Frederic W. Goudy collection

Frederic W. Goudy (1865-1947) was an accomplished American printer and type designer credited with creating over 120 unique typefaces. Born on March 8, 1865, in Bloomington, Illinois, he passed away on May 11, 1947, in Marlborough[1], New York. His wife, Bertha M. Goudy (1869-1935), was also a talented designer and worked closely with him. Both of them were self-taught.

While working as a bookkeeper in Chicago, Goudy began his exploration of layout and printing. Chicago was “swept up in planning the Columbian Exposition of 1893, and design of everything from buildings to clothes was the topic of the day”[2]. William Morris’s work at the Kelmscott Press had a particular influence on Goudy and he immersed himself in the Arts and Crafts movement. During this period, he met Bertha Matilda Sprinks, and the two married on June 2, 1897, at the Sprinks home in Berwyn[3].

Frederic, Bertha, and Will Ransom established the Village Press in Park Ridge, Illinois in 1903. The press was founded on the principles of the Arts and Crafts movement and featured a typeface designed by Goudy titled Village. The Goudys relocated their operations to Hingham, Massachusetts, and then New York City. Unfortunately, in January 1908, a fire “wiped out the Parker Building at Fourth Avenue and 19th Street in New York City”[4], the location of Goudy’s studio, destroying all of the equipment and designs. The Goudys revived the press in 1912 shortly before they moved to 40 Deepdene Street in Forest Hills, Queens, New York. Starting in 1911, Frederic Goudy enlisted the skills of Robert Weibking (1870-1927) to engrave his designs onto matrices to cast metal type. However, Goudy, as a curious experimenter, decided to learn the craft himself.

In 1923, Frederic and Bertha moved their residence and press to Marlborough, New York, where they acquired a property that included an old flour mill. His vision was to expand the workshop and establish the Village Press Letter Foundry, allowing him to design type, print books, and cast type. They named the compound “Deepdene” after their former street in Forest Hills. At Deepdene, he constructed a matrix-engraving machine and assembled all the necessary tools to oversee the entire process of creating his typefaces, from design to the final product. “By making the patterns, cutting the matrices, and casting the type himself, Frederic Goudy could then retain complete artistic control over a typeface”[5]. The favorable working conditions at Deepdene significantly contributed to his productivity, and between 1925 and 1938, he crafted around fifty distinct typefaces.

From 1920 to 1940, Goudy assumed the role of art director at the Lanston Monotype Machine Company. On January 26, 1939, the mill at Deepdene burned down. The entirety of his type of production equipment—patterns, matrices, engravers, and casting machines—was lost. The fire was widely publicized at the time as Goudy was the most famous type designer in America. However, the terrible loss did not deter Goudy. He continued to work productively through the rest of his life, creating at least eight additional typeface designs.

As an extension of his work as a printer, typographer, and type designer, he was also a prolific lecturer and the author of 59 texts, including The Alphabet (1918), Elements of Lettering (1922), Typologia (1940), and his autobiographical account A Half-Century of Type Design and Typography, 1895-1945 (1946). He died at Deepdene on May 11, 1947. His ashes are interred with Bertha’s at Old Town Cemetery in Newburgh, New York.

Howard Wheeler Coggeshall (1878-1949) began his printing career at a newspaper in Otego, New York. After working as a reporter in Oneonta, New York, and Pittsfield, Massachusetts, he moved to Whitesboro, New York, in 1905 and opened a print shop. He later settled in Utica, New York, and operated his printing company in the Savage Arms Building. Coggeshall was a close friend of Frederic W. Goudy and often printed projects for Goudy with type cast at Goudy’s Village Letter Foundery. As a result, Coggeshall was in possession of eleven different Goudy fonts in January 1939 when Goudy’s foundry burned. The fonts, dating between 1921 and 1937, became known as the “lost” Goudy types, some of the last of Village Letter Foundery-cast types in large quantities.

1. Alternative forms to the location name Marlborough include Marlboro, Marlboro-on-Hudson, and Marlborough-on-Hudson. All of these forms are used seemingly interchangeably on documents throughout the collection. Marlboro is a hamlet (and census-designated place) in Ulster County, New York, and was the name used by its first European settlers starting in 1697. The hamlet of Marlboro is located in the southeastern part of the town of Marlborough, which was formed in 1788 and named after the Duke of Marlborough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marlborough,_New_York

2. Bruckner, D. J. R. and Frederic W. Goudy. Frederic Goudy, Masters of American Design. New York: Abrams, 1990, p 42.

3. Coggeshall, Howard. “Courtship and marriage” in Fred Goudy, 1948-1949, p 4.

4. Goudy, Frederic W. and George L. McKay. A Half-Century of Type Design and Typography, 1895-1945. Vol. XIII-XIV. New York: The Typophiles, 1946, p 15.

5. Thomen, Anne, “Frederic W. Goudy Correspondence 1935-1946” (Master Thesis, Rochester Institute of Technology. 1977), p 2.