John Nash

March 12, 1871 (age 76)

Woodbridge, Ontario, Canada

Nash worked at first in a foundry, until his father relented and let him enter the printing trade. He became an apprentice at the Toronto printing firm of James Murray and Company, but interrupted his career in the early 1890's to become a professional bicycle racer. In 1892 he returned to printing, working for firms in Toronto and Denver, Colorado, before settling in San Francisco in 1895. His first employer there was the Hicks-Judd Company; in 1898 he transferred to the firm of Stanley-Taylor. The excellence of Nash's work brought him quick recognition and promotion. In 1903, after two unsuccessful ventures in a company of his own, he did design and production work for the Tomoyé Press, newly founded by the San Francisco book dealer Paul Elder, Sr. , who had launched an ambitious publishing program. With its easy opulence, San Francisco had fostered a tradition of lavish, deluxe printing, a style that suited Nash. When, however, he and Elder moved the Tomoyé Press to New York City following the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the East proved unreceptive both to Nash's ebullient designs and to the firm's Western subjects. The press returned to San Francisco in 1909, but Nash resigned two years later to assume the directorship of the Fine Work Department of the Stanley-Taylor Company, which was now rechristened Taylor, Nash & Taylor. There he produced some of his best work, including in 1913 an edition of Brunelleschi, a volume of poetry by John Galen Howard, described by Henry Lewis Bullen as "a beautiful example of chaste typography, with all the details of proportion, margins, color and workmanship perfectly arranged". Ever an individualist, Nash could not long work for others. He left Taylor, Nash & Taylor in 1915, and after a year with another firm, opened his own shop in 1916. This time he met with success. Applying his considerable talent for salesmanship, he soon achieved a broad following among book collectors seeking finely printed limited editions. His most generous patron was the wealthy William Andrews Clark, Jr. , for whom he designed an impressive series of Christmas books, beginning with Shelley's Adonais in 1922 and concluding with Robert Louis Stevenson's Father Damien in 1930. The high point of the series was John Dryden's All for Love (1929), one of Nash's most impressive technical productions. In all his work, Nash insisted on technical perfection; he employed the best available compositors, pressmen, and engravers, and personally supervised each stage of a book's development. His most ambitious project was a deluxe edition (1929) of Dante's Divine Comedy, a four-volume work that was six years in the making. The type was especially adapted to Nash's specifications. The paper was handmade for him by the Van Gelder Paper Company in the Netherlands, and the printed sheets were bound in vellum in Leipzig. The edition was extravagantly praised. Nash's most lucrative commission came in the late 1920's from the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, who had him print, with all the resources of fine bookmaking, the biographies of his parents, Phoebe Apperson Hearst and Sen. George Hearst, published in 1933. The depression of the 1930's not only reduced the private commissions on which Nash depended but also dampened critical enthusiasm for his style. Yet despite financial difficulties he continued to do excellent work, including editions of Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography (1931) and Ralph Waldo Emerson's Essays (1934) for the Limited Editions Club. Nash closed his San Francisco shop in 1938 and moved to the University of Oregon, where he had since 1926 held the title of lecturer in typography and the history of printing in the School of Journalism and, on annual visits, had supervised the Fine Arts Press. When his relations with the University of Oregon deteriorated, he returned to Berkeley, California, in 1943 to live with his daughter and died there of arteriosclerosis at the age of seventy-six. Egalitarian by nature, Nash lectured widely and attracted a large audience of laymen to fine printing. A reaction to the excessive praise bestowed upon his work in the 1920's began in the following decade and has only recently been tempered by re-evaluation. It was his artistic rather than his technical reputation that suffered. Although he employed a variety of materials and typefaces, he adhered rigidly to two or three archaic typographical themes. As a result his pages often lacked warmth; and since he made little attempt to correlate subject matter and design, he often failed to convey a sense of the book's "spirit. " Some also thought Nash's designs too self-assertive. Nash's reply would have been that the physical makeup of a book constituted a form of art, and that the book designer, as an artist, was justified in calling attention to his work.

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