Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

typography --- type design

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Museology --- Graphic arts --- bookworks --- typography

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

typefaces [type forms] --- typography --- lay-out (kunst)

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Book history --- Graphic arts --- typefaces [type forms] --- typography

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Frederic Goudy was the outstanding American designer of typefaces, and one of the leading type makers in history. He had a huge influence in America during his lifetime. A famous figure, he was a widely read commentator on design and esthetics, a popular speaker eagerly sought after by newspapers and radio for his opinions, and even the subject of a Hollywood movie.

D.J.R. Bruckner's biography is the first critical study of this extraordinary man, who spent the first half of his life drifting in the commercial margins of the booming American Midwest of the Gilded Age; drew his first alphabet at 30; counted himself a professional type designer only at 46; and went on to create a hundred typefaces - this while running the Village Press, one of the great private presses of this century. Bruckner brings to life the lost world of American printing and design as it existed during Goudy's long career, from his early years in Chicago in the cultural watershed of the 1890's, when the distinction between designer, compositor, and printer hardly existed, to his acquisition, at 60, of his own matrix-cutting machine that enabled him to engrave, and cast, on his own, some of his greatest faces.

Bruckner offers a searching assessment of Goudy's achievement, analyzing his esthetics and practices, explaining the technical aspects of his work, and exploring the characteristics of the typefaces in detail. The illustrations, many of which are printed in two collors, give numerous examples of how Goudy composed his faces, from drawings to printed samples, as well as many examples of his page designs and photographs of Goudy and his circle. Many of Goudy's typefaces have survived and flourished in this age of computer typesetting, fueling a revival of interest in Goudy's work among graphic designers, and for them, Bruckner has appended a critical list of Goudy faces with a showing of each one.

The central struggle of Goudy's life, what Bruckner calls "his long battle for order and clarity in the printed word," is one whose outcome is still in doubt, but the terrain on which it is now fought has shifted elsewhere. As Bruckner points out, so thoroughgoing has been the influence of European modernism, and particularly the Bauhaus, on American design since World War II that the very idea that the major force in type design in the first half of this century was an American, indeed, "a thoroughly democratic man, typical of the generation of the Middle West after the Civil War," will be a revelation even to knowledgeable readers.

Graphic arts --- graphic design --- typefaces [type forms] --- typography --- graphic arts --- Goudy, Frederic William