Background
Daniel Berkeley Updike was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the only child of Caesar Augustus Updike, a lawyer, and Elisabeth Bigelow (Adams) Updike. His first American ancestor, Gysbert op Dyck, was a native of Westphalia who came to New Amsterdam in the 1630's and married a daughter of Richard Smith, the first English settler of the Narragansett country. Through this marriage Smith's lands around what became Wickford, R. I, passed to the Updike family, which stayed on or close to them for more than two centuries. He was a slight, physically frail, shy boy with protruding ears, and was dominated by his mother, a woman of remarkable intellectual powers who was intimately acquainted with English and French literature and instilled in her son the feeling that his origins placed him on a higher level than most of his contemporaries. His father died in 1877.
Education
Daniel Updike's incomplete formal education was acquired in private schools in Providence, where he was unhappy. For financial reasons, college was out of the question. Later he received honorary M. A. degrees from Brown University (1910) and Harvard (1929).
Career
After a winter as an assistant in the Providence Athenaeum, Updike went to Boston in the spring of 1880 to the publishing firm of Houghton, Mifflin & Company. He began as an errand boy, carrying proof between its Boston office and the Riverside Press in Cambridge, then moved on to preparing copy for advertisements. Although bored and unhappy, he learned much about book-making and became known for his taste in typographical arrangement.
He found consolation in the Episcopal Church, and his first published work (except for a few anonymous articles in the Atlantic Monthly) was a somewhat precious piece of antiquarian ecclesiology, On the Dedications of American Churches (1891), in which he collaborated with a fellow Anglo-Catholic, Harold Brown, younger son of the Providence collector John Carter Brown. The next year Updike collaborated with Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue in designing and decorating an edition of the Book of Common Prayer that was printed by Theodore L. De Vinne. Although the book was highly praised, Updike was mortified by its appearance, and realized that he could never fulfill his desire to "do things well" until he became his own master. As Harold Brown stood ready to finance the production of an Altar Book for use in the Episcopal Church, Updike left Houghton, Mifflin in 1893 and launched out for himself in Boston as a "typographic adviser. "
This was the beginning of the Merrymount Press, a name adopted in 1896. His original intention was merely to design books that would be composed and printed by other firms, for, unlike most great printers, he derived no pleasure from the feel of type or the smell of ink. Finding the appropriate typographical dress for a text was for Updike an intellectual exercise in bringing order out of chaos. For the Altar Book, which in its style reflected the products of William Morris's Kelmscott Press, Goodhue designed decorated borders and a heavy Roman typeface called Merrymount. By the time the volume appeared in 1896, Updike had designed nineteen other books, as well as various smaller bits of printing. He soon found that adding his design fees to the normal costs of printing done by others produced unacceptably high prices. To reduce costs, he reluctantly invested in a small amount of type and ornaments, and thus became a printer, with John Bianchi, formerly of the Riverside Press, in charge of the composing room (in 1915 he was made a partner).
The Merrymount Press became an indispensable Boston institution that never compromised with quality. Unlike the Kelmscott, Doves, and Ashendene presses in England, which established a style based on a specially cut typeface, Updike chiefly employed a variety of historic types of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. He soon moved beyond the heavy neomedievalism of the Kelmscott Press and found more acceptable inspiration in the Renaissance and the eighteenth century.
In 1904 Herbert P. Horne designed for him the Montallegro font, a lighter Roman modeled on an early Florentine face, that was intended to be a good "reading type. " This was first used in Horne's translation of Ascanio Condivi's The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti, published by the Merrymount Press in 1904, and subsequently in the eight volumes of The Humanist's Library, edited by Lewis Einstein, that the press published between 1906 and 1914. This handsome series of translations of Renaissance texts had title pages designed not only by Horne but also by William Addison Dwiggins and Thomas Maitland Cleland, who often worked with Updike on other projects. The Montallegro face was only occasionally used thereafter.
Although the press had three black-letter faces useful in ecclesiastical work, most of its printing was done in historic roman and italic faces that Updike rediscovered and appreciated earlier than most of his contemporaries. Having begun with Caslon and Scotch, he added in 1903 fonts designed by the seventeenth-century Dutch founder Anton Janson and the eighteenth-century Englishman John Bell. In 1906 he acquired Oxford, a type originally developed by John Binny and James Ronaldson, the first successful typefounders in America. These simple and versatile faces were long Updike's chief stock in trade.
In 1925 he added Poliphilus and the related Blado italic, in 1927 Lutetia, and in 1930 Bodoni, but in comparison with the number of faces available at the average printing office of his time, the variety was restricted. What was significant was the full and imaginative use he made of what he had. The Merrymount Press seldom acted as a publisher. Updike's belief that "the modern printer's problem is to produce books mechanically well-made, tasteful without pretension, beautiful without eccentricity or sacrifice of legibility" is exemplified in the many books that he printed for trade publishers in the early years of the press, and in the considerable amount of learned and institutional printing that he constantly produced.
The Merrymount Press was prepared to print a billhead, a penny postcard, or a label for a catsup bottle, but even these workaday pieces of job printing had the distinction and appropriateness that invariably characterized Updike's work. The variety and ingenuity of his designs is best seen in the many books that he privately printed for his Boston friends, and in the work that he did for his fellow members of the Club of Odd Volumes and the Grolier Club, or for the Limited Editions Club. In some of these he commissioned illustrations by the wood engraver Rudolph Ruzicka.
Updike was always especially felicitous when dealing with Rhode Island books or anything connected with the Episcopal Church.
During the years 1911-16 Updike gave a course at the Harvard Business School on the technique of printing which he eventually recast into the two scholarly volumes of Printing Types, Their History, Forms, and Use (1922), published by the Harvard University Press and printed at the Merrymount Press. The Harvard Press also published Updike's autobiographical Notes on the Merrymount Press & Its Work (1934), which embodies the essence of his principles and is the proof of his belief that "a trade can be practised in the spirit of a profession. "
Updike never married. Although a reserved man, without natural bonhomie, he had a dry wit and made a distinct place for himself in the social life of Boston. Under the disguise of an elegant dilettante he effectively concealed from the casual observer the vast amount of plain hard work that he put into the creation of the Merrymount Press and the maintenance of its standards. Updike was a founder of the Boston Society of Printers (1905) and its president in 1912-14, as well as honorary member of the American Institute of Graphic Arts. He died of pneumonia at his home in Boston at the age of eighty-one and was buried in St. Paul's Cemetery, Wickford, R. I.
Membership
Member of the American Institute of Graphic Arts
