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List of typefaces designed by Frederic Goudy


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 a fire which burned down his studio in 1938. 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.


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