Ever wondered what it'd be like to step back in time? To enter a place that's surrounded by the post-modern and the digital age, but doesn't give into the pressures to modernize and refuses to succumb to the latest technology?
Entering
St. Hieronymus Press on April 27, 2012, I found a real Berkeley establishment that has stood the test of time. Large letter presses and mechanical offset printing presses from the late 1800s and early 1900s fill the print shop. Despite the recent bankruptcy of Houghton Mifflin and Borders Bookstore, this print shop and publishing destination hasn't bent to the impeding forces of the printing and publishing world outside (and it's still in business). They’ve been printing using traditional methods for nearly 5 decades, and they don't look like they're going to change any time soon.
Today, printing and publishing on paper is a statement in and of itself, but going to the extreme of printing how our great grandfathers did is something so antithetical to the ethos of our age, that I had to check this place out. What I found was not a printing house adopting the latest cost-saving practices, such as printing books on newsprint and cutting costs everywhere possible. Instead, their office motto self-mockingly calls them to "Stop! Think! There must be a harder way!" This steadfast holding to tradition has produced stunning results.
Sharing lunch with
David Lance Goines and friends, I learned that Goines started at the print shop in 1965 at age 19. He’s now 67. He looks not too dissimilar from
Jamie Hyneman from the TV show Mythbusters, fitted with a Rollie Fingers-style gray mustache. Goines designs his posters using the following steps:
- Draws the design by hand.
- Traces the design on tracing paper and transfers it to a linoleum block.
- Carves the design into the linoleum block.
- Creates a print from the linoleum, and then scans the print.
- Uses Photoshop for some final processing, similar to how he used to use a dark room.
- Transfers the image back onto either an offset die or a letter press die, depending on how many colors the job requires and the size of the image.
Goines said that his designs are limited by the human hand, and showcase qualities that a machine-produced work of art can’t. He sticks with printing methods that are tried and tested, and is skeptical about adopting newer methods simply for the sake of innovation or printing faster. The hallmark of a David Goines poster is that it
stands out of time, and demonstrates a quality that few mass-produced posters can reproduce.
Goines and the St. Hieronymus Press staff champion quality, tradition, and basic design fundamentals, and they have a loyal following (and repeat customers like UC Berkeley, local restaurants, and Napa and Sonoma Valley wineries). You can't go long in the Bay Area without seeing one of his designs. For example, walking down Safeway’s wine aisle you'll likely run into a number of his wine label designs, most notably: Ravenswood. Goines is also active creating business cards, stationery, and posters.
At St. Hieronymus Press on my visit, there were a couple recent UC Berkeley graduates training as apprentices. They were learning from the master the basics of design and how to letter press stationery. Goines is training the next generation of printers and designers in the time-tested ways of manual design and print production.
For more photos of St. Hieronymus Press see the
photo album on Google+.
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By Matt Werner, author of Oakland in Popular Memory. This post is cross-published on Oakland Local. Email Matt at editor[at]thoughtpublishing.org.
