NORTHLAND PRESS

orthland

The books featured in this article on the Northland Press can be purchased wherever fine books are sold. Readers of this publication who do not have bookstore facilities at hand can order "Torrent in the Desert" and "A Navajo Sketch Book" direct from ARIZONA HIGHWAYS, 2039 West Lewis Avenue, Phoenix, Arizona, 85009. The former sells for $20.00; the latter sells for $14.50.

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The phenomenon of excellence is unpredictable. Who? When? and Where? are unanswerable questions. If, for instance, I had been asked last year to forecast who would print the year's most beautiful books on the Southwest, and where they would be produced, I would have said either Lawton Kennedy of San Francisco or Ward Ritchie of Los Angeles, Roland Dickey of Albuquerque or Carl Hertzog of El Paso, all all of whom have distinguished records as Southwestern printers.

I would not have predicted excellence of typograph-ical achievement from anyone anywhere in Arizona; for the state, notable though its record has been in the production of written Southwestern literature, has never harbored a printer of the first rank. Frank Holme's Bandar Log Press, the first private press in Arizona, which was located at Phoenix many years ago, printed only arty curiosities. Today John Beecher, the California printer, has never stayed long enough in one place to achieve any identity with a locale. Jerome, Scottsdale, Phoenix, all have appeared in turn as imprints on the limited editions of his own poetry, but his latest move is back to the coast where his roots have always been for many years.

and beauty born deep in the pines

ical achievement from anyone anywhere in Arizona; for the state, notable though its record has been in the production of written Southwestern literature, has never harbored a printer of the first rank. Frank Holme's Bandar Log Press, the first private press in Arizona, which was located at Phoenix many years ago, printed only arty curiosities. Today John Beecher, the California printer, has never stayed long enough in one place to achieve any identity with a locale. Jerome, Scottsdale, Phoenix, all have appeared in turn as imprints on the limited editions of his own poetry, but his latest move is back to the coast where his roots have always been for many years.

The University of Arizona Press in Tucson is making earnest efforts at typographical distinction under the direction of Jack L. Cross; thus far, however, except for such typographical “sports” as George Webb's A Pima Remembers, designed by Harry Behn (now of Connecticut), its books are distinguished more for their scholarly content than for their typographical format. If I had been asked to name the Arizona locale of a typographical renaissance, I am sure that Flagstaff would have been the least likely place; and not because of any prejudice I have against that community up in Coconino County. On the contrary, I have a lifelong fondness for Flagstaff, from earliest childhood memories of crossings

On the Santa Fe Railroad, when I stood in the open-windowed vestibule of a Pullman on the California Lim-ited and sniffed the sweet incense of sawmill. More recently, I have enjoyed Flagstaff's piney charm while taking part in Weldon Heald's annual Writers' Confer-ence on the campus of Arizona State College. Yes, Flagstaff suits me fine. The Museum of North-ern Arizona, the Lowell Observatory, the College, all guarded by the Sacred Peaks of San Francisco, form a cultural center of real distinction. But not typographically speaking. No printer, no press, no book production was identified with or expected from Flagstaff, at least in my experience, until Two years ago Dale Stuart King, the Globe pub-lisher with the provocative address, "Six Shooter Canyon," produced a book called Old Father by Pablita Velarde, an unusual volume both in format and content, produced at the Northland Press in Flagstaff. This was not a truly finished production; it lacked finesse of design and exe-cution; it was more of an inspired amateur work, a typographical "sport"; and though bold enough in itself, it did not promise much for the future, at least in my estimation. It was chosen by the Rounce and Coffin Club as one of the best western books of the year.

Then came the third annual History Conference held at Tucson in 1962, sponsored jointly by the Uni-versity of Arizona and the Arizona Pioneers Historical Society, and which featured a keepsake to commemorate Arizona's Golden Anniversary. This was Donald M. Powell's bibliography called An Arizona Fifty, a per-ceptive selection of outstanding books produced in the state during its first half century.

The quality of its contents did not astonish me. Ever since he came to Arizona in 1946 this Powell boy (no relative, just a friend and colleague) has been achieving renown as the state's leading bibliographer; and this latest work of his was permeated with the author's feeling for both the landscape and the literature of his adopted state.

It was the format of An Arizona Fifty that was the bombshell. Here was an impeccable piece of printing—design, paper, inking everything was just right for eye and hand. Simple, unobtrusive, discreet, functional typography, meant to be read and not used as decoration for a library table; and the pamphlet bore the imprint "Northland Press, Flagstaff."

Paul Weaver, Northland Press

Something was happening up there in Coconino County. There was a master printer among the Ponderosa pines. I made a note to head for Flagstaff on my next Arizona field trip and see for myself who was responsible for this altogether unlikely event, for the leap forward from the amateur charm of Old Father to the masterful professionalism of An Arizona Fifty.

Before I could do this, two more books appeared from the Northland Press. If the Powell pamphlet was a bombshell, these succeeding imprints were atomic blasts. A Navajo Sketchbook by Don Perceval and Clay Lockett and Torrent in the Desert by Weston and Jeanne Lee were two of the most beautiful Southwestern books ever to appear anywhere a statement I am fully prepared to defend, having had both eyes fixed on regional publishing throughout a book reviewing career which began in 1934.

All of my questions were answered last spring at the fourth History Conference in Tucson, when I met the man-in-the-forest, the printer among the pines, the owner of the Northland Press, namely Paul E. Weaver, Jr., late of Santa Monica, California; Reno, Nevada; Acapulco, Mexico; Antibes, France; the Windward Islands, West Indies; and since 1958 of Flagstaff, Arizona, where he now lives, works, and breathes that perfumed air, a happy man who needed the first thirtyfive years of his life to find himself and to learn that all the world's roads led finally to that clearing in the pines up in Coconino County. I learned that the beauty of the Northland Press books is no accident; it is the reflection of a fulfilled man.

If Flagstaff was the unpredictable locale, so wasPaul Weaver the unlikely producer of books peerless in Arizona's printing history, although he had inky fingers from his earliest years. Only child of Santa Monica's leading commercial printer and owner of the profitable Weaver Publishing Co., Paul Jr. seemed destined by heritage and environment to succeed his father as a successful business printer. It was taken for granted that he would get experience in the shop, go to college at nearby UCLA, make a good marriage, and settle down.

And he tried, he surely tried. He got experience in the plant, and at Santa Monica High School, he showed a flair for journalism. The first signs of departure from the conventional appeared when he refused to go to UCLA "that cashmere jungle," he called it in conversation at our first meeting in Tucson. He went off to Reno to the University of Nevada, majored in journalism, and found that he was not a true city boy. He fished the Truckee and hunted the wilds of the Sierra Nevada; and thus he determined his deepest desires for living close to nature, away from what poet Robinson Jeffers has called "the thickening centers."

It is always fascinating to go back along the road of a man's life and note the points of crisis and decision. They are not sharply marked in Paul Weaver's life. There is a good deal of blur, of forking and turning, of confusing starts and stops. He is a complex man, although what he ultimately produced is simple. Two powerful forces were working on him loyalty to his father and the economic pull of Southern California and it took him many years before he could spin free into his own orbit.

College was followed by a short and successful career in journalism. Young Paul Weaver owned, published, and largely wrote the weekly Palisades Post, of Pacific Palisades, that prosperous residential community adjoining Santa Monica to the north. The chief advantage of Palisades living, he found, was access to sailing and surfing; and as we can see when we come to examine the recent books of the Northland Press, these marine hobbies paid off.

Weaver's inability to get interested in the routine commercial printing work of his father's plant, or to the increasing pressures of life in greater Los Angeles, was successful to sell the Post and get away. From 1954 to 1957 he lived in Europe, sailing his own yawl on the Mediterranean and later in the West Indies, where he did charter work in the Hemingway tradition.

If one looked at Paul Weaver's life at this point, salt water having apparently washed the ink away, he would see no sign of the man up in Coconino County, running a press in the pinewood. Human biography, however, is less predictable than horse-racing or roulette or any of those surer things.

Weaver was not destined to be an expatriate for life. He renewed contact with his father and mother and hometown; and back he came to Santa Monica, sold a lot of printing for the Weaver Publishing Co., and made plans to publish his own magazine on Latin America. Fiesta, it was to be called. He put money into it, but it wouldn't fly, it wouldn't leave the ground. No issueever appeared. Weaver became desperate again and began looking around Southern California for a small town press and paper, going as far afield as Paso Robles; and, with the naive idea that it was still the small town he had once seen as a youth, to Phoenix.

A NAVAJO SKETCH BOOK by Don Perceval with a descriptive text by Clay Lockett

A Navajo Sketch Book has been designed by JOHN ANDERSON, set in the Palatino types, and printed on Curtis Fluoro Antique at Northland Press, Flagstaff, Arizona MCMLXII

... to record, preserve and

That frightened him. “Another San Fernando Valley,” he said to himself and went to pay a courtesy call on Columbus Giragi, an Arizona counterpart of Paul Weaver, Sr., owner of the Arizona-Messenger Printing Co., one of the region's largest typographical concerns.

Here is when the roulette wheel in Paul Weaver's life began to slow for a stop; here is when his moment of truth came near. A soothsayer, an oracle, a fortune teller would have seen omens in the air that day in the sky over the Salt River Valley, at the hour when Paul Weaver entered Giragi's office and asked if he knew of any small town presses for sale. Only that morning Giragi had received a call from Jack Fine, a retail merchant in Flagstaff, who had just bought the commercial printing plant of Giragi's old weekly, the Coconino Sun. Fine, never in the printing business and dependent on a partner, found within three months that this was a bad investment and made the decision to sell it.A phone call and a trip to Flagstaff led Weaver to his decision that he would temporarily manage the Northland Press, with an option to buy. Back he went to Santa Monica and awaited Fine's reaction to the offer he had made. A month passed and no word came. Weaver put it out of his mind and took another job, a high-paying one and worked a single day. On the afternoon of his first day, Jack Fine phoned and said yes.

The wheel had stopped spinning. The moment of truth had come. Weaver went home and told his wife of two years, Mary Jean Sutcliffe, a successful drama teacher and co-author of a book on the theater (On Stage Everyone-MacMillan) and a former fellow student at Santa Monica High School, that they were moving to Flagstaff. The fact that she was expecting their firstchild was no deterrent to either of them. (A second child has since been born to them, also in Flagstaff.)

communicate the heritage of the Deneh

child was no deterrent to either of them. (A second child has since been born to them, also in Flagstaff.) "My wife is the hero of this saga," Weaver said to me, five years later, as we talked over lunch in Tucson. "She also has literary and editorial skills that have proved invaluable."

As master of the Northland Press, Weaver's first need was to replace obsolete and worn out equipment and then gradually to upgrade all the work undertaken, whether it was a single business card or a complete book. Crack salesman that he was, Weaver hit the road in both directions on U. S. 66, west to Williams, Ashfork, and Kingman, east to Winslow and Holbrook, calling on old customers and soliciting new ones. The Museum of Northern Arizona and Lowell Observatory proved to be two of his best customers. For the former he redesigned their periodical, The Plateau, and their leaflets and catalogs; and for Lowell he likewise improved a variety of their scientific publications. Thus far these were all things Weaver could have done in Santa Monica. The real reason he had left the shop of his father was his deep desire to print five or six fine books each year, to found a book publishing division of the printing plant.

This came about gradually in Flagstaff. The first step was securing a competent color printing man; one came in the person of Weston Lee, a Salt Lake journalistphotographer-color separation printer, who appeared providentially and decided to locate in Flagstaff. The Press's subsequent work led to a discerning article on the Northland Press in the Western Printer and Lithographer, written by its editor, Roby Wentz.

A chain reaction followed. The article was read by John Anderson, a peripatetic printer-designer from Philadelphia who came West to work for Grant Dahlstrom's Castle Press in Pasadena, but had his own plant at this time; and, even as Weaver before him, was finding himself discouraged by Southern California's smog and traffic, he, too, felt the pull of the pinewood, packed his type, toothbrush, and family, and headed for Coconino County.

Now the stage was set for the production of masterpieces. The Press had a master with vision and ambition; the equipment was modern and efficient; color work could be handled superbly by Weston Lee; and in John Anderson, the Press had a virtuoso of typographical design.

Anderson had learned printing under the late Peter Beilenson of New York, founder of the Peter Pauper Press; and he brought to Flagstaff both skill and taste.

Anderson designs the way all fine designers work: by nearly endless preliminary trial runs, setting version after version of a layout, pinning them up like butterflies on the wall, walking back and forth, staring, weighing, reflecting, comparing; and doing much of this after hours, playing with type in the way a pianist improvises on the keyboard, warming up to the final finished production, which sounds (or looks) so simple and is actually the result of hours of preparation. the When I learned from Weaver of this sequence of men and events in the progress of the Northland Press, I no longer wondered about the beautiful books the Powell, the Lee, the Perceval-Lockett: they were the inevitable result of catalytic forces which brought together the right men at the right time in the right place.

"If I have any talent," Weaver confessed with characteristic modesty, "it is to recognize talent in others."

This quality in Weaver led to the book which is pure northern Arizona, the Navajo Sketch Book. When he saw on the walls of the Museum of Northern Arizona an exhibition of the water-colors and drawings made by Don Perceval of the Navajo people and landscape, Weaver saw the possibility of a beautiful book. To write a text to accompany the pictures, he recognized another talented Arizonan, Clay Lockett, scion of the old Flagstaff ranching family, known throughout the state as an authority on Indian crafts and ways.

Pictures and text do not form themselves into a book. Weaver worked intensively with Perceval and Lockett and Anderson, in getting just the right combination of picture, word, and type on each page.

When it appeared, I declared the Navajo Sketch Book to be the most beautiful book ever produced in Arizona. This can be easily extended to describe it as one of the most beautiful of all American printed books.

Don Perceval was no new talent to me. I had been enjoying and collecting his work for many years. London-born and educated in architecture at the Royal College of Art and in life in the Royal Navy, Perceval had been working for thirty years in the Southwest, a scholar as well as an artist, accumulating a profound and accurate knowledge of Spanish and Indian costumes and crafts, drawn particularly to the Navajo and Hopi. In his own painting, Perceval was an admirer of Maynard Dixon, and in volume eight of The Brand Book, the annual of the Los Angeles Westerners, he had reproduced and commented on Dixon's early sketches of the Navajo country. His own Navajo drawings are done with the same sureness of subject Dixon showed.

"that glowing pictorial on the Colorado River"

For the Arizona Development Board in Phoenix, Perceval, Lee, and Weaver combined their talents to produce a folded broadside on Arizona's Indians, which should be framed and hung on school walls throughout the state. In Tucson I saw the layout for a children's book on cattle brands by Don Perceval which will be another Northland triumph.

Don Perceval also contributed end-papers and maps to the Lees' Torrent in the Desert, that glowing pictorial on the Colorado River. He and Paul Weaver go mighty well together.

John Anderson is no longer in Flagstaff. His restlessness, and that of his wife, carried him on to Phoenix, and finally back to Philadelphia. He will continue, however, to design for Northland Press. Weaver believes this arrangement will prove even more efficient and productive, if somewhat less convivial.

To prove that the Northland Press is not limited to Southwestern subjects, Weaver published an unusual book called Surfing in Hawaii, the narrative by Desmond Muirhead and breathtaking photos by Don James, an old Santa Monica crony of Weaver's. I won't be surprised now by anything Northland does, in fact I anticipate a rich and varied change of pace in all its future work.

In the 1962 competition of finely printed Western Books, sponsored annually for the past quarter century by the Rounce and Coffin Club of Los Angeles, the Northland Press placed all three of these beautiful books: A Navajo Sketch Book, Torrent in the Desert, and Surfing in Hawaii.

Once set, the patterns of behavior in a man's life tend to repeat themselves. The compulsion which led Paul Weaver to "get out of town" and quit Southern California is being felt in Flagstaff. "I've got to get out of downtown traffic," he said to me, as we parted in Tucson. "I'm planning to move the press.' "Not leave Flagstaff?" I asked.

"Oh, no!" he laughted. "Just a bit deeper in the pines. I like it up in Coconino County."