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Regional Oral History Office University of California
The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California
Books and Printing in the San Francisco Bay Area
Clifton and Lois Rather
THE RATHER PRESS OF OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA
With an Introduction by
Paul Padgette
Interviews Conducted by
Ruth Teiser
in 1980
Copyright © 1994 by The Regents of the University of California
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Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading
participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of
Northern California, the West, and the Nation. Oral history is a modern research
technique involving an interviewee and an informed interviewer in spontaneous
conversation. The taped record is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and
clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The resulting manuscript is typed in
final form, indexed, bound with photographs and illustrative materials, and
placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and
other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material,
oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete
narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in
response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved,
and irreplaceable.
KAKKKKK KKK KEKE KEK KEKE EEKEREEE
All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement
between The Regents of the University of California and Clifton and
Lois Rather dated September 11, 1980. The manuscript is thereby
made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the
manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The
Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. No part
of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written
permission of the Director of The Bancroft Pease, of the University
of California, Berkeley.
Requests for permission to quote for publication should be
addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library,
University of California, Berkeley 94720, and should include
identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated
use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal
agreement with Clifton and Lois Rather requires that Lois Rather be
notified of the request and allowed thirty days in which to respond.
It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
Clifton and Lois Rather, "The Rather Press
of Oakland, California," an oral history
conducted in 1980 by Ruth Teiser, Regional
Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley, 1994.
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Cataloguing information
RATHER, Clifton (1893-1987) and Lois (b. 1905) Private printers
The Rather Press of Oakland, California, 1994, x, 50 pp.
Getting into the book printing business; buying a Sigwalt printing press,
and modifying it for use with one hand; Clifton and Lois’s backgrounds
prior to printing; learning from Jane Grabhorn to bind books; printing
limited editions and selling books; typefaces and setting type; Lois as
author of many of the Rather Press books; halftones and other
illustrations; the Moxon Chappel support group of private press owners;
modifying the house to accommodate the printing activities.
With a complete list of Rather Press publications.
Introduction by Paul Padgette.
Interviewed 1980 by Ruth Teiser for the Books and Printing in the San
Francisco Bay Area series. Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft
Library, University of California, Berkeley.
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The Regional Oral History Office, on behalf of future researchers, would
like to express its thanks to the following individuals whose encouragement
and support have made possible the oral history of Clifton and Lois Rather,
and the Rather Press. Special thanks are due to Paul Padgette for his
leadership in raising funds.
Robert Ellerbeck and Family
Bill and Marian Foster
Willis and Maria P. Foster
J. R. K. Kantor
Roger and Frances Larson
Bill and Helen Lee
Paul Padgette
David W. Palmer
Frederica & Monroe H. Postman
Albert Shumate, M.D.
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Dedicted to the memory of
Clifton Rather, 1893-1987
and
Ruth Teiser, 1915-1994
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TABLE OF CONTENTS--Clifton and Lois Rather
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION--by Paul Padgette
INTERVIEW HISTORY--by Ruth Teiser
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Background
Other Activities
Starting Printing
Buying and Adapting a Press
Some Examples of Early Printing
"Learning Something About Printing”
Lois Devotes Herself to Writing
Lois’'s Earlier Career
Lois Devotes Herself to Clif's Printing, 1969
Learning to Bind Books
Charting a Course
Selling Books
Paper and Binding Board
Setting Type
Typefaces
Equipment
Installing the Press
Observing Printers
Impressions
Halftones
Designing a Book
The Moxon Chappel
Current Projects
Next Books
Working Premises
Lois’s Postscript, 1994
APPENDICES
A. "The Rather Press"
B. "Good Impressions," East Bay Express, November 26, 1982
INDEX
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PREFACE
The art and business of printing in the San Francisco Bay Area are
significant in the history of printing in the United States and have been
an integral part of the cultural development of California. This series of
interviews with people who have been participants in and observers of the
recent history of San Francisco Bay Area printing stems from a 1958
interview by Francis P. Farquhar with Edward DeWitt Taylor. It has been
carried forward in the interest of recording details of the movement and
analyzing factors in its development.
To the series have been added interviews concerning other related
aspects of the San Francisco Bay Area book world: writing, illustrating,
and designing books, collecting, and selling them as well.
Until her death in June 1994, Ruth Teiser was project director of the
Books and Printing in the San Francisco Bay Area Series, and coordinator of
the greater part of the oral histories. The book, Printing as Performing
Art, co-edited by Ruth Teiser and Catherine Harroun and published in 1970
by the Book Club of California, was based on interviews the two of them had
done for the series. In 1989 the Book Club published Ruth Teiser's
biography of Lawton Kennedy, entitled Lawton Kennedy, Printer. Ruth
Teiser's expertise and knowledge of the printing industry contributed
significantly to the documenting of its history in this series.
The Regional Oral History Office is under the direction of Willa kK.
Baum, Division Head, and the administrative direction of The Bancroft
Library, University of California, Berkeley.
Willa Baum
Division Head
September 1994
Regional Oral History Office
The Bancroft Library
University of California, Berkeley
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Books and Printing in the San Francisco Bay Area
Interviews Completed August 1994
Dorothy and Lewis Allen, Book Printing with the Handpress, 1968.
Valenti Angelo, Arts and Books: A Glorious Variety, 1980.
Brother Antoninus, Brother Antoninus: Poet, Printer. and Religious, 1966.
Mallette Dean, Artist and Printer, 1970.
Edward Grabhorn, Recollections of the Grabhorn Press, 1968.
Jane Grabhorn, The Colt Press, 1966.
Robert Grabhorn, Fine Printing and the Grabhorn Press, 1968.
Sherwood and Katherine Grover, The Grabhorn Press and the Grace Hoper
Press, 1972.
b . Interviews
with Leah Wollenberg, Stella Parti, Duncan Olmsted, Stephen Gale
Herrick, and Barbara Fallon Hiller, 1982.
Carroll T. Harris, Conversations on Type and Printing, 1967.
James D. Hart, Fine Printers of the San Francisco Bay Area, 1969.
Quail Hawkins, The Art of Bookselling: Quail Hawkins and the Sather Gate
Book Shop, 1979.
Warren R. Howell, Two San Francisco Bookmen, 1967.
Andrew Hoyem, A San Francisco Fine Printer, in process.
Haywood Hunt, Recollections of San Francisco Printers, 1967.
Lawton Kennedy, A Life in Printing, 1968.
Wolfgang Lederer, Bridging Two Worlds in Illustration, Graphic Design, and
Education, 1992.
Oscar Lewis, Literary San Francisco, 1965.
David Magee, Bookselling and Creating Books, 1969.
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Walter Mann, Photoengraving, 1910-1969, 1973.
Josephine Miles, Poetry, Teaching, and Scholarship, 1979.
William J. Monihan, S.J., ed Bo vi
San Francisco, 1947-1988, 1989.
Kathleen Norris, An Interview with Kathleen Norris, 1959.
Clifton and Lois Rather, The Rather Press of Oakland, California , 1994.
Bernhard Schmidt, Herman Diedrichs, Max Schmidt, Jr., The Schmidt
Lithograph Company, Volume J, 1968.
Lorenz Schmidt, Ernest Wuthmann, Stewart Norris, The Schmidt Lithograph
Company, Volume II, 1969.
Ellen Shaffer, Self-Portrait of a Bookwoman, 1992.
Albert Sperisen, San Francisco Printers, 1925-1965, 1966.
Jack W. Stauffacher, A Printed Word Has its Own Measure, 1969.
George R. Stewart, A Little of Myself, 1972.
Edward DeWitt Taylor, Supplement to Francis P, Farquhar Interview, 1960.
Adrian Wilson, Printing and Book Designing, 1966.
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INTRODUCTION--by Paul Padgette
It was in 1974, almost halfway through the productive years of the
Rather Press, that I became acquainted with Clif and Lois Rather and
their press. The Bancroft Library and I had agreed in the spring for me
to exhibit my Gertrude Stein collection commemorating her one hundredth
birthday, augmented by materials from the Bancroft collection.
The early July day I was arranging the books, programs, photographs,
and journals in the gallery display cases, Irene Moran, who supervised
the gallery exhibit, showed me a book just received by the library from
the Rather Press. It was Gertrude Stein and California. I agreed
immediately it should be included in the display. It was my introduction
to the Rather Press and shortly thereafter to the Rathers themselves.
The Stein book intrigued me in its subject matter, the early years
of Gertrude Stein in Oakland, which had not been examined so completely
in earlier biographies. Maureen R. Liston, a Stein scholar, in her
in , agrees with me when
she said it ". . . provided invaluable background information on Stein's
childhood." A phone call arranged for my first visit to the "Little Red
House," lovingly portrayed in Lois’s 1989 Rather Press Addenda chapbook.
In 1952, when Clif and Lois took possession, it was a small cottage
surrounded by several huge trees and some smaller out-buildings. Clif
began remodeling and added additional rooms. They lived in one of the
out-buildings they called The Studio for a year before moving into the
main house. Some trees were felled, a cement driveway was laid up the
incredible eighty-foot incline from the street; landscaping was
ambitious. Clif and Lois did it all.
After the Rathers began their printing experiments in the late
1960s, more adjustments were necessary with the introduction of a large
Chandler & Price press. A special room was built, designed by Lois’s
brother Willis Foster. Clif was no longer able to do the physical work
as before; he had a heart attack and stroke followed by paralysis in his
left arm and hand in 1962. He supervised the work to his satisfaction
making it possible for him to use the more sophisticated press.
On my first visit I did not know this history. I was enchanted by
the house, its surrounding landscaping, and sweeping views of the city
and bay; most of all I was charmed by Clif and Lois. It seemed a mutual
admiration and it has only deepened through the years. I have purchased
all the major Press titles from that time; Lois added my name to the list
of lucky people receiving their pamphlets and chapbooks. Through the
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years I have been able to acquire most of the earlier titles. At
present, I am still lacking five of the major works before 1975.
Although it is difficult for the collector to find the books, it is a
tribute to the Press that copies rarely come on the market. Limited
editions they are, indeed!
The Resident-Printer, Resident-Author private press created by Clif
and Lois is unique in that it only printed materials they originated
themselves. They searched for the obscure but fascinating stories with
ties to California and especially the Bay Area. The subjects could be
world famous--Kipling, Stevenson, Emerson come to mind--if they had a
California connection. More often the subjects had a special place in
the history of the state: Isadora Duncan, Jessie Fremont, Jack London,
Ambrose Bierce, and Gertrude Stein. Lois’s books on women as printers,
the Bay Area's "little magazines," early San Francisco theater, and the
Bohemian life here through more than a century are valuable social
history.
Lois’s background as a teacher and director in the San Francisco
Children’s Theater, studio director of a series of children’s plays on
KPO radio, co-author with Samuel J. Hume of Theater and School, all gave
a foundation that is reflected in her Rather Press books. In the mid-
1930s she was a research supervisor of the local WPA Federal Theater and
completed a valuable manuscript on this history of the Chinese theater in
San Francisco. She was a dancer with the Ruth St. Denis-Martha Graham
school of Betty Horst for some years. During this very busy early period
in her adult life, Lois worked as a typist-editor of a graduate thesis
shop in Berkeley and was variously employed by the University of
California history department in transcribing and research of historical
materials. When Lois retired after twenty-seven years of teaching in the
Oakland kindergarten-primary school system to become the Resident-Author,
she was well prepared by her lifework and experience.
Clif's life had been a fascinating mix of work ranging from
journeyman machinist, real estate investor and remodeler, bootlegger in
the 1920s, and an old car buff and restorer. He was a physical man.
When he suffered the serious heart attack followed by a stroke and
paralysis, it was a severe blow to his body and equally damaging to his
psyche. His early experimenting with printing was a psychological
outlet, both physically and spiritually. He was using his body--even
though limited to one hand and arm since the stroke had destroyed use of
the other one. Using Lois’s two hands and his one hand, the logo for the
press was born; three hands, her two and his one, reaching towards one
another.
The oral history that follows covers the progress of the Press with
many incidents along the way beginning with pamphlets distributed to
special friends as well as the major three dozen works that define the
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press. All or most of these are in the collections of the New York
Public Library, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Southern Methodist University,
the Huntington, Gleeson, and California State libraries, the San
Francisco Public Library, Bancroft, and others; and in the private
libraries of the lucky collectors who were able to secure the prized
titles. The editions varied between one hundred and one hundred and
fifty copies with no second printings possible.
I have been trying to decide which is my favorite Rather Press book.
It is difficult. The Stein book is high on the list because of my
special interest in the subject. I have a fondness for the Isadora
Duncan book and the Bohemian history for similar reasons. Bufano and the
U.S.A., Some Little Magazines, Bonanza Theater--all are wonderful! I
have great admiration for the chapbooks as well; they are so personal:
Jane Grabhorn and Thanks Jane, Sammi (a cat) and Life with Sammi are high
on the list. The Rather Press Addenda chapbooks Lois has continued to
write (and print herself) are beautiful tributes to family and valued
friends. This remarkable oeuvres complétes is unique and only surpassed
by the woman herself.
Paul Padgette
June 22, 1994
San Francisco, California
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INTERVIEW HISTORY--by Ruth Teiser
The suggestion that Clifton and Lois Rather of the Rather Press,
Oakland, be interviewed by the Regional Oral History Office came from
Robert Hawley, small press publisher and book store proprietor, who had
been told by Mrs. Rather of a recent illness of Mr. Rather that
threatened the continuation of the press. As he had from other bouts of
illness, however, Mr. Rather recovered and returned to work at the press,
although on a somewhat reduced schedule. He was still confined to a
wheelchair at the time of the interview, but was continuing to print.
The interview was held in two sessions, on May 26 and May 30, 1980.
Another photographing session was held June 2. All the interviewing and
photographing was done at the Rathers’ garden-surrounded home at 3200
Guido Street, in the East Oakland Hills that was in large part
constructed by Mr. Rather and that serves as both their residence and
printing workshop.
The Bancroft Library has a nearly complete file of the Rather Press
publications. Much of what was discussed in the interview has appeared
in their printed work, as they have frequently drawn upon their own
experiences for their publications.
The interviewer has been acquainted with the Rathers for some years
through their publications and occasional conversations at meetings of
the Friends of The Bancroft Library and similar organizations.
Ruth Teiser
Interviewer/Editor
June 1980
Regional Oral History Office
The Bancroft Library
University of California, Berkeley
ADDENDUM - -
After Ruth Teiser wrote the above interview history in 1980, the
Rather Press project lay dormant for some thirteen years, a victim of
inadequate funding. The interview was recorded and photographs were
taken, as indicated, but the tapes were never transcribed, and work
essentially stopped.
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In 1993, the Rathers’ great friend and admirer Paul Padgette took an
interest in the incomplete project. He realized the importance to
researchers of making the interview more readily available, and undertook
fundraising to enable the project to be completed.
The interview was tape recorded on an old-fashioned reel-to-reel
machine. The reels were copied to cassette tapes so they could be
transcribed using the Regional Oral History Office's more modern
equipment. The sound quality of the resultant copied tapes was poor,
making transcribing difficult.
Ruth Teiser edited the transcript and sent it to Lois Rather--
Clifton having died in 1987--who also went over the transcript, with the
help of Paul Padgette, filling in information that was inaudible on the
tapes. Photographs and other supporting documents were supplied by Lois
Rather.
Ruth Teiser died before the project could be completed. Indexing
and final proofing were handled by the editorial assistant, with the help
of Merrilee Proffitt, office manager.
Shannon Page
Editorial Assistant
August 1994
Regional Oral History Office
The Bancroft Library
University of California, Berkeley
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Regional Oral History Office University of California
Room 486 The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California 94720
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION from Lois Rather, 1994
(Please write clearly. Use black ink.)
Your full name Rather, Clifton
Date of birth_Oct ober 19, 1893 Birthplace Covperas Cave, Texas
Father's full name Samuel Houst3n Rather
Occupation Birthplace
Mother's full name Jessie Llewellen Carroll
Occupation Birthplace
Your spouses No. ls: Gertrude Mateer (4 Chiclidron: Chi fi
Grace,
Marileen,Claire
Nd. 23 Lois Foster Rodecape
Ocewpetion
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mid4us no childven
Where did you grow up? Texas
Education Hiagh school
Occupation(s) Various; finally a private press printer
Areas of expertise Carpentry, printing, photography, etc.
Other interests or activities
Was national director of Madel A Ford Club ? yrs.
Served in Navy 1917-1917, er7djnq as Yeaman.
Organizations in which you are active He belonged to:
W
Bane? A-Ford Club, Antique Avut3 Club,
etc., and in last years the Maxdn Chaopel
NOTE: Biographical data may De found in Rather Press publications:
Here's How, 1968 and 1970, etc.
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Regional Oral History Office University of California
Room 486 The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California 94720
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
(Please write clearly. Use black ink.)
Your full name L3iis Marjorie Foster Radecane Rather
Date of birth November 13, 1905 Birthplace Chicag3a, Illinois
Father's full name William Grant Foster (1877-1940)
Occupation Architect Birthplace _armstrana, Illinzis
Mother's full name Sve White Jackson (1879-1958)
Occupation "EWS editor, clubwiman Birthplace _WallacwWarla, Wash ONAasON
Your spouses: N+ 1: DeForest Allen Rodecape (1909-1943) m./G3e
Occupation Librarian Birthplace Spokane, Washinotoan
ghien “Wa. 2: Clifton Rather (1893-1987) wn. 1944
YORRRKE 28M Various: finally a private press printer
(N> children)
Where did you grow up? Streator. alinais
Present community Oakland, Calif 3 rnia
Education AB from S.F.State, 1947; graduate courses at boro Mil is, etc.
Occupation(s) 27 vears teaching: nov writing and private printing
NOTE: Bis craphical deta may be found
Areas of expertise in Ra > :
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1985-1994...
Other interests or activities
Organizations in which you are active
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Background
[Date of Interview: May 26, 1980]
This is an interview with Clifton and Lois Rather, concerning the
Rather Press. The interviewer is Ruth Teiser. The interview was
conducted on May 26 and May 30, 1980, at their home in the east
Oakland hills, where they also have their printing press. The
interview was intended to ask them to discuss how they got started
printing, what led up to it, and what underlay it, and then how
they have operated their press and what they have done. [tape
interruption]
Before you began printing, I presume you always read a good
deal. Is that right?
Oh, yes. Read many, many books. Mostly library books, mystery
stories and such literary things as that.
Another thing that I think would feed into it, then, besides
reading and being nostalgic, would be some mechanical experience.
Clif, I gather that you had experience in mechanics before you
started printing.
As a machinist during the war [World War II], I had some
mechanical experience. I got fired from the Bethlehem shipyard
when the foreman came around and found that I had nothing in my
tool box but a pair of pliers and some few little doodads.
But I took my tool box and walked into the J. D. Christian
plant [Christian Machine Works] in San Francisco and went to work
there immediately, and I worked there until--well, almost until
the end of the war, when I bought a house in Cow Hollow on Pixley
Street in San Francisco and remodeled that. Pixley Street is a
small street running parallel to the highway, whatever that's
called.
Lombard.
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Lombard, yes.
I'd like to ask you a little more about your time as a machinist.
Oh, as I say, I worked first for the Bethlehem shipbuilding
company, and then for the Christian company until almost the end
of the war, when I had accumulated enough money to make a down
payment on a house on Pixley Street, which I converted into rooms
for soldiers from the Presidio.
As a machinist, did you learn things about construction that
carried over to your building your own press?
I suppose it must have contributed some to that. I suppose it
must have contributed some, but I’m not sure how much.
[prompting] Now your record company experience.
Yes. Well, later on, I became a partner in a phonograph record-
making company. Our plant was on--what was that street? 55th and
12th Streets, but I can’t remember the name--
In San Francisco?
No, in Oakland. Then we later moved to a much larger building on
East 12th Street.
You cut records, was that it?
Yes, cut records. I was a full partner. I owned a LeBlonde
lathe, and that was my contribution to make me a full partner. I
soon saw that the business was going broke, and I was the only--
there were four partners; I was the only partner that had any
assets worth attaching. I had money in the bank, and I owned
rental property, as well as our own home. So I talked it over
with my other three partners, and sold out to them, sold my
interest in the record-making company to them. But I never got
paid anything for it.
Did you ever get your lathe back?
No! [laughs] No, I never got anything except a record cutter I
made.
Did you operate the lathe, or did you just own it?
Oh, I operated it. As a matter of fact, I was drawing premium
wages most of the time during the war. So that was how I happened
to accumulate enough money to make my down payment on the Pixley
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Street place, by working overtime as many hours as I could stand,
overtime, Saturdays and Sundays and holidays and so forth, you
know.
At Christian's?
AG J... D; Christian's, yes.
So all of that more or less contributed. It wasn't a very direct
route to printing.
No.
But it led somewhat to it?
More or less in a roundabout way, I suppose, yes.
Shall I ask Mrs. Rather now what in her early experience led to
her interest in this enterprise?
I think that I come along a little later. He started his press,
and I had nothing to do with it, because I was teaching school and
simply kibitzing on this deal.
Other Activities
I guess we should skip up then to the immediate cause for your
deciding to start a press. It was, I guess, after your first
illness.
Yes. You see, I came out of the hospital with a practically
useless left arm and hand.
Your first illness was well before you started interest with any
printing? That was in '62, was it?
Sixty-two was when you had the stroke. Then while you were sick,
you were writing an autobiography. I was urging you to do this as
therapy. You lay in bed and you wrote your autobiography on
yellow pads. Do you remember that?
Yes.
Then when you got well enough to go into some of the Model A Ford
deals and you got to be on the national board of the Model A Ford
Association.
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This was a hobby--an old car collectors’ club, wasn't it?
Yes.
Now about houses.
That's right, you built houses, and that then made you be able to
build a wooden press.
Yes.
The houses before this one he remodeled. But this was the first
one he actually built.
This is the present house we're sitting in.
Starting Printing
How did you get started printing?
Do you remember, the thing that spurred you on this deal was that
I wanted some stationery? I went to a professional stationers,
the Girl Friday or something. I wanted a one-line bit of
stationery with my name and address on it, and for 200 sheets I
had to pay five dollars. You said, "Oh, woo, that's just not
acceptable. I could have done that if I'd had a little type and
stuff." And then you decided that maybe you'd find out something
about printing. Do you remember that?
Yes.
All right, now tell how you went on from there.
Yes. Well, then is when I built on our kitchen counter a flatbed
press. I used scrap lumber, plus a rolling pin--the most
expensive part of it was the rolling pin which I think cost me
about a dollar and thirty-five cents. I bought some type, but not
enough to do a book.
Did I read somewhere that previous to that, you had bought a
little toy press?
Well, yes, but that was worthless really.
But at least it told you what a press should be?
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Yes. [laughs]
Did it teach you something? The toy press?
What did I do on that? Nothing on that toy press.
You never really used it. You used the type that came with it on
your own press.
You took the type.
Yess
And first he did just the cover for something that he had written,
and had the inside mimeographed. The booklet was called Household
Hints for Hippie Housewives. It's really about one of his other
hobbies, which has been for years the making of beer and bread.
Good yeast subjects.
Yes. After he had the cover finished and had a shop do the
inside, he said, "That's silly, I could have done the whole
thing." So he went ahead, this time doing the whole thing. The
amusing part about this is he wrote, "This is copy number 360 of a
limited edition." Well, actually, there were say 100, but he
wanted it to look as if it were a big edition. He didn’t realize
that smaller editions would be prized: as much rarer. [laughter]
What year was that?
Sixty-eight.
So that was your first real printing job?
Yes.
And you did that with the rolling pin?
Yes.
How much type did you have by then? Did your little toy set give
you enough type for that book?
Well, no. It only gave me just maybe one inch by two inches. It
was practically worthless. Then after I built my own press, I
bought secondhand type, mostly Bernhard Gothic sans serif type.
That's what you set up your autobiography in.
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So you got enough type to set one page at a time.
Yes. Just one page at a time. One page at a time. And we still
only set one page at a time, on even the big ten by fifteen
Chandler & Price.
You still print one up?
One up, yes. Takes a little longer, but if we don’t, we're liable
to offset on the next sheet. So we print--what do we print--we
print two days on and one day off, is that right?
We schedule it so we aren't ever printing on the back of the
preceding day's page.
I see.
Now, how about when you decided to do your autobiography in print,
and how did you get the new press? Do you remember? You were
going over to get paper.
Oh! We went over to King Brothers paper company on Potrero
Avenue, and bought a stack of paper, the cheapest paper they had.
Sulfite.
Sulfite paper. I had studied J. Ben Lieberman's book, Printing as
a Hobby. I didn’t find the book very helpful, but it inspired me
to buy a press which was far more satisfactory than the little
press that I had bought from Lieberman's company, which he called
the Liberty Press.
That was the toy press?
Yes. This was the toy. This was a tray about four by six inches,
and it had a metal roller. You were supposed to place the paper,
to ink the type with a roller, and then press the roller on the
page, and that would create a print, you see. But it was far from
satisfactory.
So that inspired you to go on and build your own?
It inspired me to build my own first, but on the way home from
King Brothers, King's paper house, we stopped at Somerset, a
secondhand dealer in printing presses and so forth in San
Francisco, and found the Sigwalt. Brought that home. From then,
of course, I abandoned the homemade press.
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uying and Adapt a Press
What size page could you get on the Sigwalt?
Well, six by nine. The chase was six by nine. By the time you
get the lockup then and everything, why, the page size will be
probably--what, four by--
You extended the size of it by putting extensions on it. Do you
remember?
Yes.
So that you'd get more margin and could use a larger page.
What size page would your original wooden press handle?
I don’t remember.
Pretty small?
I think--yes. I really don’t remember. I think I left a page of
Bernhard Gothic in the press. Well, Lois knows where the old
press is, I don’t know. It’s over in what we call the studio now.
But I used the Sigwalt for later publications.
All of this was on a friendly, sort of a social basis, and when we
got out a book, we would have a publisher's party, so it was all
very gay. Of course, nothing was for sale. It was given to
anyone that we knew or that we thought would be interested. We'd
get out little invitations that would declare a "Publisher's
party."
Some Examples of Early Printing
You're showing us now a little card which you have printed with
announcements of publishers’ parties and invitations to them?
Yes.
And this was the little book on making beer.
Was that printed on the homemade press or on the Sigwalt?
On the Sigwalt.
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On the Sigwalt.
What is this booklet?
This is Here's Know-How, which is how to make certain drinks. And
this is Cooking with Beer, because Clif is quite an expert beer
maker. Charlie McCabe once took all Clif’s recipes for beer and
made a Chronicle column out of them.
I thought this [showing card] was amusing. He just got
started printing; he also made himself a birthday card.
[reading] "How in hell did I get to be seventy-five so soon?"
[laughter] A birthday card to yourself.
He does that every year.
We're looking now through a scrapbook, a very well kept scrapbook,
I must say.
He used to have a beard for a while, and then he had a shaved head
like Yul Brynner. [picture in scrapbook]
These are all pictures of your husband.
We also did a series of poems which we printed, old-fashioned
poems like McGuffey deals and "Curfew shall not ring tonight" and
so on. Three little booklets on that there.
On the Christmas card, are those type ornaments or just drawn?
The tree is drawn, and the ornaments are typographic?
Well, no, the tree is a linocut [linoleum cut]. He had me doing
linocuts, because we didn't know anything about printing
illustrations. Then he started a series of limerick calendars for
his friends, and for the first one he got limericks out of a
library book, only slightly bawdy, because he's not at all bawdy
in speech. He doesn’t like four-letter words. And since then we
have done a limerick calendar every year, but ever since I have
written them. They're not bawdy, but sometimes they're amusing.
I see that you were getting more and more involved in the process.
Yes, because he kept saying, "I need something to print, do me
something to print." So then I would write something like this
ABC of Cats, because we're keen about cats, which we followed
later by an ABC of Dogs. And then liquor was always an interest
of his, going back to his bootlegging days, so we put out his
guide to liqueurs. Then we put out a series of toasts that people
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might care to use at fancy occasions. Here's another invitation
to another party.
"Learning Somet bout nting"
Then we decided we ought to learn something about printing. I
decided to invade libraries. In October, 1969, we completed a
little book on nice paper that Lawton Kennedy gave us, as I recall
it, called California's First Printing Press.
And that was the beginning of your learning about printing?
That was where we began to research the history of printing and
learn something about printing besides just having fun and tossing
it off, as we had done before.
To enlarge a little upon this point, you said that you had got
that Lieberman book and hadn't found it very helpful.
We later met Lieberman and his wife Elizabeth, and liked them very
much, and had some contact with them. Lieberman had been the
organizer of the Moxon Chappel, spelled with two "p's," which is a
local group of about a dozen private press people. Some of them
are also professionals, like Adrian Wilson and George Pfeiffer and
so on, but in general, it’s just a fun group. Eventually, Clif
became a member, and at the end, just about before he had to
become an emeritus member, they also elected me as a "companion."
Now, Clif, do you want to take a rest? This is about the
time where this thing comes in about how you dragged me into it.
Lois Devotes Herself to Writing
Well, Lois--I had to have something to print. I'd run out of
ideas for the small stuff, more or less worthless stuff. I had to
have something to print. So I talked Lois into retiring from her
job as a schoolteacher, after twenty-seven years of teaching. She
retired early, of course. If she had continued her full term, her
pension would probably be double what it is now. [laughs]
But at any rate, she did stop. She had been writing all of
her life, more or less, for example, for--
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10
--the Historical Quarterly--
California Historical Society Quarterly?
Yes.
And never sold anything, never was able to sell a manuscript.
Then at last I got a publisher who liked everything that I wrote,
and published practically everything I wrote!
That was me! That was me, of course. [laughter]
Mrs. Rather, did you start writing, did you start supplying Mr.
Rather's insatiable appetite for text before you retired?
Yes, quite a bit, and also doing these linocuts which were very
amateurish, but did sort of spark the material, and since they
were simply for friends and not supposed to be very professional
looking, it was possible for me to produce. Anyway, after many
attempts at these sort of silly things, as I say, I began to do
serious research in the field that was my particular interest.
Lois’'s Earlier Career
I had done a lot of work in theater after I got out of state
college. I had been assistant director of the Children's Theater
over in San Francisco, and assistant director of one of the early
children's theaters of the radio, which was done for KPO, then
located in Hale’s department store. I was working under Mrs. John
Cuddy, who was very well known in San Francisco. The top floor of
Hale's department store was a radio broadcasting place.
Well, this went on for some time in the thirties. Then I
think the Children’s Theater had to dissolve. At least the whole
thing went to pieces there. I came over to Berkeley to act as
secretary to Sam Hume, and also then through him got work in the
Bancroft Library--this was in the thirties--typing manuscripts for
theses, masters’ and doctors’ theses and so on, and transcribing
stuff for Lawrence Kinnaird, who was one of Dr. Herbert Bolton's
active assistants. So then I found out about how the historians
went at material, and how you had to footnote things to prove
yourself and whatnot.
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Anyway, my first husband, a librarian, died in 1943, and I
felt that I had better get into something that would provide a
permanent income for the future.
Let me just put on the record your first husband's name?
DeForest Rodecape. He was a cataloguer at the University of
California. This gave me access to Bancroft, and the interest
also in writing more or less serious material.
To go back a bit, in 1936, I had been invited to be research
supervisor of the WPA Federal Theater Research Department, which
was a small unit of four projects which the WPA encompassed. I
think I was there for eighteen months. I had up to twenty people
working under me, and we combed the local newspapers and so on,
discovering all the facts that we could that had not been used
before and that we felt would be of value to a local history.
All of this led to my interest in historical work. In the
forties, I had a series of--oh, I think seven articles printed in
the California Historical Society Quarterly. In the meantime, I
was busy teaching.
Lois Devotes Herself to Clif’s Printing, 1969
Well, then in June, 1969, I retired from the Oakland School
District job. I had mostly taught kindergarten and first grade,
which does not lead into historical writing. [laughs] Since
then, I have become increasingly involved in the printing, and at
present do all the typesetting, since Clif’s recent very serious
illness, and a number of other little chores, besides being the
printer's devil when he prints.
Let me bring out another thing that I'm still trying to follow. I
believe that you, Clif, were editor or publisher or something of a
magazine for car collectors?
Well, yes.
Did that give you some publishing experience?
I suppose it did, in a way. I got out a monthly letter to the
various chapters throughout the West, the United States, and some
foreign countries. I suppose that gave me some experience as a
publisher.
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12
Did you do some writing, too?
Yes, I did quite a bit of writing at that time. But now I'm too
lazy to write.
Mrs. Rather, did you edit your husband's writing?
I worked with him on it, and when we were having it mimeographed
or otherwise reproduced, I typed up the copy. When I was in high
school, I had learned how to type, and that was the most valuable
thing that I learned during my school career, I believe.
So that led into it too, then.
Yes;
So a lot of things, then, really led into all that.
Yes, all converged in the Rather Press.
So--back to where we diverged--you were going through your
scrapbook.
Learning to Bind Books
Now, this is the point at which we did our first bookbinding, for
Here's How II. At about that time, I was researching women as
printers, and I thought the most important printer in this area
was Jane Grabhorn. So we made an appointment to go over and see
Jane Grabhorn, taking over all these early things that we had
done. She was simply delighted. She gave us some of her books,
and she said, "Oh, I wish I were still printing, and that we could
work together." And sort of cheered us on.
These early books were stapled, and Jane Grabhorn said, "My God,
staples?" [laughter] We never used a staple after that!
So then she showed us how to do a very slick job of sewing the
books with linen thread, and then she gave us a couple of lessons
on sewing and bookbinding, the edition binding that she had
learned in the Grabhorn shop. And she lent us her large-scale
frame for sewing, and some materials. We still have an awl that
she gave us; she said we could keep that, for punching holes. She
gave us odds and ends of scrim and of thread and various things
that we would need, and said, "Now, go ahead!"
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13
So the first book that we tried to bind was this, d ow
Il. Well, we didn’t have a standing press. Clif remembers that.
We had no way to really press the things after we had pasted them
and got them in shape. But we used large bound packages of paper,
and heavy books and things, on the kitchen counter to press the
things out.
That led Clif to do his next mechanical deal, which was to
invent and build a standing press, which has a bench screw.
Yes, a carpenter's bench screw is the main feature of it, yes.
And this has served us very well. We can do--we are currently
doing it just as we did when we started--about eight books a
morning after the printing is all done and the assembling and
sewing. We paste eight sewed books a morning and then let them
sit for twenty-four hours, and the next morning do eight more.
This is after they're gathered and--
Yes, after they’re gathered and sewed, and--
No, after they're gathered, then I use an ordinary bench vise to
press them, and then she sews then--
First you saw.
Yes, I saw the notches, so she doesn’t have to use an awl to punch
into the paper.
It also makes for fairly even arrangement of the signatures,
because when he saws them all together, then they’re all in line.
He saws them all together?
Yes, he saws all the signatures for one book. He saws across the
back of them, all together, and then turns them over to me to sew.
Well, that’s an ingenious series of operations. Sometimes books
are sewn, though, aren't they, by machine? Like in commercial
binding.
All books that are not perfect bound. The telephone book is
perfect bound, of course, and then catalogues are perfect bound.
But all books that are not perfect bound are sewn one way or
another.
Yes. He also invented a--do you call that a template? A flat
board which is marked carefully. We lay the hard covers and the
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14
spine piece at an exact angle for gluing, so that they will come
out right without having to be trimmed, because we don’t have a
big trimmer, which most commercial people do. So we use deckle
edge text paper, partly to conceal the fact that we're not exactly
even on the sides. Also, because we like the deckle edge, and we
feel it gives a much more easygoing, normal look to the page. We
now, of course, use much better paper than we ever did before, and
spend several times as much as we did on any of the first paper.
But we figure that’s well worth it, because the whole look of the
book depends on whether it’s on nice paper or slick or sulfite or
whatever.
Charting a Course
As you went on learning something about the history of book
printing, as evidenced by your writing, did you learn then also
more about the fine points of what you were doing?
Oh, surely. I’m sure that that followed along. Also, after we
had done two books, Women as Printers and Books and Societies, we
decided that the best thing to do in our case would be to confine
our subjects to people of more than local importance and fame who
had had an interesting experience in this area. I'm able to get
at materials which in many cases have. never been available to
biographers in the East, and as you know, most biographers are
Easterners. I can get newspapers and manuscripts and whatnot;
Bancroft, for instance, has a great deal of very fine material
that has never been available to writers in the East.
They just haven't managed to get out here? They don’t know
they're here?
No, they don’t. So this is a contribution we can make, to tell
about the California experience of important people in this state,
like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Gertrude Stein, who lived in Oakland for
quite a while; Ambrose Bierce, of course, lived out here; Jack
London. We have tried to confine ourselves to material that might
be original unused material, and yet would be of particular
interest to us.
I think you've also set yourself certain space limitations, have
you not?
Yes. If we made the books too long, then our printer would get
bored. [laughter] And if we have too big an edition, he says we
would get bored--what is that you always say?
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15
This is essentially a hobby deal, and so we confine our books to
150 pages.
And 150 copies.
One hundred fifty copies.
Because if you print more than 150, Clif says it’s no longer fun.
No, it’s no longer fun. It becomes work then, and we don’t want
to work. We have enough troubles without having to work.
[laughter]
Selling Books
When did you start selling your books?
Women as Printers is the first one that we felt should be released
to the public. That and the next two books, Books and Societies
and then Some Little Magazines which were bound by Filmer Brothers
at Lawton Kennedy's recommendation. They have a shop up above
Lawton Kennedy, on First Street, isn’t it? Anyway, 100 copies of
those books were bound by Filmer, and then we did the others, not
quite having the courage to take on the whole thing. But after
that, we have done every bit of binding ourselves.
And after that, you sold everything except your little ephemeral
material?
Yes, ephemeral. But we gave books to our friends, particular
friends, and people who have helped Lois in her writing of the
books.
You've given copies of an edition that you sold most of?
Yes.
But since then, you've been collecting money and paying sales tax
and all that?
Yes. Oh, yes.
Of course, private press people should admit that for them it is a
fun thing, a pleasure operation, though it does not bring in any
profit. Our income tax statement for last year shows that our
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16
last year's profit from the Rather Press was something like
$2,100--
That's for two people, two people working full-time, 365 days out
of the year. How about that?
That's pretty good. You could be really far in the hole.
[laughter]
Paper and Binding Board
You were saying that paper has gone up how much since you started?
Oh, I suppose it’s gone about double.
At least.
At least double what it cost when we first started. You know,
inflation has taken care of that.
Also, an interesting thing about the paper is that we decided to
settle on one size, one shape, one quality, so that we would never
have to decide exactly what paper we needed for any book.
So you always--if there was some left over, you'd use it on the
next--
On the next book, that’s right. That's right.
Have you settled on a paper that you can always reorder?
We settled on off-white Curtis Tweedweave at the recommendation of
Adrian Wilson.
We get it from Butler Paper Company.
Yes, from Butler. It’s, what, ten by--
We have it cut--
--twenty, twenty by forty--
No, I think it’s more than that. We have it cut thirteen by ten,
don't we? It comes from the factory twenty-six by forty, so that
that cuts exactly. We get four big double sheets--no, four up and
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down--we get eight double sheets out of the great big sheet that
it comes in.
How about binding boards?
Binding boards we get from Gane Brothers & Lane, and Davey Board
#25 is what we use. They won't cut it for us, though. We have a
local man do the cutting for us, a man at Bargas Bindery in
Oakland. He really does do commercial binding as a way of life,
but he got sort of interested in Clif. Clif went down and called
on him and talked to him, and now he will do it for us all the
time, although cutting that board is so bad, we understand, on the
saws or the knives, that he has to wait until he has a knife about
ready to be resharpened, and then he will cut for us. This is
because it roughens up the knife so that it’s not good for fine
trimming for his other work.
So we take the great big packages of the Davey Boards in and
say, "We'll give you so long on this, and wait till you have a
dull knife," and so forth. But it saves our trying to cut it,
which we did at first. We used to cut all our own cardboard and
our own paper and so on. Now we're going lazy.
But this is also a uniform size for all your books?
Yes. That’s what we do. We started with the books smaller, and
then decided that’s silly, because we were having to cut off the
ends to throw away, so why not use the whole thing? And since the
paper was twenty-six by forty, we figured that a six and a half by
ten inch sheet would be about right for us, so that's what we
settled on.
Setting Type
[To Clif] So, to go back to the technical aspect of it (and I'm
going to stop in about ten minutes), you learned to set type. How
did you learn? Could you tell from this book by Lieberman how to
set type?
I just learned by guess and by God damn. But I learned--I set all
the type until my thumb deteriorated and got painful, and now Lois
sets the type.
[To Lois] How long have you been setting type?
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18
Oh, off and on. I often did some of these silly things, the
freebie books and the Ten Years and Fine Points and some of those
books. But Clif usually set the regular pages, until he began
having trouble with his thumb. He has a very interesting
arrangement of a coffee can on a chain which helps to hold his
hand up, so that his arm won't get too tired, because he had
bursitis one time. He also got the bright idea, which I don’t
think anybody else has ever used, of having a frame, a six by nine
frame I think it was--two of them--made out of heavy steel by a
fancy machinist.
Then we set type directly into the frame, which means that we
don’t use a composing stick. We set it into the frame instead of
on the composing stick from which it would have to be put onto a
galley and then paged. We set the page, and that’s the way the
page is going to be, the way we set it. We never have problems
with hyphenation going on from one page to the next, because we
rewrite if necessary to have the page come out right. It
certainly has turned out to be a very useful way for us to do.
It's traditional to use a composing stick, just as it's
traditional to have the type cabinet--type, what do you call it,
case?
California case?
Yes, California case, arranged in a certain way. I got the bright
idea one time of making the case--
The arrangement.
Arranging the case so that the type would be in alphabetical
order, A, B, C, D, and so forth, in alphabetical order. But then
I found out that that didn’t work out very well, because I
couldn't get cases made that way. I had to buy cases made the
old, traditional way, so I gave that idea up.
There are much larger compartments for E's, for example.
The California case has spaces proportional to the frequency of
use of the letters?
Yes.
And also the letters that are most often used are in the middle;
the A is right down here, instead of way over here.
So you had to learn the California case?
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19
Yes.
He had to adopt it, finally.
Had to adopt it, because I couldn’t buy cases arranged the way I
wanted them, in alphabetical order.
I should add in here, though, that a good number of your cases do
have A, B, C, D, in order, because the capital letters are given
normal sequence. So when we're setting type, if you have one case
of regulation Roman and maybe one of Italian (which is italics,
and is according to the other system), you have to make the mental
jump from where will the A be on this case and where will it be on
that case. But you get to do that automatically, just like
typing.
Typefaces
Well, just as you have progressed in your printing presses, you've
also progressed in types, haven't you? You've added--
Oh, yes.
How did that go?
I bought--I went over--I was more agile then--I went over to San
Francisco and bought secondhand types from secondhand type dealers
over there, usually for about two bits a pound, and then I'd bring
them home and have to sort them out, you see.
Then your first new type was--
For Here’s How Il.
Yes. Cloister Bold.
Cloister Bold, yes.
So this was for the second Here's How book?
Yes. Remember talking to Colonel Carroll T. Harris about it?
Yes.
Tell about that.
Clif:
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20
Well, I don’t know what you mean, unless I was discussing the
making of hot type with him, and told hinm--
This is Colonel Harris? Mackenzie & Harris?
Colonel Harris, yes. And I don’t know what he was colonel of. I
think he adopted the name.
No, he was a genuine World War II colonel. He just carried it
over longer than most people.
[laughs] Anyway, I reminded him that the day of hot type, of
metal type, is really over. Everything is done by offset now, and
photo typesetting and all that sort of thing. So he said no, he'd
stick to hot type as long as he lives, and they do cast and sell a
good bit. They’re one of the very few makers of metal type in the
country now, so they do a good business in mail order and local in
metal type.
Did he advise you to get--what is it, Cloister Bold?
Yes. And I think Helen Lee, who is a very good friend, advised us
to get this particular type.
Clif likes black type. His eyes are not too good for light type,
so Helen Lee suggested to him that Cloister would be a good thing
for him to pick up. And then he turned to Colonel Harris and
said, "And what kind of italics should I choose to go with it?"
and the Colonel looked taken aback and he said, "Naturally, the
same thing: Cloister Italics." [laughter]
But there is no Cloister Italics.
Yes, there is. You're talking about Centaur.
Centaur, yes.
But see, this was way back when. This was the first new type you
had bought.
Is Cloister still your basic type?
No. We haven’t used that for a long time. We use Centaur and
Arrighi and Spectrum, Centaur and Arrighi together, and then
Spectrum has its own italic. And we have large sizes, a twenty-
four point, haven’t we, of the Centaur and the Arrighi, and also
of the Spectrum, I think, for the titling. And then quite a few
other titling types, like the last one that we got, which was
Carolus; that was a gift from Dan Solo, and it’s a Swedish type.
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21
We used it for display titling on one of our recent books. I
think on the Emerson [R. W, Emerson, Tourist (1979)].
I'm going to stop now and come back again; we've come to a good
point.
Okay.
[end of interview session]
[Interview 2: May 30, 1980]
Today is May 30, 1980, several days after the first interview with
the Rathers.
The other one was on the 26th.
You have given the Bancroft Library every book that you've
published. How about ephemeral material?
Quite a bit of it, because we belong to an amateur group and the
Bancroft is on the list to receive all ephemera from Moxon
Chappel. So they have most of Moxon’s items. Then Jim Kantor
came out here soon after Clif sent his Here’s How I to Bancroft,
and at Jim Hart’s suggestion, he asked us for copies of anything
that we still had on hand, small or large, because they would like
to have it in their file. So except for the things that were
gone, like the first limerick calendar and a few things like that,
I think they have all the books and quite a bit of the ephemera.
On this memorandum you have listed the names of purchasers since
January 1980 of Rather books, and you said that you were less
active in the early months of this year, because--
Because of Clif’s illness. He was hospitalized for some time in
February. Usually, we do all of the casing and the finishing up
together, but since he was not available, I tried to do it myself,
and as I say, I probably didn’t do as good a job as usual. This
was all his invention, the procedure for binding or casing. So
when he wasn’t here, I just did my best.
Equipment
Is this device that you have over here the first press?
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22
That's the first press, yes. I made that myself out of scrap
lumber. The only expense was the rolling pin; I think that cost a
dollar thirty-five. [laughter]
So that's the homemade press. What did you use, one by two
mostly? One by two-inch lumber?
Various sizes. The thing from the ceiling is one by two.
Actually the strut fits up here to operate.
Yes, with an elbow hinge.
So that you could operate it with one hand?
Yes.
And this is what your first book was done on?
Oh, yes, that book. Yes, that book was the first one that was
printed on it.
This is the one entitled Household nts for Hippie Housewiv
How long did it take you to figure it out?
I have no idea.
Did you make the press one way and then revise it?
I had a neighbor with a saw do most of the work.
Did you have to use trial and error? Did you try one way first
and then again?
Yes, I always do.
And you did one book only on it?
That's all. Then, as I said, we bought the Sigwalt at Somerset's.
Let's go on to a description of the Sigwalt. I looked at it the
other day with Mrs. Rather, and she showed me how you have fitted
it up now for gold stamping. But originally, what was that kind
of press used for, first of all? Why was it built?
The Sigwalt was built as an ordinary press. It has a shovel
handle, you know.
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23
You mean it’s really a handle that you can grip the way you grip a
shovel?
Yes.
It was a six-by-nine originally, but you extended the size.
Yes. The chase itself is six by nine inches in diameter, but we
extended it for gold stamping.
Did you extend it for printing?
Yes, you did. You printed a lot of stuff, like California's First
Printing Press [1969] and San Francisco's First Printing Press
[1970] on that, extending out the area so that it would hold the
big sheet, the big double sheet. Otherwise, you couldn't let go
of the sheet to pull the handle or it would skew.
But it didn’t extend the printing area, just the paper size? Is
that right?
Just the paper size, yes.
I see. How many books did you use that on?
Just the one, I guess--
No, you did quite a bit of work on that. You didn’t get the big
one until I think Qakland’s Image [1972]. I think you did the
first three little books that Filmer bound for us--besides a lot
of the things in between. But I think it was Qakland’s Image that
was the first one that you did on the big press.
On the big press, I see. What made you decide to get a big one?
Why didn’t you like that Sigwalt?
It was too slow. It was much too slow, and much too inaccurate.
The paper would slide sideways and it was very inaccurate. So
then we bought the ten by fifteen Chandler & Price press from
Somerset. We first set it up in the garage, until it became
obviously too hard for me to bring the cases of type up for Lois
to help me proof then.
Your composing room is here in the same level as most of the rest
of the house.
Yes, itis:
And so this was one story below.
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24
Yes. So that was one story, and that--
There’s an outside stair, too. In the rain, that was a little
bad.
Was it a big investment, to get the new press?
Well, it was at the time, because we didn’t have as much money
then as we do now. It was a pretty big investment.
Wasn't $375 the basic price for it? And then we had to pay to
have a fancy delivery up the hill and into the ground-level press
room.
They had to use a--they had to put it on rollers and use a come-
along to pull it from one place to another, and then put it on
three-quarter-inch plywood.
It was a professional job. We got a professional mover to do it,
and he was most disgusted because the order included a big cabinet
with a real marble stone on the top, the marble stone you use for
a composing stone. The man, in bringing it up on a long chain
thing, dropped it off and broke it.
Oh!
So then he had to replace it. I mean, he was very nice about it,
but he said it was almost impossible to find one of these big
marble slabs. He did find us one, but it’s about, oh, maybe an
inch and a half or two inches thick.
How about those broken pieces, where are they?
They make nice stepping stones. [laughter]
Then you moved the Chandler & Price up to this level.
Installing the Press
The professionals said that they would have to cut a hole in the
garage roof and then get a hoist up here, if that were possible,
and lift the press up, and get it over the roof, that was the only
way they could see to do it. We asked a couple of them, and they
were completely nonplussed by the problem. The new print shop was
at the back side of this sloping lot, behind the house.
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25
Les Lloyd said, "Oh, we could do that," and he got about five
or six volunteers, including his son Richard and Marvin Calvert,
and Bill Lee, and my brother Willis Foster, who contributed the
carpentry and built the base for the press. Ona rainy, bad day,
they struggled it all the way around the place. It was documented
with our thank-yous and our celebration.
What is the title of your account?
Oh, that’s called Rather Press Uplifted.
Is there a copy of that in the Bancroft Library?
I think so.
Observing Printers
Incidentally, had you observed other people printing as you had
seen Lawton or Alfred Kennedy?
Oh, yes. We went over there many times.
So you watched what they were doing?
Yes.
We went down to Sherwood Grover’s; Jane Grabhorn suggested that we
go down there.
So you saw Sherwood Grover printing, too.
Yes. We also went to Adrian Wilson's. He was most helpful about
paper, and sent us to a good friend of his who handles his paper,
the Butler Paper Company, and also persuaded Clif that he should
invest in the more expensive paper because he'd get so much better
results.
Is it easier to print on better paper?
Oh, yes. Oh, much easier, much easier.
Any other printers whose shops you visited?
Roger Levenson's. He was at the time teaching printing at the
university.
‘ll
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<W&SATHER PRESS UPLIFTED
Rigorous effort on the part of seven saintly male volunteers
Resulted on December 14, 1974, in transport and relocation fo-
R the venerable Rather C & P, first installed in a garage nook
Reached by an exterior flight of brick steps.(And Clif prefe-
Rs bare feet for home transit, as he has opined frequently.)
Rallying round for the Herculean task were: Lester Lloyd,
Richard Lloyd, William Lee, Marvin Calvert, James Mo-
Ratti, Willis Foster and Bill Fox; official kibitzer in ba-
Re feet and leaning on a cane through a sudden and unapp-
Reciated drizzle was Printer Clif, teasing the fellows with offe-
Rs of beer, safety pins and bandaids in readiness. #5
Reasonable estimates of the distance traveled by the C & P
Range from 150 feet to a half mile, depending on musculatu-
Re and inclination. It took six hours, a lot of yellow nylon
Rope, an active Come-Along, four big pipe rollers, perspi-
Ration and know-how to shunt the press across the drive, up a
Ramp (narrow), around a deodar and the house, up a se-
Ries of stepping stones, down a slide under a black acacia to
Rest at last on a pile of railroad ties for reassembly. A small
Room specially built by Willis and Bill Fox was then floo-
Red and closed in. Voila! As one of the weary volunteers coyly
Remarked: “Now for the first time Clif is going to be p-
Rinting on the level!” #9,
Rather Press is open for inspection in its new location upon
Requisite notice. #7,
Rather gratitude and enthusiasm have reached new heights.
Rather Press, 3200 Guido Street, Oakland, CA sor
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26
I believe Adrian Wilson also.
Yes, we spoke of him. And quite a few of the Moxons, because the
Moxon people take turns hosting the group at their homes, and the
homes are where their presses are. So every time we went to a
home, we'd see the press set-up, and sometimes see it in action.
So you did more observing than you might have if you just stayed
here and printed. After you had taught yourself enough to know
what to observe?
Yes.
Les Lloyd came in a couple of times here, too, and suggested
things for you when you had problems, remember?
Yes.
And Wayne Dye, who acquired the big press for you, gave you a lot
of help.
And still does.
Any time he has a real problem, he can call on Wayne Dye. Do you
know Wayne? He's a retired professional typesetter, and he has a
quite complicated private setup now. He's retired. Has a small
press and a linotype and all kinds of cases of type and ornaments
and things, and is very generous about lending them. There
probably are others that we visited, too, because every time we
visited them, Clif would say, "Can I see your press?" And then
take a look.
What sort of problems do you have, when you phone Wayne Dye?
Well, the principal problem that I have in press operation is
overinking, too much ink. That clouds up the pads, you know. It
also makes it difficult to read. People are used to reading books
that are lighter, using less ink.
You have been able to lick that yourself, more or less. But you
did have problems with early inks that you used, and you were
advised to use latex. That was one of the big steps.
Yes. We were advised to use latex inks.
Rubber -based.
Rubber-based inks.
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27
Are they just as permanent?
Well, they don’t dry up quite so fast on a press.
Instead of washing your ink table down every day when you do
printing, you can keep that latex ink on for several days without
any problem of it hardening. Much easier to handle.
And it’s not greasy, you said?
No.
No.
So you don't need the kind of solvents that most print shops use?
No.
He doesn’t use much solvent. Once in a while.
Very seldom. I have a little one-ounce bottle of solvent and once
in a while I put about three or four drops of ink on the ink
table. I then dribble solvent on the ink table, to soften up the
ink.
Once a month, you completely clean it off, remove all of the pads
and put new ones on. But that’s once a month.
That's when I think of it. [laughter]
Well, if you don’t think of it, what happens? Everything goes
wrong?
No,.-it; still works: all: right:
It’s an accumulation of lint from the paper.
Like an automobile, if you put off having it lubricated, it’s not
going to stop. It will keep going. It may wear out a little
faster, but it will keep going.
How about your C&P press? Was it in pretty good condition when
you got it?
Yes. It was in excellent condition. We bought that from Wayne
Dye. I think, although it was made in 1926--we looked up the
number and found out that it was made in 1926--it was never used
for printing anything apparently except small stuff, handbills and
that sort of thing, in a job shop.
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28
So it didn't have to have new parts or anything like that?
No.
But you should give Monroe Postman a little praise here.
Monroe Postman. They live in Palo Alto, I believe. He gives us
quite a bit of help, and she--they have a secondhand shop near
their home. He made for me, which I'll show you later if you
want, a--
An electronic--
Electronic gadget with a dial, you can speed up or slow down the
press as much as you want to.
He uses an electric motor on the press, so that he'll have his one
hand free for the hand feeding. He sets the motor going at a slow
pace, and then puts in the paper, and then lets it go through the
printing operation. Then he takes it out. So with the one hand--
the people who have two hands can put in with one hand, take out
with the other, put in with one hand, take out with the other.
But see, he can’t do that. So this is one reason he has trouble
with overinking.
Oh, going around with no paper.
Yes.
I see. So this slows it down? That's a rheostat.
Yes. That slows it down to exactly half. Yes, with the rheostat
I can speed it up or slow it down as much as I want to.
It's a very clever device.
Impressions
Ordinarily, when you're printing, how many impressions do you do,
say, in an hour- or two-hour span, or whatever?
I think it takes me about--
Once you do the makeready and made sure of the evenness of the
color that you’re getting and do all that messing around--of
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course, supposing that the typos were already corrected--then when
you once begin the cycle, it’s only forty-five minutes, maybe?
Approximately, for 150 copies.
How long does it take you to do the makeready?
I don’t know how long that takes.
Well, sometimes it’s half an hour. Sometimes you're changing the
packing and tearing out a spot that’s too black. Then the
numerals may punch through the paper, and you’re always trying to
have a minimum amount of impression on the other side, because
there will be another page printed on the other side. It’s just
bad printing to have it go through too much.
Not like the Grabhorns’ standard--?
They wanted that impression, they wanted it to have an embossed
effect, but you can’t go to the extent of having both sides
embossed [laughing] or you're going to get into difficulties.
Well, like this, for instance. Here's a book that was printed on
both sides, this paper was printed on both sides. You can’t feel
the letters punching through.
To some extent you can. It’s like a typewriter. An electric
typewriter doesn’t punch the periods through. I use the old-
fashioned kind, and it does.
So, when you actually get the ink ready, it takes you, you said
about forty-five minutes to do 150 impressions?
Hundred and fifty, yes. A hundred and fifty is about our limit,
because it’s a hobby operation, you know. From beginning to end
it’s a hobby operation, and if I do more than 150, then it becomes
work, and we don't need to work. [laughter]
Halftones
One of the things that you should speak about is that you are
trying to minimize the halftones, because it’s very difficult to
print halftones on this kind of paper.
Yes, I noticed that you did some halftones.
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30
The ideal is to put special pages in to take the halftones, or
we've cut out some illustrations after he prints them on special
paper, and I tip them in.
In Rather A Small Press [1976], didn’t I see some little halftones
in that?
Yes. See, we tipped those in.
Those are tipped in. Are they on photo stock?
{opens book] Oh, yes.
Oh, there's some in this, too. Ten Years of the Rather Press
[1978].
But when we're doing a book, it's an important part of the design
to get illustrations that can be printed as part of the book if
possible. That is, engravings and drawings.
Halftones we can’t print very well on our paper, it’s a little bit
too rough, unless you're using a very thick paper or newsprint.
Newspapers use halftones.
They don’t get very clear print.
But they don’t get as clear a picture.as we like.
So you use linoleum cuts?
Some linoleum and some wood. But her fingers are getting a little
too--
Tender. [laughs]
Tender for that sort of thing. So we usually send to a place in
east Texas to have engravings made.
I didn’t do that one. That one was done by my brother-in-law,
Glenn Wessels. The subject was my sister, Kay. They were
Telegraph Hill-type bohemians before Coit Tower was built.
This is in the Ten Years of the Rather Press.
That illustration is used in "From Bohemians to Hippies," and
originally appeared in The Fortnightly, a small literary magazine
edited by Willis Foster [1931-1932]. It coexisted with a little
magazine, the Hesperian, edited by James D. Hart, later director
of the Bancroft Library in Berkeley.
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31
Designing a Book
Well, speaking of the design, which you just mentioned--you lay a
book out, how do you handle the design? Do you think it all out
in your minds, do you think it out on paper, or what do you do?
I don’t know how to answer that.
Ordinarily, I try to do the Adrian Wilson-type thing of tracing
letters and making a dummy title page and then figuring out if any
ornamentation is to be used, what sort we should use. In a couple
of our books, our friend Dan Solo has contributed specially
designed initials.
I believe that’s one there. This is Dan Solo’s work [Lovely
Isadora (1976)]}.
He made a large size initial for each chapter, and for the current
book that we're doing, he made pictorial initials, which we are
now using for Men W Be Boys, The Story of E Clampus V
[1980].
Well, again we're using the book Ten Years of the Rather Press as
an example. Did you lay out these pages? The one with the big
initial with a--is it a serpent?
Isadora’s scarf.
Isadora Duncan was killed by a scarf getting in the wheels of a
car. So he used that as a theme for making a set of initials.
Now, this [Ten Years] was one of the things that we have always
done. When we did these freebies, Clif often just turned them
over to me because this kind of bores him. We have done a lot of
little freebie books in between the hard-covers. Well, he just
turns that over to me to practice typesetting and so on. What I
did usually was to get all the material together, set the type,
then as the page fell, I would insert one picture on each page.
As you composed, you designed?
Yes.
That's harder. It’s a wonder it comes out!
Sometimes we had to change.
She more or less designs it, but Dan Solo does the finish job.
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No, wait. Dan Solo does what?
On our initials.
On your initials. I was wondering about the pages.
At the beginning of each chapter, we have a separate initial.
But this is only for two books that he’s done this. This is not a
regular procedure. What we do is to design our own books.
We designed practically all of this. This is our sewing frame
that you'll see later.
This is your drawing, Clif. Who is Dan Solo?
Dan X. Solo. He is a phototypographer. For this book he took old
pictures and drawings of Gold Rush men and so on, and made little
square pictures, and then set the display type on them.
I see. Does Dan Solo live near here?
Yes, he lives up the hill about two miles. He drops in’every once
in a while for an unexpected visit--he’s the only friend we have
that drops in Texas-style, you know, unexpected.
He's a very talented and creative person. We're very pleased that
he's sort of taken us under his wing, kind of big brother, giving
us advice.
The Moxon Chappel
The Moxon Chappel--you said you got involved in that group, and
was that helpful to you just in a social way?
Yes. More or less social--it started out as a private press
group, but it later slowly evolved into more of a social, beer-
drinking and ale-drinking group, that sort of thing.
There were a few professionals in it that do really professional
work, like George Pfeiffer, who had American West for so long.
He's a very active member, and I think perhaps is one of the
founding members. Then Lou Osborne, who did publication of
material up in Ashland, Oregon, he’s a member. Not while we were
there; we came afterwards. George Kane, who is now teaching
printing at Santa Cruz, is a member, an active member. It's been
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33
interesting, and it sparks a lot of ingenious examination of the
printing that you do.
We no longer go to the meetings, although they elected my wife
Lois to the status of companion, which is kind of a--the members
are called companions. They elected her as a companion, the first
woman ever elected, I believe.
No, it’s the only time two members of a family were elected.
Carol Cunningham has been a member for some time. We brought her
in, as a matter of fact. And Freddy Postman. And both of them
have acted as "dear father," which is the head of the chappel, at
different times.
Current Projects
Well, now we should go on to the future. What's your next book
going to be?
Well, the one we're printing now is called Miss Kate [1980].
No, we finished that. We're now working on Men Will Be Boys.
Yes, E Clampus Vitus. Have you ever heard of that? E Clampus
Vitus, we're working on that now, printing that. And later, of
course, we’ll bind it.
Dr. Albert Shumate did an introduction for us, and has advised me
about some of the content of the manuscript. We sent him the
manuscript to read, because it’s supposed to be an all-male
organization, and to have a woman write the history of it seemed a
little [laughing] outré. But Helen Lee is the one that urged us
to adopt this subject. She said that Colonel Harris was an avid E
Clampus Vitus member. [laughter]
Well, you'll have a hard time deciding who will get the copies,
won't you, because there are more people interested in it than in
some subjects.
Yes. [laughs] That's why we're printing 155 copies instead of
our usual 150. [laughter]
Well, you'll have some fighting among the members.
There are thousands of members, and I doubt if they will all feel
that they should get copies. We had a teacher in a Texas college
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34
write about a month ago and ask if we would supply sixty copies of
Bohemians to Hippies for a course in English that he was about to
give. [laughter] We might have come up with six!
Have you ever thought of putting your books on microfilm for
people?
Oh, no.
For wider distribution?
We were asked by the University of Michigan to allow them to
reproduce Women as Printers, so we wrote and said, "Sure," that up
to ten copies might be reproduced by Xerox if they wanted to. We
felt we aren't really making money out of this thing. But we
don’t like to have our material lifted by somebody else without
credit, so we said they could do up to ten copies.
Next Books
What's your next book going to be, then?
What are you working on?
I'm working on the Dunsmuir House and Edna Wallace Hopper, the
famous comedian. She lived to be in her upper eighties and was
considered the woman that never grew old.
She lived in a house here in east Oakland.
Dunsmuir House, which is still very active and very beautiful.
She owned it for a time.
Then what? What's the next book going to be after that?
I have about six subjects. [laughter] One thing, Josh Billings--
you wouldn’t think he'd have a California history, but he died at
Del Monte Hotel, after a lecture course in San Francisco, and it
may be that there will be some interesting material on him.
If we live that long, yes.
There’s Henry Mencken, who came out here at the time that George
Sterling was in his prime. Do you remember that story? He came
out to see George Sterling, and George Sterling got very sick--
very drunk, very sick, passing out, so that he couldn’t preside at
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35
the banquet in honor of Mencken at the Bohemian Club, but died
upstairs while Charlie Miller presided down below.
So how about the printing? Are you going to get a new press or
anything?
No, I think this will last as long as we do.
You're going to keep getting new type, I suppose?
Oh, I suppose. I suppose we'll keep getting new type all the
time. But not a new press. That's a major investment, even
beyond our means.
Well, I wouldn’t say that. But we would have difficulty getting
it in here, because this press is still here.
What about bookbinding, do you have any plans--?
Yes. We did a book on edition binding, Strictly Amateur [1971].
This book was not for sale. It was done as a freebie. We gave it
away, and then pretty soon a few people as far away as Toronto
heard about the book and wanted copies, but of course, by that
time, it was long gone. Anyway, this is the only one we did on
casing books. Tells how we did editions, not just one big
beautiful book, but an edition of 150.
Do you have any plans now for any further modifications of
equipment, or additions of equipment, or do you have your
bookbinding equipment just the way you want it to be?
Oh, we probably can improve it as we go along. We do make
changes. The template board on which we lay out the spine piece
and the hard covers, we adjust that every time to whatever the
book is, and Clif occasionally thinks of new ways to improve
things. We also are more and more simplifying things so that he
can do his part of the binding sitting down.
Yes. For the sawing we use an ordinary garage car vise, and
fasten it to the liquor cabinet here, and then saw the places
where the sewing is to be done, see?
Speaking of finances, we have talked to our income tax man, and we
charge I think half of all the utilities and the expenses of the
house to the press. We don’t charge rent for housing the press,
but we charge half of all of our utilities and half of our
automobile expenses.
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36
Working Premises
We're sitting in, I guess, your dining area--
Dining area of the living room, yes.
Yes. And is this where you do your binding, at this table?
This is the place.
And then we are spread all over the whole house, because our books
are often in different stages of assembly. Some of them are sewed
and some are just glued, and there are boxes of this and that, so
that the whole house really becomes a shop.
What’s the elapsed time on an edition of 150, how many days do you
have the house disrupted?
We do, on an edition of 150, we'll do possibly eight or ten a day.
But before that, we have spent quite a few days printing and
sawing and sewing, and then we have to do the gold stamping ahead
of time, so the spines are all ready to go. There's a lot of
preliminary business, like the makeready. It takes maybe as long
as it does to assemble the books just to get the parts ready to
go.
And where do you gather?
Here.
Right on this same table?
On the table, yes. And sometimes, it runs over to the counter.
Depending on how many signatures.
Depending on how many signatures there are.
So then it’s the final gluing and pressing that you do that’s
about ten a day, is that it?
Yes. Eight or ten; eight if it’s a fat book, but ten if it’s a
little book.
Thank you both very much.
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37
Lois’s Postscript, 1994}
Clif Rather was seventy-five when he decided to investigate
letterpress printing (I was in my sixties). He was confronted by
many problems. He had never used a printing press, and one hand
and arm were useless. He needed a lot of advice and assistance,
which he received in good measure from interested printers with
whom he made friends.
The dozen years of Rather Press operation were interesting
and rewarding years for us. I had always enjoyed the study of
history and had had little opportunity to indulge in authorship.
We decided to concentrate on those segments of history which
involved experiences of noted people in California. Being unable
to travel for research, I was so fortunate as to live within
reasonable distance of the great Bancroft Library, and received
generous encouragement in my writing from Dr. James D. Hart,
director. As he had a special interest also in private printing
and had done some himself, he cheered Clifton on, too.
When Clif died in 1987 at the age of ninety-three, I felt
that the Rather Press was finished. I presented the Chandler &
Price and most of the types to our good friend Dan Solo, but kept
the old Sigwalt and one suit of type, Bembo 14-point. It took
several years for me to find the courage to approach the press. I
had done none of our printing, only the type-setting and writing.
Then I unearthed some shabby little journals or notebooks I
had kept from age eleven. Selecting entries from 1917, I
collected and ineptly printed childish comments on the life of the
Middle West during World War I. Since that time I have sashayed
through the other diaries and family letters and histories to
produce a series of Rather Press Addenda in very small and badly
printed editions. Clif would have been amused.
He would still have been pleased with the many books he
printed one page at a time and helped to case. We were proud of
our shelf of small volumes. Here is a bibliography:
IMrs. Rather added this section after transcription of the oral
history in 1994.
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Rather Press Checklist?
N.B. All by Lois or Clifton Rather or both, as indicated.
Clifton, Household Hints for Hippie Housewives. 1968. 8pp.
Clifton, Here’ Ww u ° h art <p OSe aL Opp:
Clifton and Lois, Here's Know-How! 1968. 12pp.
Clifton [editor], Cooking with Beer. 1968. 20pp.
Clifton and Lois [compilers], Poems to Ponder. 1968. 1lé6pp.
----- , More Poems to Ponder. 1968.
----- , And More Poems to Ponder. 1968.
Lois, Ad Astra elpful Handbook. 1969. 24pp.
----- , An ABC of Cats. 1969. 24pp.
----- ~~ An- ABG_of Dogs.. 1969: 24pp:.
cocce , Strong and Sweet: A Guide to Liqueurs. 1969. 20Opp.
cocee , Here's to You: Your Health, That Is. 1969. 20pp.
All Tea Is Not for Smoking. 1969. 24pp.
California's First Printing Press. 1969. 28pp.
----- , Beads, Baubles, Baroque: A Gem Book for Smal
1969: >) 32pp.:
corre , San Francisco's First Printing Press. 1970. 28pp.
Clifton and Lois, Here's How, An Autobiograph rt iO LOR
126pp. :
Lois, Roses are Red. 1970. 24pp.
Clifton [editor], Poems for Printers. 1970. 20pp.
Lois, Life with Sammi: 1970.- 22pp.
clifton, Clif’s Fizziculture.- 1970. ~ 22pp:.
Lois, Women as Printers. 1970. 73pp.
----- , Books and Societies. 1971. 92pp.
Clifton, A Jug of Wine, a Waterbed, and Wow! 1971. 47pp.
Clifton and’ Lois... Strict mateur, A Personalized Manua
Bookbinding. 1971. 29pp.
Lois, Some Little Magazines. 1971. 10lpp.
----- , Oakland's Image: A History of Oakland, California. 1972.
163pp.
Clifton, Printer’s Progress, A Comment on Private Presses. 1972.
23pp.
Lois, Encounters: Some Incidents of Literary History. 1972.
78pp.
Clifton, One-Hand an u Handica
19725-; -L2pp.
Lois, Stevenson's Silver Ship; Biography of the Casco. 1973.
75pp.
coc-e , Railway in the Valley. 1973. 115pp.
2Reproduced from the Autumn 1988 Quarterly Newsletter of the Book Club
of California, Roger K. Larson, M.D., "The Rather Press, an Informal
History of a Unique California Press."
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Lois and Clifton, Family Letters; Printer's Progress. 1973.
12pp.
Lois, Two Lilies in America: Lillian Russell and e t
1973°;2 90pp.
Clifton and Lois, Oh Yes, We Have Bananas. 1974. 2Opp.
Lois, Jessie mont _at Black te 197477 LOSpp::
Clifton and Lois [editors], Thanks, Jane. 1974. 24pp.
Lois, Gertrude Stein and California. 1974. 107pp.
c---- , wack London. 1905. 1974.) 133pp:.
----- , An Amateur in the Archives. 1975. 8pp.
----- , Bufano and the U.S.A. 1975. 127pp.
Bierce, Ambrose, The Devil's Word Book. 1975. 25pp. [a
miniature book, 2 x 2 1/2"]
Lois, Bittersweet: Ambrose Bierce and Women. 1975. 133pp.
Grabhorn, Jane, Jane Grabhorn, Printer. 1975. 26pp. [a
miniature book, 2 x 2 3/4"]
Lois, West is West: Rudyard Kipling in San Francisco. 1976.
8lpp.
----- , Rather_a Small Press. 1976. 45pp. [another miniature,
22k, 21 Ofer
soe , Sammi -- 976. 1976. 1lpp.
----- , Levely Isadora. 1976. 125pp.
----- , The Man with the Hoe. 1976. 125pp.
Lois and Clifton, A Rather Private Press. 1977.- 12pp.
Loiss Bonanza neater: 1977: 2 l2pp-
Clifton and Lois, Fine Points: A Miscellany for Printers. 1977.
19pp.
Lois, Bohemians to Hippies: Waves of Rebellion. 1977. 16/7pp.
----- w Ding=Bats.-. 1978. > L2pp..
eoee- , Henry George--Printer to Author. 1978. 89pp.
== =)= , J. Ross Browne, Adventurer. 1978. 11lpp.
See , wotees Fountain..« 1979. 99pp.
----- SRW. emerson: Lourtst..7/1979.. 7 5pp-
----- , Miss Kate: Kate Douglas Wiggin in San Francisco. 1980.
91pp.
----- Men Will Be Boys, The Story of E Clampus Vitus. 1980.
95pp.
----- , Dunsmuir House. 1982. /77pp.
cocee , Limerick Calendars yearly from 1969 to 1981. Additional
calendars for 1984, 1985, and 1987. All except the first
were products of Lois’ nimble wit. These were not printed
for sale but distributed as gifts to friends of the Rathers.
Transcribed and Final Typed by Shannon Page
40
THE RATHER PRESS
IF THE DEFINITION of a private press is: a privately owned and
operated press which produces its own books for pleasure, then the
Rather Press is the very prototype of a private press.
It is located in a tree-surrounded private home on a hillside in
Oakland, California. Its owners try to do everything themselves
except make paper and type. They research, write, hand-set, hand-
feed to print, assemble, fold, hand-sew, encase, emboss the titles on
spines, with their own hands. Three hands, that is, since Clif has the
use of only one. Hence the press mark.
As for pleasure, they profess increasing delight, and hope they
manifest increasing proficiency, taking pride in carefully made volumes
on the best papers available, averaging two or three hardcover books
a year.
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Clif Rather
CLIF STARTED the whole thing after he suffered a serious heart
attack followed by a stroke in 1962. During the long months of
hospitalization and therapy Lois persuaded him to pencil an autobi-
ography. In it he sketched a variegated life. Born in Texas in 1893,
he left as a teenager tojoin the Navy, rising to yeoman; tried many
civilian jobs, including for a time that of bootlegger, was editor of
a small magazine, qualified as a journeyman machinist in the Second
World War, was partner in a record-pressing business, then turned to
real estate investment and remodeling. The Rather Press is housed
in their redwood home he designed and built himself.
Within weeks after his release from the hospital, Clif was driving
his Model A, restored by him in 1960 and winner of a first award
at the Pebble Beach Concourse in 1961. In 1965 he was elected to
serve as a director on the National Board of the Model A Ford
Club of America, headquartered in Los Angeles, serving for two
years during which he and Lois drove south for monthly meetings.
During this time he was Chapter Coordinator (there were over a
hundred chapters) and issued a monthly publication.
Clif next began experimenting with various means of printing
adapted by him to the disadvantages of using only his right hand.
He enlarged photographs, built a silk screen press, and finally
built his own wooden letterpress, a flat-bed model involving a hard-
wood rolling pin and a hinged strut to the ‘kitchen ceiling arch. In
1967 he printed covers fora booklet, “Household Hints for Hippie
Housewives,” on this press, then proceeded to print the whole
eight-page booklet on it. He was well into the project of printing his
autobiography, ““Here’s How, Part One,” when he acquired a6x9
Sigwalt Ideal of ancient vintage, which he used until 1972; it was
operated by pulling a shovel-handle like a slot machine's. °
In 1972 Clif acquired a lO x15 Chandler and Price job press
operated by electric motor, adapting the operations including hand-
feeding to his own capabilities (he dida little book called “One-
Handy Man” detailing some of the adaptations).
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Clif has been married twice. By his first wife Gertrude he had four
children, who have presented to the world his grandchildren and a
number of great-grandchildren. He and Lois were married in 1946.
Lois Rather
THE SECOND MEMBER of the Rather Press team was born in
Chicago, lived: in Streator, Illinois, where her father William G.
Foster was an architect and her mother for atime a newspaper edi-
tor, until the family moved to California in 1925. She received a
teacher's credential from San Francisco State College, then con-
centrated on dramatic work, teaching and directing inthe San Fran-
cisco Children’s Theater of Mrs. John Cuddy; acted as studio direc-
tor for an early series of children’s plays on KPO radio; with Samuel
J. Hume wrote a book called “Theater and School.” She was then
research supervisor of the WPA Federal Theater 1935-1936, danced
in the Ruth St. Denis-Martha Graham modern dance school of Betty
Horst for some years, studied painting and decorative art in private
schools.
For several years Lois worked as typist-editor of a graduate the-
sis shop in Berkeley, also at various times employed by Lawrence
Kinnaird and Herbert Bolton of the University of California history
department in transcribing and research of historical materials.
She was married in 1936 to DeForest Rodecape, a librarian at
the University of California Library; he died in 1943. Thereafter she
became a teacher in the Oakland Public Schools, primarily in kin-
dergarten-primary ateas. During her 27 years in this field, she wrote
and helped compile several teaching manuals.
In the period 1940-1944 six of Lois’ studies were printed in the
California Historical Society “Quarterly.” She has for 12 years con-
tributed a regular column to the MAFCA “Restorer.”
In 1969 Lois left teaching to devote herself to the Rather Press:
does the research and most of the writing, serves as printer's devil,
sets a little type, hand-sews the books, assists in most operations.
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The Rather Press
EARLIEST PUBLICATIONS of the Rather Press were in pamphlet
or booklet form, center-stapled. The first hard-cover book was
‘Here’s How, Part Two,’ which was amateurishly home-cased as an
experiment. Thereafter Clif developed his own tools, machines and
equipment, and an early book now out of print, ‘Strictly Amateur,’
tells of some of the solutions.
it was in 1970 that the Rather Press decided to sell enough
books to pay for the additional expense of top-quality paper and
binding materials. The first three such books were bound by Filmer
Brothers of San Francisco; all subsequent putliceticrs heve Leen
hand-cased with simplified equipment at the Rether home.
Major publications of the press have included:
‘Household Hints for, Hippie Housewives’ by Clif Rather (1968)
‘Here's How, Part |: An Autobiography’ by Clif Rather (1963)
‘California's First Printing Press’ by Lois Rather (19¢9)
‘San Francisco's First Printing Press’ by Lois Rather (1970)
‘Here's How, Part II’ by Clif [and Lois] Rather (!970)
‘Life with Sammi’ by Lois Rather (1970)
‘Women as Printers’ by Lois Rather (1970)
‘Books and Societies’ by Lois Rather (197!)
‘A Jug of Wine, a Waterbed, and Wow!’ by Clif Rather (1971)
‘Strictly Amateur’ by Lois and Clif Rather (197i)
‘Some Little Magazines’ by Lois Rather (197!)
‘Oakland's Image’ by Lois Rather (1972)
‘Printer’s Progress’ by Clif Rather (1972)
‘Encounters’ by Lois Rather (1972)
*One-Handy Man’ by Clif Rather (1972)
“Stevenson's Silver Ship’ by Lois Rather (1973)
‘Railway in the Valley’ by Lois Rather (1973)
‘Two Lilies in America’ by Lois Rather (1973)
Clifton and Lois Rather, 3200 Guido Street, Oakland CA 94602
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44
APPENDIX A
Friday, November 26, 1982 Volume 5, Number 7
Good Impressions
LUDLOW All-Sluo
: AWNNIVERSAR Y16
f Modern type's e
=e
Clif and Lois Rather
By Dennis Drabelle
love books. I love to hold
them. I love to smell their ink
and ‘paper. I love to riffle
their pages (gently). I love to shelve
and reshelve them until suddenly
they're in an order that lights up a
wing of neuronic circuitry in my
brain. (Norman Mailer and Gore Vi-
dal as neighbors—perfect!) I even
love to read them and usually have
two or three working. I hate it when
people mistreat books: break their
spines or spill picante sauce on
them or—truly Visigothic—bend
down a page-corner to mark the
place. In short, I am a fussbook-
budget. ;
So naturally I drool over—but just
to the side of—well-made books.
Their number is not legion these
days. Some of the most prestigious
New York houses are issuing hard-
backs that cohere just longer than
TV Guide. (Bookstores ought to
display these ephemerals in separ-
ate sections and put little wheel-
chair stickers on them.) For hand-
some, durable books, the bibliophile
has to look more and more to uni-
versity presses and modest-sized
commercial houses like Boston's
David Godine and Berkeley's North
Point Press—and to private printers
like Oakland's Rather Press.
The Rather Press is the trade
name for a Mom-and-Pop venture
run out of Clifton and Lois Rath-
er’s East Oakland home since the
mid-'60s. The press is dormant now
—Clif is not in the best of health,
45
and Lois most of her time
looking after him—but the 25 com-
mercial editions that the Rathers
little curve that connects the top of
an s to the bar of a following ¢, hand-
sewn, the cover and spine often em-
bossed in gold. (“We used real
gold,” says Lois, “until recently
when the price went up so much.”’)
Clif Rather is a white-haired and
moustached 89-year-old who be-
came a printer because he lives by
his hands. He's always used them
intensively in his work and hobbies,
and even now as he sits in the fam-
ily room, reviewing his many ca-
reers, his good right hand is in mo-
tion—stroking the edge of an end
table, fiddling with a tube of Chap-
stick, combing the cat's fur. ;
“When I was a kid—about thir-
teen or fourteen,” he says, “I work-
ed for a newspaper in
Cove, Texas. I was a printer's devil
—an unskilled handyman—but
sometimes I helped operate the
press (I had to jump to grab the
handle). I joined the Navy and came
to San Francisco before the First
World War, and I was a bootlegger
during the Depression, but I did
have one more fling at printing
when I was young. I did a little
counterfeiting. It wasn't very good
stuff, and I never tried to pass any,
but some friends of mine took the
continued on page 9
There was a time when
type was actually “set”
and books were made
one by one. For former
bootlegger, machinist,
and printer’s devil Clif
Rather and his wife Lois,
times haven’t changed
one bit.
as naa
oa) oa eh
Wares ooh
mr es a ieee ie ve ‘
Le On eee ts
ter ae
Good
Conunued trom page |
bills to Sacramento and managed to
spend them.
“I was a machinist in the ship-
building industry during World
War II.” In fact, according to Clif's
autobiography, he was a counterfeit
machinist who succeeded in pass-
ing himself off as an experienced
journeyman. Though he had no
training or experience in running
the machines, he had bravado and
his clever hands, and he became a
whiz at the controls. “I was a part-
ner in a small record company after
the War, but my later career mainly
involved buying old houses in San
Francisco, fixing them up, and re-
selling them. I designed and built
this house myself. I also took and
developed my own photos, and res-
tored Model A Fords.” In 1961, one
of Clif's restored cars took first
prize for Pre-War Non-Classics at a
show grandiloquently called the
Eleventh Annual Pebble Beach
Concours d’Elegance.
“In 1962, I had a bad heart attack
and a stroke. I lost the use of my
left arm—most of it, anyway. (I ask-
ed the doctor why he didn’t just am-
putate it, and he said the only rea-
son was that it would give me a bal-
ance problem.) Restoration work
was out of the question. I could still
use a camera, but it was a clumsy
maneuver, and I couldn't do any
my Model A.
it was so expensive I
Christ, I ought to print
* L took a book out of the
called Printing as a Hobby by
Lieberman, who's since be-
a friend of ours. The chal-
was to adapt the techniques
printing by hand to someone who
has only one of them.”
here was printing before
i Gutenberg, but it was a
Ha)
i
gee
The typesetting process used by
most hand-printers today hardly dif-
fers from Gutenberg’s five hundred
BUF {NO
46
) AND THE USA.
“The way we print books is hopelessly old-
fashioned. Sometimes the title page of a book is
still done by hand, but almost no one prints whole
books by hand anymore except people like us who
are in it for the personal satisfaction.”
LAL TI RN ST NSLP ATED eg
years ago. Printers “set” type—as-
semble letters into words and lines
—in a “composing stick,” an adjust-
able metal box with one side open.
the stick. (Spaces are blank pieces
of type that are not as high as let-
ters and thus don’t print.)
“blocks” them by hammering in
wooden wedges (called “furniture”)
to hold them in place. He inks a rol-
ler and applies it to the type face.
He lays paper on the type face and
applies another roller t6 make an
impression. If all has gone well, he
lifts up a printed page.
In his pamphlet, “One-Handy
Man,” Clif explains how he chang-
, ed the process to suit his handicap.
Essentially, he junked the compos-
A ‘ch
that it’s small and ‘maneuverable,
and printers who can use one can
stand and move it back and forth as
they pick letters out of their case.
But Clif sits while composing and
rests his arm inside a hollowed-out
coffee can hanging from the ceiling,
and his way works fine for a mono-
dextrous person.
“T built my own flat-bed press out
of wood,” he says, “with a rolling
pin and an elbowed strut attached
to the kitchen ceiling to give me
pressure. But I didn’t have anything
to print, so I wrote a pamphlet call-
ed ‘Household Hints for Hippie
Housewives,’ which was an instruc-
tion manual for brewing beer at
home. That was illegal at the time,
but the law has since been changed,
and you're now allowed to brew
small amounts so long as you don't
sell it. We had the text mimeo-
graphed, but I printed the cover in
April of 1967. The next year, we
bought an old Sigwalt press, six
inches by nine inches, and I printed
the autobiography I'd written while
convalescing.”
November 26, 1982: EXPRESS 9
Impressions
For the most part, though, the
items that rolled off the Sigwalt
during the early years were hijinks
and exercises: An ABC of Cats, An
ABC of Dogs, a collection of drink-
ing toasts. Lois began to illustrate
the editions—first with linoleum
cuts, and then with woodcuts. In
1969, Clif persuaded her to give the
books some content. “He told me I
had to be the author,” she says,
“because he was out of ideas.” To
ois claims she was a
“dowdy schoolteacher”
when she met Clif, who is
a dozen years her senior, at a Berk-
eley folk-dance party just after the
Second World War. In light of her
appearance today—a lively, blue-
eyed face framed by Imogene Coca
bangs, a smooth vigor that makes
true. Yet she does have a teacher’s
careful enunciation, and Clif un-
doubtedly saw ing solid in
her that he hadn’t found in an un-
successful first marriage and a
string of affairs in the bootlegging
demimonde.
She was born in Chicago, where
her father was an architect and her
mother a sometime newspaper edi-
tor. The family moved to California
in 1925. She became certified as a
teacher, but her first jobs were the-
atrical. She directed children’s
plays on KGO radio, co-authored a
book called Theater and School, and
served as a research director for the
WPA Federal Theater in San Fran-
cisco in 1935-36. Her first husband
was DeForest Rodecape, a librarian
at the University of California, who
interested her in fine books. She
worked as a researcher for the Cal
history department from time to
time, and during the '40s published
several articles in the California
Historical Society magazine. Rode-
cape died in 1943, and Lois became
a teacher in the Oakland public
schools, where she worked until re-
tiring to become Rather writer-in-
residence.
Their first major joint effort was
a book on women printers that ap-
peared in 1970, in an edition of 150
copies, some of them bound by the
Rathers themselves. (Since then
they’ve done all their own binding.)
A year later they bought a 1926
Chandler and Price platen press, a
job press of the kind that commer-
continued on page 10
Fanon!
gai of teem ha
; cai Bio ett
cial printers use for business cards
and letterheads. “It’s capable of
work, though,”
with them as far back as the 1850s,
so we have a long and rich printing
FE
Hy
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Am
Ft
d
i
SERS IE
ses 8
deeteee
ail
gasegey
Soiiiag
which, by and large, we've done.
Muir Dawson of Dawson's Book
Good Impressions
47
One of the great ironies of the era, Clif says, was
that he and other bootleggers “contributed
generously though anonymously to the WCTU, the
Anti-Saloon League, and other groups fighting
against repeal. But FDR had the support of the
wealthy brewers and distillers, and he put us on the
street when there were few jobs to be had.”
they usually sell out.
standing orders for all of our work
from about thirty libraries and insti-
tutions, including Yale and Texas
A&M and the Huntington Library
and the New York Public Library.
We don’t know how they all found
out about us, but they’ve always
paid without grumbling. Around
here, [UC’s] Bancroft [Library] has
all of our work, and the Oakland Li-
brary has most of it. Last summer
we consigned all our remaining
copies for sale to the Printers’ Shop
in Palo Alto.
“The way we print books is hope-
lessly old-fashioned. Sometimes the
title page of a book is still done by
hand, but almost no one prints
whole books by hand anymore ex-
cept people like us who are in it for
the personal satisfaction. And as far
we print their books, but we always
turned them down. We’ve done this
because we wanted to please our-
selves. It would have lost its fresh-
ness if we'd printed for somebody
else.
“Qur best book? That's hard. We
did one in 1972 called Oakland's Im-
swallow.” “We've been getting
calls for this sirice the city started
on its new image-raising ad cam-
paign,” says Lois, “‘but we don’t
have any more copies and no way to
reprint our books aside from start-
ing all over. a
“I also like Bohemians to Hip-
pies."” She hands me a copy. It’s a
long work for the Rathers, almost
200 pages, published in 1977, which
celebrates Northern California’s
role as a magnet for nonconform-
ists. And it’s crammed with en-
thralling tidbits: the term “‘Bohemi-
an” came to signify unorthodox
dress and behavior because people
thought the Romany gypsies came
from Bohemia; Herb Caen coined
ufactured and sold liquor in defi-
ance of the Volstead Act, but the
number must have been substan-
tial. (My own family—a pretty con-
ventional lot—harbored a bootleg-
ger in its bosom, my grandmother's
second husband.) Clif’s little book
helps explain how so many respect-
able citizens could have gone
wrong.
He learned to make bathtub gin
from one of his customers at the
garage and repair shop he ran brief-
ly after World War I. ‘Incidentally,
that term is a misnomer,” he says.
“I never knew anyone who made
gin in the bathtub, though some
people used the kitchen sink.”’ Gin
was a favorite concoction of boot-
leggers because it was easy to
make. “Gin was made then, as it is
today,” Clif wrote, “‘of a good grade
of alcohol, cut to about 85 proof
with plain or distilled water and fla-
vored with a few drops of juniper
serving
Later he added beer, bourbon,
and Scotch to his line, and the suc-
would go sour without more liquor.
It was a trap. Clif was arrested, and
the next day his picture and a story
ran in the Berkeley Gazetie. He had
to pay a $500 fine, but the same
amount slipped to the judge got him
out of a threatened six-month jail
term.
Bootlegging was prosperous for
Clif. He lived well and kept an ex-
pensive mistress: ‘‘no diamonds,
fur coats, and such things, but she
liked $15 a pound candy and black
legal then, “readily available and in-
expensive,” but Clif found it did
nothing for him. And he turned
down an opium-running opportuni-
ty because he felt it was “too rich
for this simple country boy.”
He has no qualms about his boot-
ing. “The law was ridiculous,”
he says, “and it had exactly the op-
drinkers to whisky drinkers. It also
gave organized crime its start.” For
small-time operators like Clif, how-
ever, Prohibition was a godsend, a
profitable opportunity during a time
of economic turmoil—the moral
equivalent of the Small Business
Administration. One of the great
ironies of the era was that Clif and
other bootleggers “contributed gen-
erously though anonymously to the
,
* is ele th)
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48
INDEX--Clifton and Lois Rather
Bancroft: Library; - 10-11-14. 21,425,305. 37
Bargas Bindery, 17
Bierce, Ambrose, 14
Billings, Josh, 34
ve eG
Bolton, Herbert, 10
Books and Societies, 14, 15
Butler Paper Company, 16, 25
California Historical Society Quarterly, 10, 11
California's First Printing Press, 9, 23
Calvert, Marvin, 25
Chandler & Price printing press, 6, 23-24, 27-28, 37
Children's Theater, 10
Cooking with Beer, 8
Cuddy, Mrs. John, 10
Cunningham, Carol, 33
Duncan, Isadora, 31
Dunsmuir House, 34
Dye, Wayne, 26, 27
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 14
Filmer Brothers, 15, 23
: ag It:
Foster, Willis; 25.730
Grabhorn,, Jane, 12,.25.,.-29
Grover, Sherwood, 25
Harris, Colonel Carroll T., 19-20, 33
Hart ;) James -D :.6°.21 > 30), 37
Here's How, An Autobiography, Part I, 21
Here’s How, An Autobiography, Part IJ, 12, 13, 19
Here's Know-How, 8
Hopper, Edna Wallach, 34
Household Hints for Hippie Housewives, 5, 22
Hume, Sam, 10
J. D. Christian machine works, 1-3
gi.
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he
i.
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ar
ae Ae
a ne A
>)
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oh
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49
Kane, George, 32
Kantor. Jim, 21
Kennedy, Alfred, 25
Kennedy, Lawton, 9, 15, 25
King Brothers paper company, 6
Kinnaird, Lawrence, 10
KPO radio, 10
Lee; Bill. :25
Lee, Helen, 20, 33
Levenson, Roger, 25
Lieberman, Elizabeth, 9
Lieberman, J. Ben, 6, 9, 17
Lloyd, Les, 25, 26
Lloyd, Richard, 25
London, Jack, 14
Lovely Isadora, 31
McCabe, Charles, 8
Mackenzie & Harris, 20
Mencken, Henry, 34-35
Men Wil] Be Boys, The Story of E Clampus Vitus, 31, 33
ss A te Douglas Wiggin in San ancisco, 33
Moxon Chappel, 9, 21, 25-26, 32-33
Qakland’s Image, A History of Oakland, California, 23
Osborne, Lou, 32
Preififer; George, 9-232
Postman, Freddy, 33
Postman, Monroe, 28
Rather a Small Press, 30
Rodecape, DeForest, 11
R,. W, Emerson, Tourist, 21
‘ie
Shumate, Albert, 33
Sigwalt printing press, 6-8, 22-23, 37
Solo, Dan XX... 20,. 31-325; 37
Some Little Magazines, 15
Stein, Gertrude, 14
Sterling, George, 34-35
Strictly Amateur, A Personalized Manual of Bookbinding, 35
Ten Years of the Rather Press, 18, 30, 31
Wessels, Glenn, 30
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Wessels, Kay, 30
Wilson; Adrian, 9, 16, 25,.3%
Women as Printers, 14, 15, 34
Works Progress Administration, 11
World War II, 1-2
50
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PEN te
a
Ruth Teiser
Born in Portland, Oregon; came to the Bay Area
in 1932 and has lived here ever since.
Stanford University, B.A., M.A. in English;
further graduate work in Western history.
Newspaper and magazine writer in San Francisco
since 1943, writing on local history,
business and social life of the Bay Area,
and the wine industry of California and Italy.
Book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle,
1943-1974
Co-author of Winemaking in California, a history,
1982.
An interviewer-editor in the Regional Oral
History Office since 1965.
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Shannon L. Page
Graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with
honors in 1989, with a B.A. in Rhetoric.
In 1986 was hired as a student employee with the Regional Oral
History Office to transcribe oral histories. Has stayed on since
graduation and is currently an editorial assistant.
Writes short stories, and is completing her first novel about
life in rural northern California.
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