The Friendly Goudys + Oliver Goldsmith 1920’s, 30’s. These two books are titled “The Friendly Goudys, The Story of a Visit to Deepdene” and “The Deserted Village, A Poem”. “The Friendly Goudys” was written by Sidney S. Wheeler and published in Boston by the Typographical Laboratory in MCMXXXII [1932], and it’s about the life of Frederic Goudy, an American printer, artist, and type designer who was famous worldwide for his special types and presses. Goudy ((1865 - 1947) began creating typefaces when he was 40 - it was a new life for him - and he cut 113 fonts of type, which were more usable than most type faces created by the great inventors of type and books, from Gutenberg to Garamond; some of Goudy’s famous types included Copperplate Gothic, Goudy Old Style, and Kennerley. He lived in Marlborough-on-the-Hudson, at his estate called “Deepdene”, in Ulster County, about 70 miles north of New York City. (The area is also spelled “Marlboro”) Goudy was also an author and a bibliophile as well In 1895 he founded his printing shop, Booklet Press (later renamed Camelot Press). In 1903, Goudy and Will Ransom founded the Village Press in Park Ridge, Illinois. In 1908 however, the Village Press burned to the ground, destroying all of his equipment and designs. In 1911, Goudy produced his first type hit, Kennerley Old Style, for an H. G. Wells anthology, and it came out of dissatisfaction with the Caslon typefaces then in use in fine art printing; he felt these had an uneven color on the page due to the thickness of the capital letters being much greater than that of the lower case. All of Goudy's types were drawn freehand, without the use of compass, straightedge or French curve, and his career was influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement and the ideals of William Morris. He was one of the first type designers to become established without working for a foundry, then the American Type Founders Company became interested in him after his release of Kennerley; ATF commissioned Goudy to create a typeface, which became Goudy Old Style, Goudy also designed type for the ATF that came to be known as Camelot, De Vinne, Roman and Pabst, and he created ads for Marshall Field and Hart Schaffner & Marx, among others. In this book, Goudy described the process he used to create a typeface, starting from a pencil sketch that he cut onto cardboard all the way to becoming a metal pattern that was cut onto brass by use of a pantograph machine and ready for type, and this book is set in Kennerley type. The Cary Graphic Arts Collection, a rare book library and archive at the Rochester Institute of Technology, sponsors the Frederic W. Goudy Award, which goes annually to outstanding people in the field of typography. The Cary Collection also houses the Albion iron hand press No. 6551 - or the “Kelmscott / Goudy Press," so named because it was first owned by William Morris and later by Goudy. The book is 1/4 bound, with gray-brown cloth, a gilt title on the front cover, blank endpapers, a half-title, a tipped-in black-&-white photo of Deepdene for a frontispiece, a tissue guard, then the title page, a dedication page, two pages about Kennerley with two more tipped-in photos, the string binding, as called for, a tipped-in photo of Goudy and his dog, nine pages of text, and a leaf near the end says the book was composed in Goudy Kennerley by the Murray Printing Company of Cambridge, Mass. and printed on Japan paper called “Zerkall Deckle Edged Leipsic - 1504” and bound by the Union Bookbinding Company of Boston. The Goudys book measures 10 3/4 x 7 3/4 in. wide and is in very good condition. The binding is tight and the pages, text, and photos are very clean, with light browning on the spine and just faint shadows on the bottom of the front cover and at the top of the back cover, probably from being placed next to a smaller book on the shelf, and this is a great book for bibliophiles and people who want to know more about famous presses and printers in the tradition of William Morris. Oliver Goldsmith’s book is titled “The Deserted Village, A Poem”, it’s part of the English Replicas published in New York by Payson & Clarke in 1927, and it’s a facsimile of the 1770 edition made from the British Museum copy of the first edition. The book is a pastoral elegy written by Oliver Goldsmith and first published in 1770. It’s considered one of his major poems, an attack on the lords and nobles who were taking over the countryside from villagers and farmers who were losing their way of life to the upper class - the lords and nobles were taking over the countryside and turning it into vast landed estates, and this was upending villagers whose way of life depended on farming - their way of life was being destroyed by greedy landlords, and by economic and political change they could not stop. Goldsmith worked on “The Deserted Village" for about two years before its publication, but had been collecting materials during country visits for some years before that. It was his most researched, most careful, and most openly didactic or informative poem, It was finally published in May, 1770, as a quarto pamphlet and probably one of the great English poems of the 18th century. The book is 1/4 bound, with blue-green lettering on the spine, pale blue-green boards with a blue-green decoration and the title and author’s name in blue-green letters inside the decoration, blank endpapers, some uncut pages before the half-title, then the vignette title page, three pages by Oliver Goldsmith dedicated to Sir Joshua Reynolds, and twenty-three pages of the poem. The Goldsmith book measures 10 1/4 x 7 3/4 in. wide and is in good condition. The binding is tight and the pages and text are very clean, with light rubbing on the letters and brown spots on the spine, light soiling on the edges of the boards, and specks of rubbing at the tips. The first edition from 1770 goes for up to $2500 on the rare book website we use, so the facsimile copy is much more affordable. #242 #1684