The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Free font
Sorts Mill Goudy
A free alternative to Coelacanth Display.
About Sorts Mill Goudy
Sorts Mill Goudy is Barry Schwartz's open revival of Frederic Goudy's Goudy Old Style (1915), released through The League of Moveable Type in 2010. It carries the warm, calligraphic old-style character of the original — gently bracketed serifs, a humanist axis, and the distinctive upturned ear on the lowercase g — rebuilt as a full working text family.
Unusually for a free serif, it ships with true italics, small caps, and old-style figures, so it can set proper book and editorial pages rather than just approximate them. It is comfortable at long reading lengths and dignified in subheads, filling the role you might otherwise reach for Goudy or a classic old-style serif to play. Open Font License, self-hosted here.
- Designer
- Barry Schwartz
- Released
- 2010
- Available at
- The League of Moveable Type →
Sorts Mill Goudy is also a free alternative to…
- Coelacanth Display → A revival of Goudy Old Style, the American serif that, like Centaur, reinterprets the Venetian tradition with soft, hand-drawn curves and a slanted-looking e. The closest match in warmth and period feel, though it comes in a single weight and lacks Coelacanth's optical sizes.
- Trajanus → A revival of Frederic Goudy's Goudy Oldstyle, the American calligraphic oldstyle closest in spirit to Chappell's pen-drawn Venetian forms, with a similarly short descender and a lively italic. It is rounder and gentler than Trajanus, without the nervous flicks on f and t or the serifless M and N apexes.
- Palatino → Barry Schwartz's revival of Frederic Goudy's Goudy Old Style, a calligraphic American old-style serif that is often named in the same breath as Palatino. It matches the warm pen-drawn curves and generous width, but Goudy's quirks run softer and rounder, with less of Palatino's crisp broad-nib edge.
- Feijoa → A revival of Goudy Oldstyle, whose rounded, slightly plump letterforms share Feijoa's dislike of hard angles and its warm, bookish feel. Goudy's forms are a bit wider and more decorative, and the family offers only a regular and italic, so there is no bold or display cut.
Display + body that work together
Quiet type that does the work
Two thousand years of letterforms boil down to a handful of decisions — width, weight, proportion. Pick a pair you trust, and let the rest take care of itself.
Editorial · Modern Sorts Mill Goudy + Manrope
Pages that earn the read
Body type does the heavy lifting. Get it right and the reader never thinks about it; get it wrong and they feel it before they can name what is off.
Modern · Editorial Manrope + Sorts Mill Goudy