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1. Stauffacher Paula Stephanie, geb. 20 Nov 1949, San Francisco, San Francisco, California, USA gest. 27 Okt 2018, San Francisco, San Francisco, California, USA (Alter 68 Jahre) [Vater: natural]
Jack Stauffacher, a master printer who taught himself on a mail-order 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, 1934-2000.” 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.
Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SamWhitingSF
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Bpb Elmer / Family History Notes 2018.3
San Francisco native John Werner (Jack W.) Stauffacher, 96, passed away in November of 2017. He was a self-taught printer who developed and expanded his printing skills becoming a highly respected book publisher, designer and artist. At the age of 13 Jack purchased a printing press from Popular Mechanics magazine. By the age of 16 he had opened Greenwood Press, the San Francisco printing firm he would be associated with for the rest of his life. Jack’s career spanned 80 years and his printed body of work encompassed lowly business cards, collectible art books, and art prints now found in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). Jack, his wife and two daughters had the opportunity to spend three years in Florence, Italy where Stauffacher studied historic printing techniques under two renowned European printing experts. On his return to America, Stauffacher was associated with the Carnegie Institute of Technology followed by a return to his native California where he was hired by Stanford University Press.
The Letterform Archive in San Francisco acquired over 200 of Stauffacher’s wood type prints. They wrote, “These [prints] are the product of the printer-typographer’s experiments with the drawers of wood type he inherited at his 300 Broadway studio, located in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. These wooden letters – many mismatched, not a “monoprints,” no two the same. Among his techniques: manipulating the layouts of the letters on the bed of his press between impressions; using solvents and sponges to create unique textural variations and effects with inking; iterating with sub-sets of letters; and inking once, then printing multiple times. The resulting prints offer striking variance in color, shape, texture, and pattern . . .” Pictured is Stauffacher’s 2003 print entitled “Wind whistles”.
Jack’s surname gives away his Glarner heritage. His great- grandparents, Anton and Anna (Stauffacher) Stauffacher, were original 1845 settlers of New Glarus. They were accompanied by their young sons including Anton Jr. (b. 1841) who was Jack’s grandfather.
Jack Werner Stauffacher (December 19, 1920 – November 16, 2017) was an American printer, typographer, and fine book publisher. He taught at Carnegie Mellon University, University of California, Santa Cruzand San Francisco Art Institute.
Stauffacher was born in San Francisco, California in 1920. In 1936, he established the Greenwood Press, named after the street on which it was located, in a small building that he and his father built behind the family home in San Mateo, California. His first books appeared when he was in his early 1920s.
In 1955, he received a Fulbright grant for three years of study in Florence, Italy. There he met master printers Giovanni Mardersteig and Alberto Tallone, whose work and ideas influenced him profoundly.
After his return to the United States, he became assistant professor of typographic design at Carnegie Mellon University. His work led to the formation of the New Laboratory Press. He went on to become typographic director at Stanford University Press and to teach at the San Francisco Art Institute.
In 1966, he reopened the Greenwood Press in a building at 300 Broadway in San Francisco and resumed producing books and limited editions such as Albert Camus and the Men of Stone (1971). In 1967, he was commissioned to redesign the Journal of Typographic Research, later renamed Visible Language. The typographic composition he used for its cover was used for many years and became something of a design icon.
Stauffacher was added to the distinguished list of AIGA medalists in 2004. Several of his experimental compositions using wood and metal type are in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Stanford University Library, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Much of his life and work is documented in the book A Typographic Journey / The History of the Greenwood Press published by the Book Club of California in 1999. He was the subject of an article and his work featured on the cover of the groundbreaking Emigre magazine in 1998.
His brother, Frank Stauffacher, ran the pioneering "Art in Cinema" cinema series at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from 1946 to 1954. Stauffacher died in November 2017 at the age of 96.
1920 - 2017 (96 Jahre)
