Saint Hieronymus Press, situated inside a brick-red building in North Berkeley, is streaked with history, like ink stains that won’t come out.
Each object around the studio — every tool, machine, and leaf of paper — is a vessel for a memory.
A piece of art on the wall shows David Lance Goines, the shop’s late proprietor, as a newborn, drawn in the loving hand of his mother, Wanda. In the press room, a Lunar New Year card, made by Goines and sent posthumously, ushers in the Year of the Rabbit. Posters, bearing Goines’ unmistakable style, hang high along the perimeter of the space.
Goines’ first professional poster, botanical studies of herbs and spices for a cooking supply store, is displayed on the wall near his calligraphy-scarred drafting table. The last plate for his final poster, made for the since-renamed Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, is still loaded in the Heidelberg offset printing press.
Throughout his career, Goines, who died in 2023, captured, in two dimensions, the bold and bohemian spirit of Berkeley, while reflecting a distinctive style both tinged with influences and all his own.
The Bancroft Library recently acquired Goines’ archive. The collection comprises nearly 5,000 objects formerly housed at his studio, from posters to printing blocks, correspondence to childhood drawings. Like a prism scattering light, the collection illuminates Goines’ life and work, offering students, scholars, and inspiration-seekers a deeper understanding of the graphic artist and printmaker, and the city and world he inhabited.
“What you get through his collection at the Bancroft is a very rich and vibrant view of art and culture and printmaking in the Bay Area from the ’60s to the present,” said Kate Donovan, James D. Hart director of The Bancroft Library and UC Berkeley’s associate university librarian for special collections. “That span and depth bring a lot of value and, quite frankly, joy.”
Telling his story
After Goines’ death, Hannah Hoffman ’06 began a monumental task: gathering and organizing what her uncle left behind.
Over a span of 18 months, Hoffman spent nearly 500 hours sorting through the materials at the print shop. Through this process, she said, she became the only person besides Goines himself to have touched everything he’s worked on.
“I got to put things in order in a way that told this story that he couldn’t tell,” Hoffman said.
As a kid, Hoffman spent many hours with Goines, playing chess, riding in his red Volkswagen Bug, watching him develop negatives in the darkroom at the print shop, and sharing meals and conversation. Her uncle loved to read and learn. He was a “true polymath,” Hoffman said, and would engage her curiosity on far-flung topics.
“I could always go to David when I wanted to learn something for real — when I really wanted to go down a rabbit hole on something,” she said. “I felt like he was someone who really saw me.”
Goines, born in 1945, was the oldest of eight children. (Hoffman’s mother was the second oldest.) The trail of materials in Goines’ archive encompasses his entire career, and beyond. Among the pieces from his childhood is a drawing he made at age 6 of a little gray mouse standing next to a home fashioned out of a shoe.
Goines went on to attend UC Berkeley, pursuing a degree in classics before he was expelled for his involvement in the Free Speech Movement, which swept across the campus in 1964.
In 1965, he started apprenticing at the Berkeley Free Press. A few years later, he bought the print shop, turning it into Saint Hieronymus Press.
In the decades that followed, Goines created some of his most iconic and visually striking works, including 255 posters, many of them for businesses and organizations in and around Berkeley.
In a poster for the lithography company Rainbow Zenith, a small yellow airplane flies beneath a swooping rainbow, whose vivid colors were achieved by layering the inks of nearby stripes. A poster for the opening of Chez Panisse, the restaurant founded by his former girlfriend Alice Waters, shows a woman with a fiery mane holding a wine glass. In a piece for Cody’s Books, a reader holds a copper-hued volume against the backdrop of a sliver of a moon and a tree bearing gold-glimmering fruits.
The person behind the prints
The archive provides a rare glimpse into Goines’ printmaking process, from original idea to finished work. Among the materials in the collection are 10 notebooks’ worth of sketches; watercolors, some serving as blueprints for his designs; digital files; and more than 150 carefully carved linoleum blocks.
The archive also includes progressives, or proofs that provide a step-by-step look at the printing process, each sheet representing a single turn through the press. In a series for a 1980 poster for outdoor equipment supplier The North Face, a scene of sprightly clay-red flowers and snow-flocked mountains slowly comes to life, one pop of color, one layer of ink, at a time. To Hoffman, seeing Goines’ process unfold is the “most beautiful part” of the archive.
Throughout the collection, Goines’ meticulousness and attention to detail are on full display.
Across his pieces, custom-mixed colors, such as the shade of teal on a poster for the cafe at Chez Panisse, come together to form a cohesive and considered palette, helping to tell a continuous visual story. In the calligraphy work for his unfinished and never-before-seen Song of Roland, each stroke is as precise and elegant as the last.
In his life and career, Goines made it a point to look for and appreciate beauty, and bring more of it into the world, Hoffman said.
“It might mean that you sit there for hours (mixing inks) to get the correct blue,” Hoffman said. “It might mean that you hear a piece of music, or you write something down, or you read something specific, or you see that someone worked really hard on something. … Prioritizing that makes your life so much richer.
“You’re experiencing things in a really, really different way.”
Goines was also an accomplished author, with books including A Constructed Roman Alphabet, which earned him the American Book Award for typographical design in 1983, and The Free Speech Movement: Coming of Age in the 1960s, a rigorous account of the tumult of the times. Among Goines’ early writings in the archive is a copy of a journal from his early 20s documenting the adventures he shared with friends as they searched for gold in the Yukon. “The escapades in this journal are worthy of a dramatic reading,” Hoffman noted.
Goines was generous with his knowledge, according to printer and designer Richard Seibert. Seibert’s journey into printmaking began under Goines’ mentorship, and he went on to operate his letterpress business out of Saint Hieronymus Press. Seibert saw his former teacher, who became a confidant and friend, at the shop almost every day for nearly 20 years.
“Printing was sacred to him,” Seibert said. “The tradesman is a temporary vessel, and we are responsible to preserve our process for the next generation — it was all very important to him.”
His generosity extended beyond teaching. Seibert remembers arriving at the print shop to find Goines with a modest meal: a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and an apple.
“I would come in, and he’d cut the apple in half and give me half the sandwich and half the apple,” he said. “And if three people would’ve walked in, he would’ve cut it in thirds. And if five people would’ve walked in, he would’ve cut it in fifths.”
Jen Osgood, technical processing lead in the UC Berkeley Library’s Arts & Humanities Division, took part in a weekly game of darts with Goines and his friends and neighbors in the alley behind the print shop. During the games, they would joke, argue, laugh, and engage in freewheeling conversations about everything from books to politics to bawdy Shakespeare lines. Goines “cared fiercely about his friends,” she said.
Hoffman summarized her uncle’s priorities succinctly: “Be kind. Work hard. Create something beautiful.”
‘Feels like home’
Goines’ archive, which came to Bancroft as a gift, broadens and deepens the library’s collections. Several of the institutions and organizations Goines worked with and took as subjects are represented in Bancroft’s holdings, including Chez Panisse, the San Francisco Symphony, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Goines’ archive also complements Bancroft’s materials that shine light on the university across time, including the extensive documentation of the Free Speech Movement, and it joins the library’s existing collection of the printmaker’s work.
Because many of Goines’ pieces are snapshots of the community — and the organizations, businesses, and people at the heart of it — the archive “feels like home,” said Kate Donovan, the director of The Bancroft Library.
Some of the subjects of Goines’ works, such as Chez Panisse, have become iconic. Others, though once beloved, have been swept away by the currents of time.
“He made so many posters for so many Berkeley institutions, from bicycle shops to wineries, from real estate companies to even UC Berkeley organizations, that his graphic design almost became the style of the city,” Osgood said. After his death, she added, the city became “a little less vibrant.”
Once the archive has been fully processed, it will be available for anyone to discover and access at Bancroft, said David Faulds, the library’s curator of rare books and literary manuscripts.
The materials in the collection tell a story that generations of students, researchers, and members of the public can look back on years from now to get a deeper understanding of Goines’ work and the place he called home.
“So much of it seems like relatively recent history now,” Faulds said. “But we, of course, are keeping material for centuries into the future.
“And, I think, over time, people will want to come back and see these as a very visual and colorful time capsule of the period that he lived in, in the city of Berkeley.”