Archival Program Information
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Lecture


Stauffacher / Number Seven from Wooden Letters from 300 Broadway
 
Thursday, October 24, 7:00 p.m.
Museum Lecture Hall


The Research Library at the Getty Research Institute hosts the American Printing History Association's 2002 J. Ben Lieberman Memorial Lecture featuring renowned printer and typographer Jack Stauffacher. A preeminent figure in the fields of fine book design and letterpress printing, Stauffacher is also the founder of the Greenwood Press in San Francisco.

For more than forty years, Stauffacher has engaged in a series of typographic experiments using wooden letters, which were the subject of a recent solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Enchanted with type and printing as a boy, Stauffacher started the first incarnation of the Greenwood Press in 1936, naming it for the street where he and his father built it, behind the family home in San Mateo, California. In 1955 he received a Fulbright scholarship for study in Italy; later, he held an academic post at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon), and served as typographic director at Stanford University Press. The Greenwood Press was reopened in 1966 in San Francisco, where it continues to flourish.

Stauffacher will discuss his work with award-winning type designer Matthew Carter, a recipient of the Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design, the Type Directors Club Medal, and the AIGA Medal. Jack Stauffacher, Printer (2002, 21 min.), a new documentary about Stauffacher and the Greenwood Press by filmmaker Jim Faris, will screen continuously starting at 5:00 p.m.