"All the old fellows stole our best ideas." Source?

Mark Simonson

F.W. Goudy is famous for the quote in the title above, but when/where did he say or write it?

André G. Isaak

Not sure, but I'm reminded of another quote which I cannot source: "Don't you hate it when someone steals your best ideas and publishes them a hundred years before you were born" (or something to that effect)

John Hudson

Great question. The most specific reference I have is to Goudy’s statement being from ‘around 1915’, in Steven Heller’s Borrowed Design. That’s around the time of the production of Goudy Old Style for ATF, so perhaps look in the publicity materials and printing journals regarding that typeface?

Nick Shinn

I know it from how he used it as a couple of lines of text, beneath most of the full character showings in a self-penned monograph The Typophiles Chap Books XIII and XIV, A Half-Century of Type Design and Typography, published in 1945. A facsimile was published in 1978, Goudy’s Type Designs [Complete].

Here is the specimen from that book, for Monotype 38-E, his design for Gimbels department store in 1909.

Craig Eliason

I've seen the same idea credited to Mark Twain (for example in a museum label for an Ed Ruscha painting of the saying), and though it does sound Twainian to me, I didn't find the line in his autobiography that was credited nor in other confirmable sources. 

But the idea predates them both—here's some pages of a book from 1780 by John Hope.


But finding examples of earlier writers who stole the very idea that earlier writers stole our ideas is getting too meta so I'm stopping my search here.

John Savard

For those who are curious, the book by John Hope is: Thoughts in Prose and Verse, Started in His Walks.