TYPOGRAPHIC WORKSHOP 17

I learned typography from Jack Stauffacher in the fall of 1967. He taught at the San Francisco Art Institute in Typographic Workshop 17, a basement room off one of the corridors in the old concrete buildings that ramble down the slope of Chestnut Street on Russian Hill. Although I’ve been a working typographer and a teacher of typography for five decades, Jack’s was the only course in typography I ever took.

When I think back to my first typographic autumn studying “the black art” with Jack, I wonder how he managed to teach in such a short time enough typography to last a lifetime. He didn’t do it with a textbook, though he showed us books, and he didn’t do it with ideology or a methodology, though he had those in reserve somewhere. He did it by example.

The Art Institute is a shadowy labyrinth punctuated by brilliant sunlit courtyards and balconies, but the type workshop is like a dungeon down a steep stairwell. Its few windows are high in the room yet at foot level on the sidewalk of Chestnut Street. We could see the feet of students passing-by. The first day of class, a half-dozen of us students waited in the workshop. On the walls were posters of alphabets by somebody named Hermann Zapf. A gray light filtered in from the windows. The smell of turpentine drifted down from a painting studio at the top of the stairwell.

A couple of us began rummaging around, peeking into things. The room was full of wooden cabinets full of flat drawers divided into compartments full of small, flat rectangles of gray metal, each with a little letter on one end. This had to be the type, the very stuff of typography.

A thin patina of acrid dust lay over every surface and a faint, varnish-like odor hung in the air. It was, like, weird! Mark Twain stuff. We could have been back in the 19th century down in that workshop.

But, man, up on the surface world, it was the space age, the information age. It was the Sixties. Astronauts orbited Earth. Satellites beamed TV all around the world. Revolutions flared up like wildfire. Marshall McLuhan was telling us that the Gutenberg galaxy was shifting into the video universe faster than a fuel-burning dragster roaring through a quarter-mile. Old-fashioned, hot, linear, typographic man was being replaced by modern, cool, non-linear media man.

And not a moment too soon, because old-fashioned, up-tight, lock-step linear man was dropping fire from the skies in Vietnam and elsewhere spewing poison into the air and water in business as usual. But modern hip laid-back groovy man, rendered polymorphic by a pharmacopeia culled from ancient ethnobotany and modern chemistry would send us to a better tomorrow. It was the spaced-out age. Turn-on, tune-in, drop-out. Even before astronauts had stepped onto the moon, some of us had travelled out beyond the asteroid belt in search of the remote and the strange. The Sunday San Francisco Chronicle had a regular column called “Astronauts of Inner Space”.

Back in Typographic Workshop 17 we waited for our teacher. Even before we saw him, we heard him. A quick, syncopated tattoo of footsteps down the concrete stairs, accompanied by the ticking of a bicycle freewheel. From the speed of the steps, it first seemed like a late student rushing to class or the school store farther down the stairs. But it was Jack. I think that’s the way he always went everywhere. Not that he was in a hurry, but because he was eager to get to wherever it was he was going. To do whatever it was he was going to do.

He came into the type shop, unslung a leather satchel and set down the Italian bike he’d been carrying on his shoulder.

We saw a man of medium height, in his forties, seething with the energy of an athlete in his twenties. Suntanned. His hair was long and black, combed back, the ends curled down over his back collar. His eyes were sharp, brows strong. Under a tweed jacket his shoulders were powerful, slightly arched like those of a hockey player or acrobat. His tie was askew, his collar unbuttoned, his sleeves long and loose. He wore khaki trousers. Brown loafers were on the feet that had trotted so nimbly down the stairs.

So this was a typographer. I had studied calligraphy, but my teacher, Lloyd Reynolds, had admitted few typographers into his pantheon. The murky photographs I had seen of those few seemed from some antediluvian age - William Morris, Rudolf Koch, Eric Gill. Titans, to be sure. But Jack was a modern man. Sure he revered Humanism and had studied Renaissance typography as a Fulbright scholar in Italy. But he reveled in the modern world, though hardly uncritically. He had just designed the typography for a new periodical, the Journal of Typographic Research [now Visible Language]. He read widely and pondered the TLS and NYT book reviews, always eager to discuss some recent provocative volume, invariably asking “What do you think...?”

In Typographic Workshop 17, our teacher took off his jacket, opened the high windows to let in air and light, spread clean sheets of white paper on the conference table, arranged the chairs with the help of students, and invited us to sit down. Then he opened his satchel and began to show us books. For him, typography sprang from the book. Typography is the book. Emil Ruder. Jan Tschichold. Daniel Berkeley Updike. Karl Gerstner. Raymond Gid. Carl Dair. Massin. Adrian Frutiger. Hermann Zapf. Guys he knew! He held their books in his deft hands with the assurance of long acquaintance and intimate knowledge, opened them, and passed them around. It was like watching a card-sharp handle a deck.

Then we witnessed a brief dialogue that summarized, as I came to realize, Jack’s philosophy.

A student from the highly esteemed Masters printmaking program asked, “What about illuminated manuscripts? You aren’t showing us any of those!”

Jack replied, “Illuminated manuscripts are medieval books. Handwritten, made with hand tools, in a different time, for different readers. These are typographic books, made with tools of our time, for our world.”

The student declared, “Modern machine-made books can’t compare to the beauties of illuminated manuscripts!”

Jack explained: “Each has its own kind of beauty. The beauty of the handwritten book lies in calligraphy and illumination, but the beauty of the printed book lies in typography and photography. We must try to understand that difference.”

He glanced around, looking for signs of understanding. Smiling. Enjoying saying these things.

The student proclaimed, “No modern book can match the beauty of the Book of Kells, the most beautiful book ever made!”.

“The Book of Kells is beautiful,” Jack said, “but it was written more than a thousand years ago by monks meditating on the word of God. Today we have to meditate on our world, on our words. Typography is our way of making books. We aren’t monks in a monastery. We can’t look back. We must face our own times.”

Silence. As a calligrapher, I was inclined to agree with the student, but Jack seemed so sensible in his explanations, so sturdy in his commitment, so honest in his vision, that I made my choice, not all at once, or even consciously, but irrevocably, to become a typographer.

The student stormed out. Jack asked, “What was that all about?” Somebody said, “She freaked out.” We laughed. Jack shook his head, puzzled. He donned a denim printer’s apron, picked up a composing stick, pulled out a case of type, and set it on top of a cabinet. He asked us to gather round, and began to teach the craft and art of typography. It never ends.

— Chuck Bigelow

(Jack Stauffacher passed away on November 16, 2017, age 96. An earlier version of this article originally appeared in Ampersand, journal of the Pacific Center of the Book Arts, vol 10, No. 4, 1990.

Chuck Bigelow final project in Jack Stauffacher's typography class, 1967

Jack & Chuck ponder new technology of typography, Bigelow & Holmes Studio, 300 Broadway, San Francisco, 1984. Photo by Kris Holmes.