Job:03171 Title:Typography Referenced (Rockport)
Page: 90
068-121 03171.indd 90 9/22/11 4:55 PM
Typography, Referenced
Text
Job:03171 Title:Typography Referenced (Rockport)
Page: 90
Frederic Goudy
American, –
Typefaces: Camelot (1896), DeVinne (1898),
Copperplate Gothic (1901), Pabst (1902),
Powell (1903), Kennerley (1911), Forum (1912),
Goudy, Goudy Old Style (1915), National Oldstyle (1916),
Hadriano (1918), Garamont (1921), Cushing Antique,
Deepdene (1927), Kaatskill, Remington Typewriter (1929),
Mediaeval, Truesdell (1930),
Village (1932), Bertham (1936), Friar (1937),
Berkeley Oldstyle, Californian (1938), Bulmer (1939)
Frederic Goudy was one of the most pro-
lifi c U.S. type designers of the twentieth
century (). By his own account, he
designed faces (though he counted
each italic as a separate typeface).
Goudy, born in Bloomington, Illi-
nois, in , was interested in type at an
early age. He held several jobs in various
cities before founding a printing busi-
ness, the Booklet Press, in Chicago in
. Renamed the Camelot Press, he
printed the journal American Cap-Book
before selling his interest a year later. In
his next successful endeavor, he sold a set
of capitals of his own design to the Bruce
Type Foundry in Boston, which encour-
aged him to become a freelance lettering
artist. He also taught lettering and design
at the Frank Holme School of Illustration.
In , Goudy started The Village Press
in partnership with Will Ransom in Park
Ridge, Illinois.
Goudy’s breakthrough with type
design came in when he designed
Kennerley Old Style for the publisher
Mitchell Kennerley. He set up the Village
Letter Foundry to cast and sell Kenner-
ley and a titling font, Forum. These two
typefaces established his reputation
and became particularly popular in the
United Kingdom. Subsequently, Ameri-
can Type Founders commissioned Goudy
to design a typeface, resulting in Goudy
Old Style, regarded by many critics as
one of his fi nest designs. In , with
forty types to his name, Goudy became
Lanston Monotype’s appointed art
adviser; in this capacity, he worked on
the revival Garamont.
As one of his fi nal infl uences on the
type-design world, Goudy wrote about
type and the origins of his work in his
book A Half Century of Type Design and
Typography: 1895–1945, completed when
he was nearly eighty years old.
Mediaeval,
A Variations
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