[7] This venture was modeled on the Arts and Crafts movement ideals of William Morris, whose Golden Type many of Goudy's earliest designs echo.

Although he continued to design for Monotype throughout this period, Goudy withdrew to his workshop in Marlborough, New York, which he dubbed the Village Letter Foundery.

Goudy withdrew partly because he believed that the methods the Monotype firm used to transfer his designs to matrices compromised his work.

Goudy was widely known from 1915 to 1940 mainly because of the success of his typefaces, but also because he gave many lectures and speeches on "the great love he had for letter forms".

An excerpt from a lecture he gave to the annual convention of the International Club of Printing House Craftsmen in New York in 1939 highlights Goudy's practicality and love for letterform.

He worked extensively with his wife Bertha M. Goudy, who particularly collaborated with him on printing projects in which she acted as a compositor of type.

[10] Besides printing, he also worked on numerous hand-lettering projects (especially early in his career) and created a large set of ampersands for an article on the topic.

[11] Goudy's career was influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement and the growth of fine book printing in the United States.

His career was aided by the new pantograph engraving technology, which made it easier to rapidly cut the matrices used as moulds to form metal type.

This was a considerable advance on the traditional method of cutting punches manually at the size of the letter to be printed, which would be stamped into metal to form the matrix.

An additional boon to his career was the new hot metal typesetting technology of the period which created increasing availability and demand for new fonts.

While most of his designs are 'old-style' serif faces, they do still explore a wide range of aspects of the genre, with Deepdene offering a strikingly upright italic, Goudy Modern merging traditional old-style letters with the insistent, horizontal serifs of Didone faces of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and Goudy Old Style being sold with a swash italic for display use.

[29] Walter Tracy described Goudy as "over-fond" of the 'e' with a tilted centre common in fifteenth-century printing which he felt added an "unwanted restlessness" to many of his type designs.

[30][31][32] William T. LaMoy, a curator at Syracuse University, discovered two sets of matrices (metal molds) and associated paperwork in Syracuse University Library's archives for a font known as Sherman, which the publisher Frederic Fairchild Sherman had commissioned from Goudy in 1910.

Indeed, in 1934, Syracuse University had awarded Goudy an honorary degree and, from the journalism school, a typographic medal for excellence.

[35][36] The Cary Graphic Arts Collection, a rare book library and archive at the Rochester Institute of Technology, sponsors the Frederic W. Goudy Award.

It is awarded annually to outstanding practitioners in the field of typography, including previous recipients Hermann Zapf, Ed Benguiat, and Kris Holmes.