letter designed by his friend Robert Foster. 1931, Continental with matrices cut by Goudy and cast privately. Goudy personally felt that the design 'violated every canon of type design'.
Considering digital revivals of Goudy's non-character typefaces, P22 has also published an anthology of Goudy's ornament designs, released along with their collection of Goudy's ampersands; Parachute Fonts has also released adaptations of Goudy's initials for Greek and Cyrillic.
References.
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