David Ruff

• Comment: I am marking this as "under review" and it may take a couple of days; I agree with the previous reviewer that this could be used in an article about David Ruff. An article about him was deleted (PROD) a few years ago, and I'll ask for it to be restored in my userspace to see what, if anything, could be saved from it.
  A previous article about The Print Workshop was deleted in 2017 following a discussion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/The Print Workshop, which suggested that the content should be merged into David Ruff. I don't know whether that was actually done. bonadea contributions talk 12:44, 12 June 2022 (UTC)

• Comment: The draft appears to be more about David Ruff than the workshop itself - I wonder if this draft should be reworked into an article on Ruff, who appears to meet criterion 4 of WP:NARTIST. Spicy (talk) 06:11, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

---

David Ruff working at The Print Workshop

The Print Workshop (TPW) was a fine art print publishing studio founded by artist David Ruff (1925-2007), which operated from 1950 to 1955 in San Francisco, California. It was an integral part of two important start-ups in United States avant-garde poetry: Jargon Book I (by The Jargon Society) printed in 1951, and Pocket Poets I, printed in 1955.

History

The Print Workshop was founded by David Ruff who had studied and worked with Stanley William Hayter at his Atelier 17 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, writer Holly Beye (1922–2011) 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, 1952; 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.

David Ruff Working at the Print Workshop

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 Museums of 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 Lawrence Ferlinghetti's 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 [Bookstore] 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 [to Upstate New York] and got back seriously to painting.