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 the letter cutter. J. Johnson, author of Typographia (published in 1824), wrote of a type face that the printer needed only to “observe that its shape be perfectly true, and that its lines or ranges with accuracy, and that by noting certain mathematical rules the letter cutter may produce roman characters of such harmony, grace and symmetry as will please the eye in reading; and by having their fine strokes and swells blended together in due proportion, will excite admiration.” He says further that “if the letter stands even and in line, which is the chief good quality in letter, it makes the face thereof, sometimes to pass, though otherwise ill-shaped.”

Type design as a profession evidently did not exist in 1824. And even today many printers are uninformed as to the various steps that must be taken between the inception of a type face in the designer’s mind and its eventual appearance on the printed page.

Today the designing of a type is practiced by few artists as a separate craft; it is an humble art at best—and a minor one. Yet every user of types demands in them certain artistic qualities, i.e., invention, novelty, style, beauty, distinction (a few insist on legibility); most of those users forget or do not realize that these are qualities an artist only may secure, and even the artist cannot always insure that his design will present all of them.

First invention requires that we soar above mere caprices of fashion or the demands of passing fancy. Our letter forms have become fixed in their essentials by long use and tradition, yet a study of all that has gone before will enable the designer seeking new expressions to infuse new life and character into traditional shapes and inspire him to create new designs based on broad impressions stored in the granary of his mind.

Second: Novelty gives us some new impression suited to and brought about by new conditions of life and environment—by the changes that time has wrought. By novelty I do not mean, however, the imitation novelty so frequently met with and presented as something new; too often it means simply some older thing newly described. Achieving the fantastic quality reminiscent of the “slimy trail” of Art Noveau, which you older ones will recall as rampant in the 1890’s, produces freaks of fashion in an attempt to be novel, but may not, necessarily, always secure the novelty desired. Traditions of the past need not be disregarded nor overlooked in order to meet the prejudices of the present.

Just now a seemingly insatiable demand for novelty is giving us a senseless and ridiculous riot of “beautiful atrocities.” The inundation of freak types is largely due to a revival of some former products of ignorance bringing in their train new designs even more bizarre in the attempt to secure “novelty”—a detestable word used frequently, I fear, like charity, to cover a multitude of sins. It has no place in artistic considerations, as a thing that really is good should be good for all time. Sporadic outbreaks in the name of novelty inevitably occur from time to time and fortunately have usually only their little day in the sun before vanishing forever into the limbo of the forgotten.

I do not wish to imply that novelty itself is undesirable—by no means; striving for newness keeps things fresh and alive. It is the representation of the extraordinarily ugly and bizarre types of the middle of the last century with no exceptional artistic warrant for their revival, in an attempt to do something different, that I deprecate. Newness for its own sake only may not always be worth while.

I find it difficult to speak dispassionately of some of the types advertisers are using nowadays, because I am too deeply steeped in the traditions of the past to accept them. The best art of the designer, the highest skill of the printer, and the clear lucid argument of the advertisement writer must be requisitioned. Yet in much of the typography of today many of the new types display a marked avoidance of everything that is plain, simple and legible. Why are simplicity and easy readability no longer esteemed as desirable qualities in print? . . .

I realize, of course, that the letters I may select as my models were, without doubt, inspired by some manuscript that personally I may find offers very little for use in my own work. With complete independence of calligraphy I attempt, instead, to secure the negative quality of unpretentiousness; I strive for the pure contour and monumental character of the classic lapidary forms of the first century of the Christian era; I endeavor in my work to avoid any bizarre quality or exhibition of conscious preciosity.

Goudy as the pressman of the famous Village Press, pulling an impression on the Albion press originally owned by William Morris of the Kelmscott Press.