Jack Stauffacher

Stauffacher died at home in Tiburon, California, in November 2017, at the age of 96.

Stauffacher was added to the distinguished list of AIGA medalists in 2004.

His work was the subject of a short biographical documentary film by filmmaker Jim Faris, Jack Stauffacher, Printer (2002).

Much of his life and work is documented in the book A Typographic Journey: The History of the Greenwood Press (1999) published as a limited edition book by the Book Club of California.

Several of his experimental compositions using wood and metal type are in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the Stanford University Library, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). He was the subject of an article and his work featured on the cover of the groundbreaking Emigre magazine in 1998.

In 1966, he reopened the Greenwood Press in a building at 300 Broadway in the North Beach neighborhood of 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.

In 1955, he received a Fulbright grant for three years of study in Florence, Italy, and decided to close Greenwood Press. There he met master printers Giovanni Mardersteig and Alberto Tallone [it], whose work and ideas influenced him profoundly.

At the age of 13, he established the Greenwood Press. The press was 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 printed book appeared in 1941 when he was 20 years old, Washington Irving's "Three Choice Sketches By Geoffrey Crayon, Gent" based on The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent..

Jack Werner Stauffacher (December 19, 1920 – November 16, 2017) was an American printer, typographer, educator, and fine book publisher. He owned and operated Greenwood Press, a small book printing press based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Stauffacher was born in San Francisco, California, in 1920, and he grew up in nearby San Mateo, California. His father Frank A. Stauffacher was a plumber, and his mother was Elsa R. Stauffacher. His brother, Frank Stauffacher, was a filmmaker and ran the pioneering Art in Cinema cinema series at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from 1946 to 1954. His sister in law was designer Barbara Stauffacher Solomon.