page_title: Frederic Goudy
section_title: Typefaces
hierarchical_section_title: Frederic Goudy / Typefaces
caption_attribution_description: English: Frederic Goudy's University of California Old Style typeface in regular and italic styles, compared to two digitisations: Californian FB and Berkeley Old Style Medium. The sample images are from Goudy's memoir, "A Half-Century of Type Design and Typography", which is in the public domain (copyright not renewed). Spacing is manually adjusted to match the metal type. The quote is part of a short text presenting Goudy's famous quote "The old fellows stole all of our best ideas," humorously exemplifying his belief in the continued primacy of old-style serif designs.
context_page_description: Frederic William Goudy was an American printer, artist and type designer whose typefaces include Copperplate Gothic, Goudy Old Style and Kennerley.
context_section_description: Goudy was the third most prolific designer of metal type in the United States (behind Morris Fuller Benton and R. Hunter Middleton), with ninety faces actually cut and cast, and many more designs completed. His most famous were Copperplate Gothic and Goudy Old Style. Besides printing, he also worked on numerous hand-lettering projects (especially early in his career) and created a large set of ampersands for an article on the topic.
  Goudy's career was influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement and the growth of fine book printing in the United States. At a time when printing types had become quite mechanical and geometric under the influence of Didone designs such as Bodoni, Goudy spent his career developing old-style serifs often influenced by the printing of the Italian Renaissance and calligraphy, with a characteristic warmth and irregularity. His neighbour, Eric Sloane, recalled that he also took inspiration from hand-painted signs. In contrast to his great contemporary Morris Fuller Benton, 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 a result, many of his designs may look quite similar to modern readers. He also developed a number of typefaces influenced by blackletter medieval manuscripts, illuminated manuscript capitals and Roman capitals engraved in stone. Some of his most famous designs such as Copperplate Gothic and Goudy Stout are unusual deviations from his normal style. 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 revived several times since.
  As an independent artist and consultant, Goudy needed to undertake a large range of commissions to survive, and sought patronage from companies 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 quite similar to modern readers. His career was aided by the new pantograph engraving technology, which made it easier to rapidly cut the matrices used as moulds to form metal type. This was a considerable advance on the traditional method of cutting punches manually at the size of the letter to be printed, which would be stamped into metal to form the matrix. An additional boon to his career was the new hot metal typesetting technology of the period which created increasing availability and demand for new fonts.
  While most of his 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 Goudy Old Style being sold with a swash italic for display use. Goudy kept records of his work (though most of these do not survive due to the fire), giving his typefaces numbers for his own use in a similar way to the opus numbers used by composers. Almost uniquely for type designers of the metal type era, he wrote extensively on his work, including a thorough commentary on each of his designs late in life.
  The printer Daniel Berkeley Updike, while respecting some of his work (at least publicly), echoed Goudy's student Dwiggins' comment that his work lacked 'a certain snap and acidity', and apparently somewhat snobbishly disliked Goudy's aggressive seeking after work and reputation. 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 also wrote sarcastically in private letters to Updike that Goudy had "designed a whole century of very peculiar looking types", and that
caption: University of California Old Style in regular and italic styles, compared to two digitisations: Californian FB and Berkeley Old Style Medium.
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