Jack Stauffacher
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Jack Stauffacher (b. 1920, San Francisco) is an American printer, typeface designer, and fine book publisher. He has taught at Carnegie Mellon University and at the San Francisco Art Institute.
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 20’s.
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.
Upon his return to the U.S., he became assistant professor of Typographic Design at Carnegie Mellon. His work led to the formation of the New Laboratory Press. He then 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.
His brother Frank Stauffacher ran the pioneering cinema series "Art in Cinema" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from 1946 to 1954.
