Art: Type Couple

Thirty years ago an itinerant bookkeeperfrom Shelbyville, Ill. settled down with his wife, the former Bertha M. Sprinks, and a font of type of his own designing to open a printing shop in Park Ridge, Ill. Last week printers, publishers, museum curators, editors, book collectors and art critics went to the New York Museum of Science & Industry in the Daily News Building to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of that event, to honor the onetime bookkeeper as the greatest type designer in the U. S.

Frederic William Goudy’s interest in the shape and style of letters started as a child when he decorated his Sunday School room with texts redrawn from specimen letters in an old type book and cut out of fancy wallpaper. As bookkeeper, clerk, unsuccessful publisher, advertising artist, he never lost interest in letters. From Gutenberg to Bruce Rogers, other famed printers and designers have built great reputations on the strength of two or three original alphabets. In the centre of the Goudy exhibition last week a streamer list hung from a column. It started with Camelot, 1896, ended with Goudy Boldface, 1932. Above was a short announcement: “This chronological list of 87 types drawn since 1896 is fairly complete.”

A legend that all bookmen love is that of the bright-eyed New York University girl who listened to Fred Goudy lecture on lettering and then askecl: “Professor, just how do you design type?” Solemn as a preacher, Fred Goudy answered:

“You think of a letter, miss, and then you mark around it.”

At other times Typographer Goudy has been far more specific. His two major works, The Alphabet and Elements of Lettering, are required reading for all apprentice printers, advertising agents, architects’ draughtsmen. He has no idea how long it may take him to design a new alphabet. One of his most successful fonts, Hadriano, started with a rubbing taken from an inscription in the Louvre when guards were not looking, finished by 3 a. m. the next morning.

At the exhibit there were plenty of other mementoes of Goudy’s career. In cases around the wall were the original drawings, matrices and specimen sheets of most of the 87 type faces. Most of the sheets were hand set and printed by Bertha Goudy who can match her husband’s reputation as a type designer with her own as the world’s ablest woman printer. In Marlborough, N. Y., despite exhausting and remunerative* work for publishers, advertising agencies and type founders, the Goudys still do with their own hands all the work of the original Village Press. Bertha Goudy has a collection of 29 lively tropical birds. Chief of the aviary is a parrot whose printable vocabulary is limited to “Tombo—precious boy!”

Highlight of last week’s exhibition was a broadside of the Oath of Hippocrates, set by Bertha Goudy in Fred Goudy’s Forum type. This was saluted by the greatest U. S. printer, Bruce Rogers, as “the finest piece of printing I ever saw.”

*Camelot, Fred Goudy’s first font, he sold to a Boston firm for $10. Type founders who wish to buy a new Goudy alphabet today must pay $1,000 to $5,000 and in addition collect royalties for Goudy for its use outside the foundry-