The Print Workshop

The Print Wokshop (TPW) opened in San Francisco in 1951 and closed in 1955. It was an integral part of two important start-ups in the world of U.S. avant-garde poetry: Jargon Book 1, printed in 1951, and Pocket Poets 1, printed in 1955.
TPW was founded by David Ruff who had studied and worked with Stanley William Hayter at his renowned Atelier 17C in New York for four years. In Ruff’s words, his plan was “to produce fine books of poetry - books such as those I saw on a visit to Henry Miller in Big Sur: beautiful limited editions printed in Paris with etchings and lithographs by great artists”.
Ruff and his wife Holly Beye (Iowa City, 1922 - Lake Katrine NY, 2001) left Greenwich Village and arrived in San Francisco on October 1, 1950. By the spring of 1951, Ruff had taught himself how to set type and had acquired a letterpress. Working out of the basement of his house at 970 Broadway, then at 509 Sansome Street, he designed, printed and did etchings for limited editions of poems by Beye (Do Keep Thee in the Stoney Bowes, 1951; In the City of Sorrowing Clouds, 1951; Stairwells & Marriages, 1955); Orchards, Thrones & Caravans (1952) by Kenneth Patchen; and Garbage Litters the Iron Face of the Sun’s Child, Jargon Book 1 (1951) by Jonathan Williams. He worked with the little magazine Inferno; taught evening classes in fine-press printing and engraving methods; and did commercial jobs - business cards for neighborhood dressmakers, letterhead paper, concert programs - to keep going.
An exhibit of his work was held at the Book Club of California in 1952 and an etching by Ruff acquired by Moore Achenbach is in The Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco. Other prints and books from TPW are in the collections of the Rare Book Room and Prints Division at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, Brown University, Yale University, SUNY at Buffalo. In 1955, Ruff printed the first edition (500 copies) of Pictures of the Gone World (Pocket Poets 1): “I spoke to him about printing his poems. . . . I designed and printed his first book. There was very little capital about so once I got some pages off the press, Ferlinghetti and his wife and friends came to my shop to put the books together and got them back to City Lights where they sold and sold and sold.”

At this point a constellation of factors led to the closing of TPW and Ruff and Beye’s return to the east coast. Keeping TPW going would have involved a major investment in equipment and staff and would have eclipsed Ruff’s letterpress, limited editions. In addition, although Ruff was a fine graphic artist and printer, his first love was painting and he realized that the work at TPW left so him with so little time for this that when he cleaned his presses at the end of the day, he would take the rags and make huge ink paintings on the walls of the shop. Things were not working out as he had imagined and wished: “I didn’t have the funds or the stamina to carry on TPW. To print editions in the way I would have wanted of writers that I could believe in as creators became physically and financially impossible so I sold what equipment I had and went back and got back seriously to painting.”

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