What is taste? To me, taste is the ladder by which we mount toward greater perceptions of beauty, by exchanging, progressively, that thing which we recognize instinctively as not altogether good, for something we recognize as less gross, and, in turn, exchanging that thing for something more pleasing, until, finally, we become more and more [...]
It is evening! As daylight fades tired hands reluctantly lay by the work not yet done. The old mill with four grey walls rearing high above mossy rocks; its rough-hewed beams that read a builder’s day of long ago, stands grim and silent in the evening air. From its outswung casements’ grated squares we see, far [...]
First, my originals (drawings) are 7.5ʺ high, from which I cut by hand the master pattern in the same size. From these I engrave sunken patterns one-third that size, which means that everything on the original drawing is on the metal but reduced to one-third. Everything I do is a matter of proportion. When I am ready to engrave the [...]
Editors’s Note: Frederic W. Goudy, the greatest of American type designers died almost twenty-two years ago, on May 11, 1947. That he still has something to say to the typographer of the 60’s is evident from the following excerpt.
One hundred and twelve years ago type design was generally imagined to be a matter that concerned only [...]
“There was a great sum of accomplishment in this practical artist. He was a designer and a philosopher, a writer and a craftsman, a printer who preached of beauty in utility. In his time he won vast acclaim and once it was said that half of the display lines in a national magazine were set in Goudy type. His was a truly great [...]
If we may properly glorify the appellation of Genius, certainly Frederic Goudy was born to enrich typography and the printed word, and thus achieve immortality in our great Art Preservative of All Arts.
From hand lettering and decorative design of his earliest work, in the eighteen-nineties, to type design and printing was a natural transition and development in [...]
In the late ’nineties I began the study of printing and the design of types; by 1925 I had made many drawings for types for which matrices were engraved for me by the late Robert Weibking of Chicago. His work was technically satisfactory but I did not feel that the types cast from them carried fully into print [...]
It is now almost twenty-two years since the death of America’s most widely known and respected type designer, Frederic W. Goudy. The bare chronological facts state that he was born in Bloomington, Illinois, on March 8, 1865, and died in his home at Deepdene, Marlboro-on-Hudson on May 11,1947. Beginning in 1895, and ending in 1944, [...]