Jack Stauffacher — typographer’s works part of SFMOMA
Jack Stauffacher, a master printer who taught himself on a mailorder press and ended up with his austere and exquisite typography in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, has died.
Mr. Stauffacher died Nov. 16 at his longtime home in Tiburon, said his daughter, Francesca Stauffacher of Corte Madera. He was 96.
In a nearly 80-year career that started when he was a teenager, Mr. Stauffacher worked with metal and wood type and printed everything from business cards and tickets to fine art books and museum monographs.
Along the way, he was part of the North Beach bohemia that spawned the Beats after World War II. He also was the subject of a solo show, “Jack Stauffacher: Selections from the Permanent Collection of Architecture and Design,” at SFMOMA in 2002, and a group show, “Belles Lettres: the Art of Typography” in 2004-05.
“Jack will be remembered by his passion for the written word and the ability for type to contribute to the emotive quality of text,” said Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, curator of architecture and design at SFMOMA.
A third-generation San Franciscan of Swiss descent, Jack Werner Stauffacher was born Dec. 19, 1920, and grew up in San Mateo, where his father owned a plumbing company.
As a 13-year-old, he saw an ad in Popular Mechanics advertising a starter press kit for $15. He sent away for it, and once he’d taught himself the trade, he opened the Greenwood Press, a printing studio he had his father build behind his family’s house on Greenwood Avenue, where he got the name.
“I’ve never looked back since, in terms of my profession,” Mr. Stauffacher told The Chronicle in an interview 20 years ago. When he was 20, the Greenwood Press printed its first book, 250 copies of “Three Choice Sketches by Geoffrey Crayon Gent” by Washington Irving.
Next, he published an illustrated guide called “Bicycle Polo: Techniques and Fundamentals.” “No one knows about bicycle polo,” he told The Chronicle. “I was passionate enough to make a book. The first book about bicycle polo in the world.”
Drafted into the Army at the outset of World War II, Mr. Stauffacher served as a mapmaker. Discharged after coming down with pleurisy, he returned to San Francisco, then a national printing center with Grabhorn Press, Taylor & Taylor and John Henry Nash, among others.
“It was like going to Paris,’’ he said.
In 1947, Mr. Stauffacher moved the Greenwood Press from San Mateo to Sansome Street in the city. His older brother, Frank, was a well-known avant-garde filmmaker who introduced him to the bohemian scene in North Beach. He met and befriended Dylan Thomas, Henry Miller, Ansel Adams, Alan Watts, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Kenneth Rexroth.
“It was a very rich moment for us,” he recalled. “There was the postwar dedication of the artist. Somebody said ‘Oh, you’re a Beat, Jack,’ But I’m not. I came out of the earlier period that reflected a different social consciousness.”
While visiting the old SFMOMA in the Veterans Building, Mr. Stauffacher met Josephine Grimaldi, an Italian immigrant. They married in 1948.
In 1955, Mr. Stauffacher closed the Greenwood Press and moved his wife and two children to Florence, Italy. He’d received a Fulbright grant for three years of study under the Italian masters Giovanni Mardersteig and Alberto Tallone.
He was hired as an assistant professor of typographic design at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. He returned to San Francisco in 1963, when he was hired as the typographic director at the Stanford University Press.
“He did dozens and dozens of books and book covers for them,” said Dennis Letbetter, a photographer and longtime collaborator with Mr. Stauffacher. He also taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1966, he left Stanford to reopen the Greenwood Press at 300 Broadway.
It was a one-man shop he maintained until his death. While raising his family in a variety of rental flats in the Marina, he rode his Italian bicycle to work, always picking a flower along the way for the lapel of his tweed jacket. Later, after moving to Tiburon, he took the ferry to work.
In 1974, he was hired by UC Santa Cruz to start the Cowell Press at Cowell College. Many of his students there went on to careers in graphic design, including Les Ferriss, now the master printer at the Bancroft Library.
“He was a scholar printer,” Ferriss said. “He was my mentor, my colleague and my friend for over 30 years.”
Among his greatest honors was when the Book Club of California published “A Typographic Journey: The History of the Greenwood Press and Bibliography, 19342000.” A portfolio entitled “Wooden Letters from 300 Broadway” was purchased by SFMOMA, which owns nearly 100 of Mr. Stauffacher’s works, including experimental compositions using wood and metal type. He also designed the lettering for the museum’s tote bag.
In 2011, Mr. Staufacher’s archive was purchased by the Bancroft. His 1966 Vandercook Cylinder Handpress was also purchased. It has been restored and is being used by the Bancroft Library Press.
His last book, “Oxen, Plough, Bicycle,” a memoir of his years in Tuscany with his own photography and dated journal entries from the 1950s, was published this fall.
“This man never retired,” Letbetter said. “He was a visionary in the printing world.”
As such, he was central to a Friday afternoon guild, where printers, type designers, poets, filmmakers and academics from all over the world would meet at a cafe in North Beach.
A year ago, the salon met as usual, with no indication that it would be the last time. But Mr. Stauffacher was 95 and was losing energy. He called to cancel before the next lunch. Rather than continue without him, the salon folded after more than 25 years.
“Without Jack it would have been unstructured, dissolute and lacking in discipline,” Letbetter said. “He was the true pillar of a humanist approach to design.”
Survivors include his wife of nearly 70 years, Josephine Grimaldi Stauffacher of Tiburon; a daughter, Paula Stauffacher of San Francisco; a son, Mario of Tiburon; and a daughter, Francesca Stauffacher, her husband, Christopher Rand, and a granddaughter, Isabella Bertaud, all of Corte Madera. Services are pending.