FREDERIC W. GOUDY TYPES AND TYPE DESIGN

The Syracuse University School of Journalism awarded its first medal of honor to F. W. G. in 1936, "for distinctive achievement in typographic design." His address then, reflecting the typographic philosophy and practice of two-score years, is reprinted as published by the University in 1936.

It would be mere affectation on my part were I to pretend not to be touched by the signal honor you extend to me this evening, and I would be ungrateful indeed if I neglected to voice my very great appreciation of your kindness. I wish that I might express that appreciation in words that would leave no shadow of doubt in your minds as to the depth and sincerity of my feeling.

I am not conscious of any outstanding reasons for the kind words spoken here tonight of my work. At the same time I am under no illusions as to the ultimate value of the work I have attempted to do, although it is, after all, merely the every-day work of an earnest craftsman who endeavors to perform each task well and the next one, if possible, even better; and withal no thought or expectation of acclaim.

My craft is a simple one. For nearly two score years it has been my constant aim and endeavor to create a greater and more general esteem for printing and type design; to give to printers and readers of print more legible and more beautiful types than those in current use. This has involved some little sacrifice; the missionary seldom acquires much more than the satisfaction of work well done, and yet, on the whole, I haven't done badly, since my work has brought me a wealth of friendship beyond measure.

And now to the subject which has been assigned to me for this occasion—something about types of the past, type revivals, and a bit about type design, as I see it. I trust you will not find that my brief postprandial attempt bears out Gay's lines too literally:

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 it 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 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 the 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 Nouveau, 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 re-presentation 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. I cannot be accused of intolerance, however. 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? Why are these outlandish characters selected? For four hundred years the Roman types of the early Italian printers have furnished models to suit all tastes and serve every purpose.

For several years past advertisers and even our magazine and book printers have somewhat strayed from a definite standard of dignity and beauty in the quest for novelty. Foreign types, imported to add a touch of novelty to our advertising (types which, no doubt, are good enough for the conditions in the bailiwicks that gave them birth), too frequently impart to print a fantastic or a too fanciful effect when used under the entirely different conditions found here. These types are likely to impart to our printing an air of incongruity displeasing to the trained taste. En passant, I am reminded of a suggestion offered by Reinhardt, the scenic designer: "Do not try to inspire from foreign ideas. Be interested in them, of course, and they will help to fertilize your own."

Third: Style is a subtle quality that comes from an intelligent use of a good tradition renewed and advanced into our own times; it is a quality inseparable from the tools and materials employed, and is not to be acquired simply by taking thought or by a determination to attain it. Style is the living expression controlling both the form and the vital structure of the vehicle which presents thought in tangible form—an intimate and inseparable something in the work of a craftsman wholly unconscious of style or of any definite aim towards beauty for itself.

Fourth: Distinction is more difficult to secure, yet, when a type presents an unassuming simplicity; when it expresses thought in every detail; when it is clear, elegant, strong; nothing in it that is loose and vague, no finesse of design, but showing clearly in every line the spirit the designer has put into the body of his work, that type can hardly fail of real distinction. To meet the demands of utility and to preserve also an esthetic standard is the problem the type designer must attempt to solve. Obviously a large order for a mere amateur (or even for a professional designer).

As to legibility, I shall not here comment. Everyone knows (or thinks he knows) just what constitutes it; I fear I do not, or I would never permit myself consciously to make a type that was not the quintessence of legibility.

I am frequently asked how I design a type face. There are so many things that lead up to one that it is difficult to give a specific reply. I once told a student that "I think of a letter and then mark around the thought." That is hardly real designing. It may be easy to think of one letter, but to think also of its twenty-five relations which with it form the alphabet and so to mark around them that they will combine in complete harmony and rhythm with each other and with all—that is the difficult thing, the successful doing of which constitutes design. What is the inspiration for a new face? That also is difficult to answer. In the first place, it is hardly possible to create an absolutely new type or one that will not be reminiscent of the past.

It is quite within the province of the letter artist to take his inspiration for a new face from any source—the lapidary inscriptions of the first centuries of the Imperial age of Rome; a mediaeval brass that marks the last resting place of a departed ruler; a manuscript letter by some unsung scribe of the Renaissance, or an early type of the golden age of typography. Or maybe he may even strive to put into tangible form on his drawing board some vision from out of nowhere—the realization of a chance thought straying through an idle reverie which he will whip into a satisfactory medium of intellectual exchange. On the other hand, he may prefer to attempt the re-creation of new letter from the bones of a more ancient form, endeavoring to secure in it a new expression of life and vigor, with new graces suited to our times and our use.

If the designer chooses to disregard old types and go direct to their source, the manuscript hands of the scribes, well, why not? By revising their forms, refining them, eliminating their whimsicalities and vagaries and formalizing their irregularities, he may meet, too, the mechanical requirements and technical limitations of type founding. This, probably, is the more legitimate method, since in this way he will inspire from the real beginnings of our lower case forms. For myself I am inclined to agree with a writer who maintains that "it is doubtful whether the type designer benefits from a close study of hand lettering," meaning of course the manuscript hands of the past. Interesting as old manuscripts are, I find them of little practical use as offering models for new types. Speaking for myself only I find it more feasible to get my inspirations from a study of the earlier types that appeal to me. They frequently offer opportunity for new expression. With no attempt to copy their particular forms, or to make changes merely in weight or serif, I endeavor rather to tear from them the qualities and the spirit that makes them good, for incorporation in my own letter shapes.

I realize, of course, that the letters I may select as my models were, without doubt, inspired by some manuscript hand that personally I may find offers 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 centuries of the Christian era; I endeavor in my work to avoid any bizarre quality or exhibition of conscious preciosity. (It has been said that in this latter aim I sometimes fail.)

Once in a while a type face by some other designer seems to present an interesting movement or quality that I like. I take early opportunity to make it mine, frankly and openly, in the same way that a writer might use exactly the same words as another, but by a new arrangement of them present a new thought, a new idea, or a new subtlety of expression. Or as two painters using identical tools and colors, each might produce a masterpiece, yet the work of one probably would not resemble that of the other in any detail. By copying carefully a few characters of the type that appeals to me drawn by another hand, I try to secure in my own drawings some certain movement or rhythm his may present. I soon discard my model and proceed from there, as it were, under my own steam, and sometimes produce a face which my good friend Kent Currie says "has an acid, typy quality" and (in substance) that it is regular and well-ordered, that it has interest, color, movement, and sometimes quaintness.

Several years ago I accepted a commission to make a type for a magazine of large circulation. At that time it was my practice to make drawings from which matrices were engraved for me by the late Robert Wiebking of Chicago. His death occurred just about the time I was to send him my originals for translation into "mats" from which to cast the type. In order to carry out my arrangement with the magazine, and finding difficulty in procuring the work elsewhere, I determined to try doing also the mechanical work of matrix engraving myself. Like Moxon, I "learnt it of my own genuine inclination," with no previous instruction in the craft. With no engraving or casting plant ready to my hand I began the getting together of the various paraphernalia of a type foundry. Procuring machines for a type foundry was comparatively simple; the operation of them, making patterns for use in the engraving machines, the lining and fitting of the cast types, etc., all after I had reached my sixtieth birthday, was something else. Looking back, I am amazed at my temerity. It was literally a case of rushing in where angels might well fear to tread. Yet, since that time I have engraved many hundreds of matrices.

And now, one other personal note. It is my credo. For nearly two score years I have made use and beauty the great desiderata. I have never permitted myself intentionally to utilize the message I was attempting to present, to serve as a mere framework or scaffolding upon which to exploit my own skill, nor ever to allow my craft to became an end in itself instead of a means only to a desirable and useful end.

COMPOSED IN DEEPDENE TYPES