1
Michael Garabedian
15 June 2004
IS 281 Final Paper
The printer in Paris: François-Louis Schmied’s influence on Ward Ritchie’s intellectual and aesthetic development and the Ward Ritchie Press, 1930-1932
1. Introduction: Ward Ritchie, Los Angeles, fine printing, and the locational fallacy
Perhaps the most striking thing about writings which take as their subject the rise of fine press printing in 1920s and 1930s Los Angeles is the extent to which commentators have correlated this emergence with the city’s singular geography and physicality, and the civic and institutional developments that obtained in the nascent metropolis between the world wars. As historian Kevin Starr notes in Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s (1990), in this foundational period “Southern California was being designed and materialized [as] it was being simultaneously interpreted.”[1] Accordingly, Starr argues, fine printing in Los Angeles represented a larger and fully conscious movement to help the city “come of age and identify itself to itself and others as a city ready for the next stage of cultural evolution,”[2] based firmly in practitioners’ recognition of their unique physical and historical location, and attested to by both contemporary and retrospective observations by Los Angeles “bookmen” in myriad essays, interviews, and memoirs.[3]
One of the most important of the bookmen who worked in Los Angeles during this bibliographic boom, and foremost among those who subsequently chronicled this period and his life in fine printing, Henry Ward Ritchie has received significant attention as the representative of what he would designate in 1987 “The Los Angeles Tradition” of fine press printing.[4] Time and again in the secondary literature, observers suggest that it was Ritchie’s special geographical location that most directly influenced his craft, aesthetic, and evaluation of the value of printing and bookmaking.[5] In part, undoubtedly, the subjects of Ritchie’s productions have influenced this assessment; as he argues (in a notably typical modest vein), the primary significance of the books he printed lies in providing “a sample picture of the literary output of Southern California during the three decades of the mid-twentieth century, for with few exceptions the books we have printed are of local interest and by local authors,”[6] and this idea is borne out by even a cursory perusal of a checklist of the output of the Ward Ritchie Press. Too, in both his published and non-published writings, Ritchie constantly underscores the importance of place to his life and work. In a wonderful passage written late in his life, for instance, Ritchie evokes the quasi-magical landscape that helped to shape his remarkable ebullience and enthusiasm:
Being young and fortunate in one’s environment, as I once was, breeds assurance in one’s future which is usually tempered in later years with the realization that all is not sugar and sunshine in this best of all possible worlds. A half century ago, however, it would have been difficult to have convinced me otherwise. The orange trees ladened the air of our San Gabriel Valley with the sweet aroma of their blossoms. . . . There was great beauty in Southern California when I was a boy there. The air was fresh and clean, tinged only with the good smells of things growing out of the rich earth. The mountains rose high to the north of us, with the snow sometimes reaching down to the poppy fields that covered the foothills with their brilliant color in the springtime.[7]
Given the sentiments expressed here and elsewhere, in addition to more general arguments about the rise of fine press printing in Los Angeles and the sorts of things Ritchie published, it is not difficult to imagine why people often connect explicitly his work with his lifelong home.
Certainly it is fundamental in considering Ritchie’s early work and aesthetic not to disregard when and where he was printing. However, to focus on Ritchie’s books as particular Los Angeles productions, or to think of his vision as engendered solely by the region in which he found himself, amounts to something of a locational fallacy and does a disservice to our understanding fully the significance of Ritchie’s craft and his own evaluation of this work. Contra this conviction, the purpose of this paper is to describe Ritchie’s intellectual and aesthetic development shortly after he made the decision to become a fine printer in the late 1920s, an incredibly formative time in which he was settling increasingly in his thinking about the value of fine printing. In so doing, most specifically, I want to examine Ritchie’s relationship with the Parisian printer François-Louis Schmied, and give overdue attention to the ways Schmied’s ideas influenced Ritchie between the time he sojourned in France in 1930 with the express intent to work for Schmied, until just prior to the founding of the Ward Ritchie Press in 1932.
2. “Reading himself into becoming a printer”
Although I have limited my focus here to just three years of Ritchie’s biography, before looking to his time in Paris it is necessary to consider what Ritchie was doing as early as 1925 in order to describe how and why he lighted upon printing as a career, and to establish a primary context from which to trace what I have called Ritchie’s intellectual and aesthetic development.
Ritchie’s early life and initial foray into printing has been documented extensively. Journalists, oral historians, and Ritchie’s personal friends have recounted this start, and Steve Tabor notes that “much of it [Ritchie himself has] already written about”;[8] as such I will not look at this time in any detail. It will suffice to say here that Ritchie went from the happy, middle-class boy described in the passage above, “roaming the miles of [orange] groves that were [his] homeland” in Pasadena,[9] to a resolute bookstore browser and distinguished student at Sewanee, Stanford, and finally Occidental College with a marked penchant for the humanities and literary studies. Ritchie favored modern poetry and especially the poetry of Occidental alumnus Robinson Jeffers, and in his last year of college he began to write his own poetry and discuss his work in addition to poetry in general with his colleagues. However, despite this inclination toward literature and what he would describe in later years as “creating,” after graduating from Occidental Ritchie enrolled in the Law School at the University of Southern California with the somewhat puzzling and incongruous intention of becoming an attorney.
As a legal career is in several ways opposed to studying literature, writing poetry, and bookish conversation, as we might expect law school was for Ritchie a trying experience; as he writes in Art deco: the books of François-Louis Schmied, artist/engraver/printer, not long after starting at USC a reluctant Ritchie found that he “was hopelessly bored with torts and writs”[10] and sincerely conflicted about his choice for a profession:
I had started in Law School expecting that to be my career. But I had been more interested in books and in art in college. . . . Soon after plodding through the great tomes [there], I decided that this probably wouldn’t be the type of work that would make me happy. I knew that I didn’t have the ability to become a first-class writer and I was quite sure that I couldn’t make myself a living as an artist.[11]
By 1928 Ritchie was fairly convinced that a career in law would not make for a contented or fulfilling life. But at the same time, he felt that doing those things that had given him the most pleasure as an undergraduate at Occidental (i.e. writing poetry and thinking critically about art and literature) would make it very difficult to earn a livelihood. Caught as it were between two worlds, Ritchie desperately needed something to push him in one direction or another.
The push Ritchie got, and which would result in his foregoing the law in order to instead focus on fine printing as a career, came when by “happy accident . . . snooping around a table of sales books at Robinsons” he fortuitously picked up and purchased for $3.12½ per volume a set of The Journals of Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson.[12] In the journals Ritchie learned that Cobden-Sanderson, the distinguished nineteenth-century English bookbinder and member of the William Morris circle, had in the first half of his life been an unhappy and uninterested barrister, anxious and constantly on the lookout for an occupation that would allow him “to create with his heart and his hands.”[13] At the suggestion of Mrs. William Morris at a dinner party, at the age of 40 Cobden-Anderson made the somewhat abrupt decision to go into bookbinding. He later took up printing and eventually founded the renowned Doves Bindery and Doves Press.
It is easy to understand why in Cobden-Anderson Ritchie discovered “a most kindred soul”;[14] and also why for Ritchie this history was an epiphany. Like Ritchie, Cobden-Anderson had been in law and absolutely despised it, and like Ritchie he hungered for a literary occupation in which he could also invent and design. Thus in a sudden move analogous to Cobden-Anderson’s decision to go into bookbinding, Ritchie resolved to become a printer. Here, after all, was a profession that combined in a satisfying way those things that had most inspired and pleased him just several years earlier—art, literature, and books—and in which he might have the opportunity to meet and work with other like-minded artists and authors. In thinking more about Cobden-Anderson and printing, Ritchie writes, “I discovered this semi-literary, semi-art career which I thought might be pleasant . . . the creation of books. In that way I would be working with the people who wrote them, the people who illustrated them, and could add what little to the art of the book that I might be able to myself.”[15]
Upon making his decision and after he had, like Cobden-Sanders, “junked his career” in law, Ritchie went about attempting to learn as much as he could about fine press printing. With no contacts in the world of printing and “not realizing that the usual method of entering the profession was to get a job at a printing shop,”[16] learning about printing entailed for Ritchie an intense research process during which he familiarized himself with the best fine printing being done in Europe and America by reading in the history and art of printmaking and typography. Because of this unusual but fastidious preliminary instruction, Ritchie would later suggest that he “read himself into becoming a printer.” As he writes, “I believe I was fortunate in reading myself into becoming a printer rather than following the usual pattern. I would easily have ended up as a clumsy compositor or a lousy proof reader.”[17]
Again, I have framed this paper in such a way as to suggest that, in thinking about the influences on his aesthetic, intellect, and art we must move beyond merely connecting Ritchie with his geographical location. However, clearly it was to Ritchie’s advantage to have his revelation about printing in a Los Angeles whose bibliophilic culture was well-established by the late 1920s, and the ensuing stage of Ritchie’s initiation into fine printing involved his taking advantage of institutional and living resources in the city for his further edification. By just the next year, in 1929, Ritchie had examined the fine print collections at the Clark and Huntington libraries; been introduced to and become a close friend of Gregg Anderson, a prodigious young printer and Ritchie’s future partner; come under the familiar tutelage of Pasadena-based book collector Alice Millard, who was able to show him original productions from the greatest European and British print shops then in operation; been, on the recommendation of Huntington Library patrons, to visit the Grabhorn Brothers’ and John Henry Nash’s print shops in San Francisco; and through the influence of Los Angeles printer Bruce McCallister, secured a mid-semester appointment Frank Wiggins Trade School in order to learn typesetting and composition. By 1930, Ritchie was working at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena and begun to rent time at the press in the Abbey of San Encino just outside of Los Angeles on the edge of the Arroyo Seco. It was here that Ritchie began printing his first non-student works, a series of poetry booklets (or more accurately, pamphlets) by the likes of Robinson Jeffers, Archibald MacLeish, and Carl Sandburg, and which “biblioluminary” and Los Angeles’s foremost bookseller Jake Zeitlin (who Ritchie had met through Gregg Anderson) sold in his shop.
Although during this early period it seems as if Ritchie was concentrating most on learning the mechanical exigencies of presswork, and does not in his contemporary correspondence or journals delineate in an explicit way his aesthetic inclinations or influences as such, nevertheless we can make some informed assumptions based upon those printers with whom he was talking and whose work he was investigating. As Starr notes, Ritchie was “rapidly assimilat[ing] the rudiments and subtleties of his art”; an idea upon which Tabor expands: “Ritchie was very much alive to what was going on around him, and his first and most lasting influences were the living or recent masters in the Anglo-American tradition.”[18] This is not, however, to suggest that Ritchie did not have his preferences. In a valuable oral history conducted in 1969 by UCLA historian Elizabeth I. Dixon entitled “Printing and Publishing in Southern California,” Ritchie recollected what it was about McCallister and the Grabhorns he found so appealing, especially in contradistinction to John Henry Nash. This interview speaks to Ritchie’s formal preferences as well as his earliest aesthetics, and so I quote him here at length:
[T]heir work was at the opposite ends of the spectrum of fine printing. Nash was the most meticulous printer I have ever known. His books are so perfect that they are almost mechanical. His type-setting had no flaw in it. . . . Ed Grabhorn, on the other hand, was a true artist. The Grabhorns didn’t bother too much if an occasional error was found in the text of their books that wasn’t their primary interest. Theirs were designs. Their books are not books in the sense of those we buy to read; they are books to be looked at. It’s as if this were a fine art rather than just a means of reproduction. They put a great deal of warmth into their books which you will never find in the works of . . . Nash. His are very cold-looking books. He wasn’t the artist that the Grabhorns were, and when he tries to get decorative, he overdoes it . . . When Nash is simple and straightforward and plain, his books have great quality, but as soon as he attempts to do something a little extraordinary, he falls down badly. The Grabhorns on the other hand, even in their selection of typefaces, seem to be able to get warmth and vigor.[19]
Ritchie clearly appreciated technical mastery in printing, but what most appealed to him were those productions that, in their designs and layouts, telegraphed rather than erased the presence of the printer. Thus if the book culture in late 1920s Los Angeles can be described in Zeitlin’s famous terms, that is a “small Renaissance, Southern California style,”[20] we can certainly regard Ritchie as something of the small Renaissance’s “head humanist”: a liberal artist who valued above all else in fine press books their “human centeredness,” and who became a printer only after a deep survey of the masters’ works—again, “reading himself” into his discipline.
3. Schmied, the “Book of the Future,” and Ritchie’s progressing/progressive aesthetic
François-Louis Schmied, a highly accomplished printer best known today for his de luxe editions of classic works of literature, was based in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s and in Morocco in the later 1930s. Many of his books reside at the Clark Library, collected by Ritchie and gifted to the collection upon his death in 1996. Illustrated with multi-plate, art deco xylograph prints, Schmied’s books’ sumptuousness defies easy description and evidences a singular mastery. As Steve Tabor notes in an article about Schmied in The World From Here: Treasures of the Great Libraries of Los Angeles (2002): “On their first exposure to one of François-Louis Schmied’s productions, most Americans . . . are apt to declare they have never seen anything like it” (136).[21] Keeping these remarkable productions in mind, it is easy to understand why in 1930, having received a negative response to a written inquiry about the possibility of working under and learning from Schmied, a typically enthusiastic, impetuous, and apparently undaunted Ritchie nevertheless crossed the Atlantic and literally showed up at the Parisian printer’s doorstep to ask for an apprenticeship. Suggesting that he had come from a California, and more impressively to the Parisians, from “near Hollywood,” one of Schmied’s printers interpreted the master’s response for the young man, recounted in “Printing and Publishing”: “Mr. Schmied doesn’t know what to do. He said that since you’d come all the way from California to work for him, he can’t send you back. Come to work on Monday.”[22]