Here’s a basic collection printers interested in typography should own History, type design, typography and biography in recommended listing Individual opinions vary; printers may want to add other important works Some time ago this department listed the manuals which, since Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises, circa 1683, had influenced the compositor’s craft. There have been several inquiries [...]

Oz Cooper the fine Chicago artist and type designer, wrote on December 9, 1927, to Richard N. McArthur, then advertising manager of the typefoundry, Barnhart Brothers & Spindler: “Dwiggins should be seduced, and I was thinking that I might write him some day and try to get him interested. Not with any definite proposal, you [...]

On this day in 1937 the New York Club of Printing House Craftsmen met and honored as its guest of the evening the type designer, Frederic W. Goudy. A veteran of the lecture platform after countless appearances all over the United States, the seventy-two year old Goudy was completely at his ease. As the unquestioned [...]

On this summer day in 1903 in a Park Ridge, Illinois barn there was struck the first proof to come from the Village Press under the watchful eyes of its enthusiastic proprietors, Frederic W. Goudy, Bertha Goudy, and Will Ransom Whereas most private presses consider type to be but one of the appurtenances of a [...]

In Berwyn, Illinois on this date in 1897, Frederic W. Goudy, a bookkeeper of sorts, married Bertha Sprinks, whom he had known for about seven years. He thereby acquired a helpmate who exerted a most powerful influence on his subsequent career, as Bertha Goudy became one of its motivating forces. Almost immediately she was helping [...]

“The wildly enthusiastic youngster from Snohomish, Washington,” who helped Fred Goudy start the Village Press and then went on to a long and distinguished career in typography, died this day in 1955. Will Ransom’s interest in printing came about when as a boy he wrote out by hand his favorite stories, decorating them in the [...]

“Dear Sol,” wrote Frederic W. Goudy on May 8, 1947 in what was to be the last of countless letters which had come from the hand of the great type designer, “I would have written you long ago except for an acute attack of neuritis which has kept me in the house since early in [...]

The journal of Will Ransom contained an entry for April 4, 1903: “Saturday. Before I went to work this morning I went up to see Goudy and he made me a proposition to work with him during the summer. I might make enough to live on, but probably not, and then he may go East [...]

The late Frederic W. Goudy would undoubtedly have been most amused if he could have lived until the present to witness the love affair between the dispensers of alcoholic beverages and his types in the pages of the national consumer periodicals. I have compiled a list of 15 distillers and vintners who use Goudy types [...]

Goudy was among the last of a breed of type designers who regarded type as something artistic as well as functional. March 8 will mark a most significant event—the centenary of the birth of the great Frederic W. Goudy. Today, with the printer attempting to keep pace with the astonishing technological changes now taking place [...]

Born on this day in 1865 in Bloomington, Illinois, Frederic W. Goudy lived to be the best known American printer of his times. He achieved international renown as a letterer, a type designer, and a typographer. He was also the operator of a most distinguished private press, the Village Press. Fred Goudy came late to [...]

Residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in the City of Washington, D.C. have from time to time been prevailed upon to say a few words about printing, generally about the time of Benjamin Franklin’s birthday. It is rare indeed that any President of the United States has mentioned the art prior to his elevation to the [...]

“The old pre-Revolutionary mill at Marlborough, in which Frederic W. Goudy famous type designer, has his studio and workshop since 1923, burned to the ground early Thursday morning [January 26, 1939], with everything it contained. The loss is tentatively estimated at $50,000 at least; the money value of many of the things destroyed is beyond [...]

Writing about his profession of type design some 35 years ago, Frederic W. Goudy stated: “Critics, unfamiliar with the classic forms of the past, too frequently mistake details of handling for the essentials of underlying structure, rating highly one design exhibiting some more or less insignificant but flamboyant touch—and rating as mediocre another, of less [...]