Michael Garabedian - UCLA GSEIS



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]

Although Ritchie had encountered Schmied’s work “in the flesh” for the first time at the home of Alice Millard who, as has been discussed, was the preeminent Los Angeles collector that helped to familiarize Ritchie with the greatest examples of modern fine printing (and who, more importantly, could afford to buy Schmied’s expensive editions), Ritchie actually first read about Schmied’s remarkable work in an article by P.J Angoulvent from volume 3 of the typographical journal The Fleuron (1924) entitled “The Development of Printing.” Ritchie later recalled that he was “particularly interested” by the fourth and final section of the article, called The Book of the Future, in part because “at the time in [his] life . . . the future seemed to offer so many exciting opportunities and challenges.”[23] More than this, in this section Ritchie was intrigued by Angoulvent’s estimation of the place of the book in society, and his categorical admiration of Schmied’s books which, he argued, “may be considered the most exact anticipations that can be given up till now on the book of the future.”[24]

According to Angoulvent, description in printing or illustration was no longer to be tolerated, and in a decidedly modern mode that valued the new, he suggested it would fade completely from art as observers/readers became increasingly conscious of descriptive or mimetic art’s orthodoxy and, indeed, oppressive literalness. Instead, he argued, art should always defer to a reader’s “liberty of understanding”; an artist’s designs should not compete with a text’s import or attempt to delineate its meaning. Rather, they should be abstract, and the work should not explicate as much as help to make a reader’s feelings harmonize with the feelings of an individual work’s creator. Using this idea as a point of departure and with Schmied’s works as its supreme instantiation Angoulvent suggested that the decorated book, the book of the future, was most in harmony with what he called “the modern mind.”

Most contemporary observers, though perhaps not as strident as Angoulvent in their assessments, nevertheless also recognized Schmied’s brilliance. In a 1928 article from l’Atlantique, which Ritchie would most certainly have read in studying up on his future teacher and which he donated to the Clark Library in the 1990s, writer M. Taskin observed (as many others have since) that “It is impossible to give . . . a complete description of the works of Schmied. One must see them.”[25] One cannot help but imagine that Ritchie would have also read with satisfaction—and indeed, may have recognized his own personality in—Taskin’s description of Schmied: “The virtue of his spirit is formed of enthusiasm, of impulse, of fantasy, of the imperious need of creative action, of curiosity, of divination.” Additionally, Taskin’s evaluation of the special significance of the book parallels in a striking way an assessment we know Ritchie to have made in the same year:

Schmied arrived in the domain of the book, where he rapidly showed himself master, contributing his part towards again putting in honor an art capable of giving us the most complete enjoyment since it appeals at the same time to our intelligence, to our sensibility, to our eyes, and even to our feeling, creating forms and techniques truly worthy of our epoch of wide renaissance.[26]

It is worth noting here that by the 1920s, fine printing and bookmaking more generally enjoyed a special status in Europe to a far greater degree than in the United States. As S.H. Steinberg writes, the mechanization of printing in the nineteenth century did not “throw out the work of the craftsman” or adversely affect private printing concerns as we might expect, and likewise, the early part of the twentieth century saw no falloff of private or fine press productions.[27] By this time in Europe it seems as if one can begin to track a greater consciousness on the part of private and fine press printers about their social-political place of their work; after World War I especially, the ubiquity of mass reproduced books (not to mention the distribution of new media) afforded private presses and their works a new artistic dimension, and not surprisingly, we find printers revealing (and describing) attendant artistic intentions. During this time, “the avant garde became fascinated with superb craftsmanship and meticulous design”[28] to alter traditional perceptions about books and art; indeed, we need only think of much of the printed work of the Futurists or Constructivists to evidence this idea.

Starr notes that by 1930 Ritchie had “exhausted the [printing] resources of Southern California”;[29] that he should have looked to Europe (and more specifically, Paris, the unofficial but undisputable capital of modern art), where fine printing was held in such high regard, should not come as a surprise. Neither should it surprise us that Ritchie would have gravitated toward Schmied’s typographical work. For, beyond the reasons discussed above, far more than the productions of his continental contemporaries does Schmied’s work correspond with the sorts of aesthetic preferences Ritchie had started to develop by this time: In sharp contrast to the minimal, mechanistic, what we might even call “cold” designs being printed, for example, by the majority of the European avant garde,[30] Schmied’s illustrations and typography are colorful, warm, and expressionistic to the extent that we know someone (as opposed to a machine) printed the works. The contrast is analogous, it seems, to the cold/warm distinction between the presswork of John Nash and the Grabhorns Ritchie makes in “Printing and Publishing”; indeed, Ritchie makes note of Schmied’s exceptional warmth in his introduction to Art deco: “In the 1920s there were innovative rumblings in Germany where the Bauhaus group was coldly and starkly creating a new concept for printing. Schmied in France had likewise broken from tradition, but unlike his German neighbors he infused his concepts with an abundance of Gallic warmth and color.”[31]

Thus, having exhausted Southern California’s printmaking resources and begun to develop an aesthetic sense and evaluation of printing in line with Schmied’s work, did Ritchie travel to Paris in 1930 to learn from the man who was turning out books of the future.

4. Ritchie’s “typographical pilgrimage”; or Paris, and what he found there, 1930-1931

It is beyond this paper’s scope to go in any sophisticated detail into an assessment of the artistic influence Schmied might have had upon Ritchie’s own designs. There can be little doubt that Ritchie had Schmied in mind when he composed the layout for Robinson Jeffers’s First Book, an insert printed for The Colophon #10 in 1932—the elements of this first-ever product of the Ward Ritchie Press (notably its asymmetrical layout, broad capitals, and pronounced bands) are all hallmarks of Schmied’s presswork. However, thereafter, it is less easy to trace Schmied’s impact. As Steve Tabor has noted, Schmied was primarily an illustrator while Ritchie was primarily a printer, and in a certain sense Schmied had little to teach Ritchie in the way of typesetting or composition.[32] The lasting influence Schmied and his work were to have on Ritchie was, instead, intellectual or ideological more than anything else; and while it most certainly did not hurt for Ritchie to broaden his experience with the technicalities of printmaking and layout, his brief stint with Schmied in Paris was most significant because it allowed a time and space for contemplation, and represents one of the last stages in Ritchie’s intellectual and aesthetic development before the founding of the Ward Ritchie Press in 1932. In this last section of the paper I want to give a sense for the nature of this development, and for Ritchie’s time in Paris, by looking to memoirs and recollections but primarily to the prolific journal Ritchie kept during this significant year.

On the final page of his journal from his year in Europe, Ritchie writes, “And now ends the first typographical pilgrimage to Europe performed by Harry Ward Ritchie, sailing on the Albertic from Montreal, June 21 1930 and returning by the Homeric from Southhampton, June 3, 1931 and remaining in New York until June 20.”[33] It is important to note that Ritchie qualifies his journey as a typographical pilgrimage, as this word connotes a distinctly pious or spiritual ritual. At the risk of pushing this idea too far, it is safe to suggest that for Ritchie, printmaking had by 1930 become an activity that, if not holy exactly then somewhat spiritual, and important enough to the fledgling printer to couch his ideas about fine printing in quasi-religious terms. Clearly Ritchie invested great significance in his time with Schmied, who in the journal comes across at times as guru-like, and a good deal of the observations about printing (and art in general) Ritchie recorded in the journal share a distinct reverence.

In this sense Ritchie’s tone is consistent with that of the observations of another Schmied admirer writing nearly six decades later. In Schmied, published in 1991, Italian art historian Mauroo Nasti describes Schmied’s books as cosmoses unto themselves, with Schmied acting the parts of architect and prime mover:

A book is for Schmied a complete architectonic universe whose opposing tensions and multiple, interconnecting levels of complexity achieve their own stability. From the line to the page to the succession of pages, the decorative elements are subservient to the whole and not autonomous additions. Schmied’s fidelity to his general plan is unquestionable . . . the decorative elements are never self-standing, but are at most destined to blend into a whole which presupposes a technical perfection of execution, functionality and structural cohesion as its guiding principles, and as its final goal, and included in its beginning . . .Schmied, the master of the book as universe, is certainly the designer and in part constructor of the book as harmoniously balanced structure, as an ordered and self-sufficient whole—in short, as a microcosm.[34]

Here what are essentially metaphysical assertions about balance and harmony bleed into more tangible descriptions of Schmied’s aesthetic and craft. Ritchie, too, underscores the balance and in Schmied’s work in a lecture delivered several decades after his time with the printer: “[T]ypography and the conception of it . . . [are often] left in the background. . . . Beautiful and magnificent as [illustrations] are they don’t add much to the book as if they were part of a complete work of art. . . [but] as we go through [a Schmied book], there is a continuity of feeling and also notice the coloring . . . How they blend together.[35]

Thus the notion of printing as a necessarily spiritual process in addition to the idea that typography and fine printing are capable of effecting conceptual integrations or reconciliation between, for instance, an observer and a book, word and text, color and line, abstraction and suggestion (communion itself being a sort of divine activity), come to characterize Ritchie’s observations and thoughts in the journal entries from 1930 and 1931. In an entry from October 1930, for example, Ritchie writes,

Some of Schmied’s books have offered this reaching out for something beyond the technical problem of presenting a readable book. It gives something of the spiritual commentary. Words are an imperfect way of expressing thought . . . [thus] the future of typography . . . lies in coupling it with one of the higher arts that may suggest the ultimate in to thought that words alone lack this quality to transmit.[36]

By this time, then, Ritchie was increasingly coming to think of fine printing as not only a mode by which he might bring together his personal disparate interests (e.g. semi-literary, semi-art), or different sorts of art (e.g. illustration, design, and typography), but in his most conceptual moments also a potentially transcendent or spiritual art form:

This is the appeal of Schmied’s books over other French attempts at an illustrated book. They I feel are perversions of the ideal book; Schmied’s is something more—it is a new graphic art which combines color, line, and type. Perhaps it interprets the text, perhaps not . . . but it does fulfill the architectural requirements of this new art—to make each page a thing of beauty in itself capable of standing alone and pleasing the eye, even without the thought conveyed by the text.[37]

Starr argues that from Schmied Ritchie garnered a “synthetic technique” which he used to great effect in his printing by “blending . . . typography, color, decoration, and illustration . . .”[38] This is certainly true. Beyond this, though, during his time with Schmied Ritchie gained a near-spiritual appreciation for fine printed books, based in part on the sorts of physical as well as conceptual syntheses they engender, which lasted throughout his life.

5. Conclusion

Based partly on secondary literature but also on his own writings and the sorts of books he printed during his career as a fine printer, many commentators have been quick to correlate Ward Ritchie’s work, craft, and aesthetic with his geographic and physical location, an assertion that ignores Ritchie’s social-historical location and other factors that influenced his intellectual and artistic development. Philosophically and artistically primed for a career at a private press of the sort that were operating here and in Europe after World War I, in printing Ritchie saw an opportunity to participate in a variety of activities he most enjoyed and way to fulfill his dual need for intellectual and creative stimulation. Initially a discipline and an art which combined those ancillary skills he found most interesting, during his time as an apprentice to François-Louis Schmied, Ritchie increasingly reflected upon the harmonizing potential of this graphic art, not only in a technical sense, but in fact in a more conceptual one, too: It is safe to say that at the end of his time in Paris, in Ritchie’s mind printing had become less of a discipline or career, and more of a quasi-religious calling, and it is this important idea which, in addition to his place in Los Angeles, we must keep in mind in evaluating Ritchie’s intellectual development, the evolution of his craft, and his larger situation in the Los Angeles printing scene of the middle twentieth century.

Works Cited

Primary sources

Ritchie, Ward. “Fine Printing: The Los Angeles Tradition” (address delivered at the Clark Library, Los Angeles, 13 October 1987).

_______. “The Ward Ritchie Press and Anderson, Ritchie & Simon” Los Angeles: Anderson, Ritchie & Simon, 1961.

_______. “Typescript about Schmied.” In the Ward Ritchie Press Archives, ca. 1930-1978. Box 3, Folder 6. William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

_______. Unpublished journal, 1930-1931. Ward Ritchie Press Archives, ca. 1930-1978. Box 3, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

_______. Unpublished journal, 1924-1929. Ward Ritchie Press Archives, ca. 1930-1978. Box 178, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

_______ to Robinson Jeffers [1928?]. Draft of a letter in Ritchie’s hand. Ward Ritchie Press Archives, ca. 1930-1978. Box 178, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

_______. “The Forgotten Street of Books.” A Garland for Jake Zeitlin on the occasion of his 65th Birthday & the Annivesary of his 40th Year in the Book Trade. Los Angeles: Grant Dahlstrom and Saul Marks, 1967.

Tabor, Steve. “Slideshow Presentation: Ward Ritchie’s Artistic Influences.” Clark Library, Los Angeles California, [typescript], n.d.

Zeitlin, Jake. “Small Renaissance: Southern California Style.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 50 (1956): 17-27.

Secondary sources

Angoulvent, P.J. “The Development of the Book.” The Fleuron 3 (1924).

bauhaus-archive museum of design. 2004. Available at . (10 June 2004). [I’m afraid I’m using edition 5 of Turabian and she does not include Web pages; this format from another university’s library’s Web site.]

Bennett, Paul. “Ward Ritchie—Designer, Printer, Publisher, Man of Books.” Publishers’ Weekly, 186 (1964), 85-90.

Dixon, Elizabeth I. “Printing and Publishing in Southern California.” Los Angeles: UCLA, 1969.

Fox, Leonard. “F. –L. Schmied, Master of the Art Deco Book.” Art Deco Society of New York News 5.4 (Winter 1985): 10-12.

Nasti, Mauroo. Schmied. Schio (Vicenza): Guido Tamoni Editore, 1991.

Ritchie, Ward. Art deco: the books of François-Louis Schmied, artist/engraver/printer: with recollections and descriptive commentaries on the books. San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1987.

Sheehe, W. Michael. “FL Schmied: Art Deco Illustrator.” American book Collector 3 (May/June 1980

Starr, Kevin. Material dreams: Southern California through the 1920's. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Steinberg, S.H. Five hundred years of printing. London: British Library ; New Castle, DE : Oak Knoll Press, 1996.

Taskin, M. “Francois-Louis Schmied, Painter-Engraver-Printer.” l’Atlantique [1928?].

Tabor, Steve. “66. Le Cantique des Cantiques.” The World From Here: Treasures of the Great Libraries of Los Angeles. Los Angeles: Getty Press, 2002.

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[1]Kevin Starr, Material dreams: Southern California through the 1920's (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990): x.

[2]Ibid. 361.Interestingly, these sorts of location-based claims are not limited to retrospective observations by non-“bookmen.”

[3]Los Angeles as place looms large, for instance, in several of the essays in J.M. Edelstein, ed., A Garland for Jake Zeitlin (Los Angeles: Grant Dahlstrom & Saul Marks, 1967).

[4]Ward Ritchie, “Fine Printing: The Los Angeles Tradition” (address delivered at the Clark Library, Los Angeles, 13 October 1987).

[5]Cf. Starr 423, for instance, where the author suggests that Ritchie’s use of color “glow[s] like Southern California itself.” See also Paul A. Bennett, “Ward Ritchie—Designer, Printer, Publisher, Man of Books,” Publishers’ Weekly, 186 (1964), 85-90.

[6]Ward Ritchie, “The Ward Ritchie Press and Anderson, Ritchie & Simon” (Los Angeles: Anderson, Ritchie & Simon, 1961): iv.

[7]Ward Ritchie, “Art deco: the books of François-Louis Schmied, artist/engraver/printer: with recollections and descriptive commentaries on the books. (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1987): 1. See also Ritchie’s 25 August 1930 from his “Typographical Pilgrimage” diary in the Ward Ritchie Press Archives, ca. 1930-1978. Box 3 Folder 4. William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles: “California skies have that. They make one’s world seem larger and give a new sweet breath of energy that no man-made thing may offer.”

[8]Steve Tabor, “Slideshow Presentation: Ward Ritchie’s Artistic Influences,” Clark Library, Los Angeles California, [typescript], n.d.

[9] Ritchie “Art Deco,” 1.

[10]Ward Ritchie, “Typescript about Schmied”: 1. In the Ward Ritchie Press Archives, ca. 1930-1978. Box 3, Folder 6. William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

[11]Ibid. 10.

[12]Ward Ritchie, “The Early Years,” in “The Ward Ritchie Press and Anderson, Ritchie & Simon” (Los Angeles: Anderson, Ritchie & Simon, 1961): 5.

[13]Ibid. 6.

[14]Ward Ritchie, “Typescript about Schmied”: 2. In the Ward Ritchie Press Archives, ca. 1930-1978. Box 3, Folder 6. William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

[15]Ibid. 10.

[16]Ibid. 2.

[17]Ibid. 9.

[18]Starr 355, and Tabor 4. An undated draft of a letter (likely from early 1929) in which he solicits Jeffers for a poem to print bears this out, especially when we look at what Ritchie edited out: “And now, in admiration of the printing work done by the Grabhorn Brothers of San Francisco and Bruce Rogers and the other many others of our contempo contemporary fine printers, I too am taking it up printing, though as yet in a very amateurish way.” In the Ward Ritchie Press Archives, ca. 1930-1978. Box 3. William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

[19]Elizabeth I. Dixon, “Printing and Publishing in Southern California” (Los Angeles: UCLA, 1969): 84.

[20]Jake Zeitlin. “Small Renaissance: Southern California Style,” in The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 50 (1956): 18.

[21]Steve Tabor, “66. Le Cantique des Cantiques,” in The World From Here: Treasures of the Great Libraries of Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Getty Press, 2002): 136..

[22]Dixon 128.

[23]Ward Ritchie, “Typescript about Schmied”: 11. In the Ward Ritchie Press Archives, ca. 1930-1978. Box 3, Folder 6. William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles

[24]P.J Angoulvent, “The Development of the Book,” in The Fleuron 3 (1924): 71.

[25]M. Taksin, “Francois-Louis Schmied, Painter-Engraver-Printer,” in l’Atlantique [1928?]: 2.

[26]Ibid. 1.

[27]S.H. Steinberg, Five hundred years of printing (London: British Library; New Castle, DE : Oak Knoll Press, 1996): 136.

[28]Leonard Fox, “F. –L. Schmied, Master of the Art Deco Book,” Art Deco Society of New York News 5.4 (Winter 1985): 10.

[29]Starr 356

[30]For excellent examples see the bauhaus-archive museum of design [Web site]; available at .

[31]Ritchie “Art Deco” 3.

[32]Tabor “Slideshow” 6.

[33]Ward Ritchie, 20 June 1931 entry, “Typographical Pilgrimage” diary in the Ward Ritchie Press Archives, ca. 1930-1978. Box 3 Folder 4. William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

[34]Mauroo Nasti, Schmied (Schio (Vicenza): Guido Tamoni Editore, 1991): 51, 61.

[35]See also W. Michael Sheehe, who writes, “The parameters of the page, its typographical elements, its formal components, available technology, all must be reckoned with in relationship to each other—to render some state of unity and harmony.” In “FL Schmied: Art Deco Illustrator.” American book Collector 3 (May/June 1980: 6.

[36][11?] October 1930 entry, “Typographical Pilgrimage” diary in the Ward Ritchie Press Archives, ca. 1930-1978. Box 3 Folder 4. William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

[37][?] 1931 entry, “Typographical Pilgrimage” diary in the Ward Ritchie Press Archives, ca. 1930-1978. Box 3 Folder 4. William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

[38]Starr 359.

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