Frederic and Bertha Goudy Collection bookplate in William Nicholson's The square book of animals. 1910. Frederic and Bertha Goudy Collection, Rare Book and Special Collections Division. View the Library of Congress catalog record for this title.

The Frederic and Bertha Goudy Collection in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division was purchased from Goudy himself in 1944 and consists largely of material that escaped a disastrous workshop fire in 1939. The collection includes the Goudys' personal library on typography and numerous examples of fine printing (approximately 1890-1944), particularly from private American Presses.

Materials in the Frederic and Bertha Goudy Collection are representative of the collectors' long and illustrious careers as printers and proprietors of one of the longest lived of American private presses. The Village Press, begun by the Goudys and Will Ransom in a barn behind the Goudy's home in the summer of 1903, won many awards during its existence. The collection includes books, broadsides, and pamphlets produced at the press. Two of the most interesting items are the press's first book, William Morris's essay Printing. Not in the Goudy Collection itself, but elsewhere in the Rare Book Collection, is the rarest of its imprints, Filson Young's The Lover's Hours, of which only three copies are known to have survived a fire which devastated the press in 1908.

The output of the Village Press is documented by over 150 items ranging from dummies and broadsides to finished books. The Rare Book Division's copy of Melbert B. Carry's A Bibliography of the Village Press (New York: Press of the Woolly Whale, 1938) has been annotated to indicate collection holdings. In addition, the collection contains photographs of Frederic and Bertha Goudy and drawings, rubbings, proofs, and posters illustrative of his commercial design work on The Inland Printer and for the Curtis Publishing Company, the Peerless Motor Car Company, and other clients.

Frederic Goudy was also a student of paleography and printing history and he wrote several treatises on those subjects. The best known is his study, The Alphabet, first published in 1918. Included in the collection is Goudy's personal copy of the work along with the printer's proof of one of the pages with his manuscript annotations.

The Goudy Collection is also very rich in the productions of many other notable American and European presses. Since Frederic Goudy was viewed as the grand old man of American typography and type design, many of the books in his library carry personal inscriptions from their printers, illustrators, and designers. Among them are the famous Fra Luca da Pacioli designed by Goudy's close friend and admirer Bruce Rogers, and the Grabhorn Press's monumental edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass inscribed to Goudy and autographed by all members of the press.

In 1975 a group of manuscripts was added to the original purchase, bringing the total number of manuscript items in the collection to 3,169. The acquisition includes correspondence largely from the years 1935 to 1945, papers relating to Goudy's A Half-Century of Type Design and Typography, 1985-1945 (1946), and notes and galley proofs for an unpublished book by Paul Bennett entitled "Goudy: The Man and His Work." Howard Coggeshall, Richard Ellis, and Mitchell Kennerley are among the correspondents. Most of the 1,791 volumes and 708 pamphlets in the Goudy Collections are represented in the Library of Congress online catalog. Also available is a register describing non-book materials and an inventory of the 1944 purchase.

In addition to the holdings in the Frederic and Bertha Goudy Collection by and about the Goudys and their work, there is a significant amount of material produced by the Village Press and examples of Frederic Goudy's type design in the Pforzheimer Bruce Rogers Collection and the Shapiro Bruce Rogers Collection at the Library of Congress.