Selected Special Collections

Frederic W. Goudy Collection

Personal library, papers, and publications of type designer Frederic Goudy.

[Frederic] Goudy working on drawings for his University of California Old Style design. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

American type designer Frederic W. Goudy (1865-1947) began experimenting with layout and printing while working as a bookkeeper in Chicago in the 1890s. He created a total of 124 type designs, executing many from drawing to casting, and operated the Village Press with his wife Bertha from 1903 to 1939. The Goudy Collection in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division was purchased from Goudy himself in 1944 and consists largely of material that escaped a disastrous workshop fire in 1939. The collection includes Goudy's personal library on typography and numerous examples of fine printing (approximately 1890-1944), particularly from private American Presses. The output of the Village Press is documented by over 150 items ranging from dummies and broadsides to finished books. The Division copy of Melbert B. Carry's A Bibliography of the Village Press (New York: Press of the Woolly Whale, 1938. 205 p. Z232.G68C3) has been annotated to indicate collection holdings. In addition, the collection contains photographs of Goudy and his wife and drawings, rubbings, proofs, and posters illustrative of his commercial design work on The Inland Printer and for the Curtis Publishing Company, the Peerless Motor Car Company, and other clients. In 1975 a group of manuscripts was added to the original purchase, bringing the total number of manuscript items in the collection to 3,169. The acquisition includes correspondence largely from the years 1935 to 1945, papers relating to Goudy's A Half-Century of Type Design and Typography, 1985-1945 (1946), and notes and galley proofs for an unpublished book by Paul Bennett entitled "Goudy: The Man and His Work." Howard Coggeshall, Richard Ellis, and Mitchell Kennerley are among the correspondents. Many of the 1,791 volumes and 708 pamphlets in the Goudy Collections are represented in author/title and shelf-list files. Also available is a register describing non-book materials and an inventory of the 1944 purchase.  

Digitized Materials Available from the Frederic W. Goudy Collection

	The Square Book of Animals / By William Nicholson; Rhymes By Arthur Waugh. New York: R. H. Russell, 1900, c1899. Page Turner - PDF (9.58MB) Bibliographic Information
	Denslow's Mother Goose: Being the Old Familiar Rhymes and Jingles of Mother Goose / Edited and Illustrated by W.W. Denslow. New York: McClure, Phillips, 1901. Page Turner -PDF (34.03KB) Bibliographic Information

Also See Goudy's works in: Digitized Children's Literature