Typography Tuesday
Fred Goudy’s Kaatskill
The great American type designer and printer Frederic W. Goudy designed over 100 typefaces in his long career, including Copperplate Gothic, Goudy Old Style, Deepdene, Kennerley, and a number of noted proprietary faces, such as University of California Old Style. Goudy designed his Kaatskill typeface in 1929 specifically for an edition of Rip Van Winkle. As designer, typographer, and printer Dwight Agner tells the story:
According to Charles Pont, Goudy invited George Macy of the Limited Editions Club [LEC] to see a new type design he was working on and discuss an idea for its use. The book Goudy had in mind was Rip Van Winkle, and he wanted it to be set by his wife Bertha . . . and printed by the recently established Walpole Printing Office of Peter Beilenson and Ned Thompson. . . . When the the book was published, Goudy made much of the fact that the typeface was produced in the area where the story took place. Macy noted that since Kaatskill “owes nothing in its design to any existing face, the type is therefore as truly an American type as anything as hide-bound by tradition as type can be.”
Goudy never designed an accompanying italic, but recommended instead that his Deepdene Italic be used with Kaatskill. Once the LEC volume was done, he offered various sizes of Kaatskill for sale, but got few takers, except for the Walpole Printing Office. The Goudys did use Kaatskill again in 1930 for a small book for the Carteret Book Club, Jemima Condict, Her Book!, which was printed by Fred and Bertha Goudy at their Village Press, combining Kaatskill with Deepdene. The book was selected for the AIGA Fifty Books of the Year exhibit, but that still didn’t seem to popularize Kaatskill for wider use. Dwight Agner writes again:
After being ignored for half a century and unavailable for most of that time, Kaatskill has been given a new lease on life. . . . In the late 1980s Lanston Type Company Ltd, of Vancouver, British Columbia, issued a series of digital versions . . . . Jim Rimmer redrew the Kaatskill, reproducing the roman very faithfully and adding an italic. . . . It is to be hoped that such access to Kaatskill and other Goudy fonts will spur a rebirth of interest in the work of the dean of American type designers.
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