Searching for high resolution images of PRINTING by W. Morris printed by Goudy's Village Press

ivan louette

Hi, this week end I began to draw the characters of the first Village from Frederick Goudy. Attached is my first draft of the lower case glyphs (punctuation, numerals and capitals are substituted in this document). I love this font and I would do something with it because personnally I am not a fan of what was done as numeric versions of it. Thus I am in search of anyone or any institution which could provide some pages of the booklet PRINTING, written by William Morris and republished by Goudy's Village Press.

Thanks in advance for any help !

ivan

George Thomas

Does the booklet you are seeking have a complete alphabet showing?

ivan louette

It's completely printed with this font. It's even a little bit more than a booklet ; it's an essay. On the other hand I could draw my awn interpretation of this font, based on low resolution images, but I am sure I could learn much more about Goudy's work and typography if I work on high resolution images. I did it on base of low and high resolution images with Auriol's fonts and I understood the difference.

George Thomas

The book "Catalogue of a Loan Exhibition of Paintings by Old Dutch Masters" found here  http://tinyurl.com/hejy52p was typeset in the original Village font. It has 488pp and is a fine art book so I don't know how much of a complete showing could be found. It is also pretty high-priced.

You might consider contacting either of the two bookstores which have listings at that url and see if they could provide images of a couple of pages showing blocks of text and if it looks useful possibly work out some type of loan arrangement for using the book.

[EDIT] Better idea: search for the title at archive.org. They have the book available for download. Click on the "All Files" link and you will see a .tar file which contains the original scans which are likely hi-res -- although with library overhead scanners, hi-res doesn't mean the same thing it means to designers.

ivan louette

Wow ! Thanks a lot ! I downloaded the images and that's very interesting. I worked with this kind of document from archive.org for my first attempt to a reconstitution of the early Auriol text font (Matthew Carter's Auriol is based on a corps 48 titling Auriol and it's not very adapted for text ; thats the reason I searched smaller optical sizes). This is what I call a low to mid resolution, but this is interesting because it contains a very wide range of characters at multiple occurrences and thus I can verify some details from one to another. In fact that's probably a more recent version of Goudy Village (N°2 perhaps) because Goudy has abandoned the "cuneiform" i dot. Otherwise it's very similar to what I know. Nevertheless it remains difficult to appreciate the transitions between serifs and verticals : sometimes it seems angular but at other times it's more or less curved. And while Goudy extensively used curved transitions, I believe he didn't in Village N°1. Unfortunately only high resolution scans (2400 dpi or more) could provide the right information about that.

PabloImpallari

Ivan, you may also enjoy:
A Half-Century of Type Design and Typography
Vol I https://archive.org/stream/GoudyHalfCentury1946V1/goudy-half-century-1946-v1-0600dpijpg#page/n5/mode/1up
Vol II https://archive.org/stream/GoudyHalfCentury1946V2/goudy-half-century-1946-v2-0600dpijpg#page/n5/mode/1up

George Thomas

I agree that the files from archive.org are not that good.

The book on Goudy's type I have says the book on Dutch paintings was all typeset using Village No. 1. It was produced by Frederick Fairchild Sherman for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Monotype produced Village No. 2 in 14 & 18 point, naming it Goudy Village No. 410, along with a companion italic.

If you have access to an older Monotype specimen book the complete Goudy Village No. 410 and its companion italic are there if that will help you.

John Hudson

@PabloImpallari As I recall, the Goudy Typophile chapbooks don't show the original Village type, only the later Village No.2 and related designs.

George Thomas

Interesting. It seems that Theo Rehak of The Dale Guild was able to acquire the original No. 1 mats from Sherman and cast new type from them. That new type is the source of the specimen shown in McGrew's book on metal types. Therein is shown a complete specimen of "Village, Goudy", which apparently is the Village No. 1.

It does not, however, match the sample you supplied (especially the dot over the /i) nor does it match the digital font from P22, which matches yours.

ivan louette

Thanks Pablo ! It's a nicely printed and so fascinating book. On the other hand I have found my satisfaction with this copy from Archive.org which is the best I have found at the moment. It has high enough resolution to evalutate the serif transitions. Thus I think I will be able to do my work on this base. However that will not be these days because it's hot here and I wouldn't kill my computer ;-)
George, the special /i dot is characteristic of the first release of Village N°1. It causes me a little problem because it's very close to the acute accent which Goudy used for example in Hadriano. Thus I should draw something different enough to adapt it to my french language. The P22 Village N°2 is another font, very different. It doesn't have the dynamics and energy present in the N°1.
Thanks again to everybody ! I will submit my work as soon as possible.

Nina Stössinger

ivan louette said:

Unfortunately only high resolution scans (2400 dpi or more) could provide the right information about that.

I may be pointing out the obvious here but I think ideally your goal should be to find originals, rather than asking strangers for scans and hoping they’re good enough. I don’t know where you’re located but you may also want to check research libraries nearby.

ivan louette

@Nina Stössinger I did it for Auriol fonts ; I have found Auriol Labeur and Française légère specimens at Namur University Library (Belgium), and after that I have got very nice things for free from Musée de l'imprimerie de Lyon, France. But I didn't find any Goudy documents close to me and that's why I asked here. On the other hand I could also order some high resolution images at Getty Research Center Library (I have seen that the scanned books on Archive.org came from there) but I don't have money enough for that. I am not a pro and I don't make money with my fonts :-)

George Thomas

(I have seen that the scanned books on Archive.org came from there)

Not all of them come from Getty and quality varies a lot.

ivan louette

@George Thomas You are right, the quality varies a lot. However the quality of the copy I told above is valuable. In the past I used also the Archive.org copy of Huysmans novel À rebours to try my first reconstitution of the Auriol text font because it was better than the one of the french national library.
@Nina Stössinger  I forgot also the very kind help I have got from Bibliothèque Forney in Paris, which owns the Deberny & Peignot Foundry archives.
Attached my trials with Auriol fonts. I would share them as open source but i didn't decide how to at the moment because they were only exercises for me and thus they don't match the quality of production fonts.

PabloImpallari

A tool that may help you: Glyph Collector
http://typedrawers.com/discussion/977/glyph-collector

The website is now dead, but you can still download it from here:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/glyphcollector/

ivan louette

Wow ! Fascinating ! I always test every glyph drawing on top of many different ones. And afterwards I decide which one work better within the text block.
However I work on Linux (Kubuntu). Perhaps it could work if i could install OS/X in a VirtualBox ?

ivan louette

Pablo, how is it possible to buy OS/X separately from a Mac ?

PabloImpallari

no idea...

Dan Reynolds

Ivan, I think you may have misunderstood Nina’s suggestion. I agree very much with what she is writing. I think that you should not really be searching for libraries or archives that will give you the “best scans.” You should find the closest research library to you that has the book you are looking for in its collection, and you should go there, and look at the book. This is much, much more important (and more helpful) than looking at scans. Scans are two-dimensional interpretations of the actual thing. When you are looking at a scan, you are not looking at the actual object. Looking at a scan is just insufficient.

ivan louette

Thanks Dan, I understand that very well. The general effect of the original document compared to different prints of my drawing is more efficient. I did it for the Auriol Labeur after the more imprecise interpretation of my first attempt with the À rebours Auriol. However I could not do without scans for the first steps at the moment. Perhaps after more experience I will do. Of course my first impression of Goudy Village N°1 could have been biased by the numeric documents I have seen.

ivan louette

Here is a view of a part of my work. The background image is extracted from the archive.org document I mention above. Reading the terms of archive.org I have thought I can use it for this purpose which is essentially education and research. However if anyone better informed tell me showing this is illegal I will remove it of course.
As you will see my work at this stage is very approximative. It's an Inkscape session. In fact the orange text on top of the bitmap picture is typed at 750 pts. If I vectorize the text after typing this size allows me to cut and paste easily every glyph to Fontforge and from Fontforge. I use Inkscape documents as sort of desktops where I do all what i want freely, moving around anything and using all drawing facilities of Inkscape (I am an Inkscape experimented user and I use only the developpers ppa for years with very few problems). Thus the same Inkscape document can serve at drawing the glyphs (I will describe how I place it in another picture ; in fact I don't use Inkscape buit in glyph drawing and encoding), correcting it, evaluating spacing and kerning etc. Even if I must re-install the font and reload my Inkscape document every time this process is so quick in Kubuntu that I do it even for small changes. And working with this kind of virtual desktop allows me to change groups of very diverse things toghether.
I use colors to help me with the impact on top of the document ; sometimes it's blue green or red but orange proved to be very helpful for me personnally.
If I work like that that's because I didn't feel free enough in the preview windows of Font drawing tools. You could think that it's because of my lack or experience with these tools (The first one I used was Type Designer, then successively Fontographer 4.1, Fontlab 4.1, and finally FontForge), but don't forget that drawing fonts is for me before all a very interesting research/game with the goal of understanding visual things, creating some free results and sharing this kind of experience.
Thanks for any advice !
ivan