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Creator
Rummonds, Richard-Gabriel
Call number
MssCol 2645
Physical description
86.1 linear feet (178 boxes, 2 volumes, 2 computer files); 77.8 Megabytes
Language
English
Preferred Citation
Richard-Gabriel Rummonds papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library
Repository
Manuscripts and Archives Division
Access to materials
Request an in-person research appointment.Restrictions apply

Richard-Gabriel Rummonds (1931- ), is a noted hand-press printer and the founder, printer, and publisher of the Plain Wrapper Press and Ex Ophidia Press which published fine art limited editions of poetry and prose by contemporary authors. He has taught printing at the University of Alabama and Cornish College (Seattle) and is the author of the manual Printing on the Iron Handpress (1997), Nineteenth-Century Printing Practices and the Iron Handpress (2004), as well as numerous essays and lectures on the book arts. Collection consists of records of the Plain Wrapper Press and Rummonds' personal and professional papers 1948-2010. Correspondence with friends, relatives, business associates, and professional colleagues documents his careers as industrial and book designer, commercial attach? in Quito, Ecuador, and later, iron hand-press printer and founder of the Plain Wrapper Press and Ex Ophidia Press, writer and educator. Plain Wrapper Press records include correspondence, production files of manuscripts, proof-sheets and galleys; engravings and lino-cuts; samples of bindings, papers, covers, and completed books, keepsakes, and other examples of his printing. The collection also includes copies of Rummonds essays and lectures and drafts of his books, including an unpublished autobiography, Fantasies and Hard Knocks: My Life as a Printer.

Biographical/historical information

Printer-publisher and founder of the Plain Wrapper Press, Rummonds was born in Long Beach, California, in 1931. Rummonds attended Syracuse University in 1949, and the University of California-Berkeley in 1950. After that Rummonds worked as a set-designer in New York, an industrial designer in Japan for Fraser China, a book designer at Alfred Knopf, and as a commercial attaché at the U. S. Embassy in Quito, Ecuador. When Rummonds decided to enter a Trappist monastery in 1965 he started the Plain Wrapper Press, in order to print Eight Parting Poems, the press's first imprint, as a keepsake for friends. Later, when Rummonds was studying at a Roman Catholic seminary in preparation for entering the monastery, he regained his interest in printing and publishing illustrated and signed editions of previously published works. In 1970 Rummonds began publishing the texts of prominent writers, such as Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino and in 1971 he moved the Press to Verona, Italy. In 1982 Rummonds moved the Press to Alabama where he had been appointed to the faculty of the School of Library Sciences at the University of Alabama. In the summer of 1988 soon after printing Seven Aspects of Solitude, a sixteen page keepsake and the last publication to bear the imprint of the Plain Wrapper Press, Rummonds sold his printing equipment and moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in screenwriting.

Scope and arrangement

The papers of Richard-Gabriel Rummonds span the years 1948-2010, and document his activities as industrial designer, book designer, commercial attaché and as founder, editor, printer, and publisher of The Plain Wrapper Press. Included are correspondence, 1948-2010, with friends, relatives, business associates, professional colleagues, publishers, artists, and authors, including Dan Russell, Paul Zweig, James B. Hutchinson, Scott Davis, Thomas Parkinson, Fritz Eberhardt, Steve Miller, Stefano Massetti, Julia Loving, Alessandro Zanella, and Charlotte Straub. Also included are work records for books printed by The Plain Wrapper Press, such as log books, progress folders, binding information, typescripts, galley proofs, art work, engraved plates collectors' cards, and public relations and promotional material. Some of the books represented are Siete Poemas Sajones, by Jorge Luis Borges; La Donna con la bocca aperta, by Luigi Santucci; The Ship of Sounds, by John Fuller; Lo Stemma Cittadino, and Italian translation of Franz Kafka's Das Stadtwappen. This series includes dossiers of artists and authors, and oversize material such as page and text proofs, book block mockups, templates, and imposition dummies.

There are also drafts of Rummonds' complete history of The Plain Wrapper Press, Fantasies and Hard Knocks: My Life as a Printer, and drafts of the checklist of books printed at the Plain Wrapper Press and its successor, Ex Ophidia.; and drafts of his syllabus/workbook, Problem-Solving and Printing on the Cast-Iron Handpress, which was used in a workshop Rummonds gave at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in 1991. The first edition of this workbook was read by Bradley Hutchinson and David Pankow, and their comments were incorporated into the revised second edition which Rummonds used in his second workshop at RIT in 1992. Rummonds later expanded the workbook into a comprehensive handpress manual titled Printing on the Iron Handpress: A Contemporary Approach with Selected Readings on Historical Practices. Text drafts 1 through 20 are sequentially grouped by chapter. During the process of revision the sequence of some chapters was altered to reflect the final arrangement of the material.

Finally, the collection includes records of Rummonds' work in graphic and industrial design, some of his teaching files, and copies of his numerous essays and lectures on fine printing and related topics.

The Richard-Gabriel Rummonds papers are arranged in five series:

  • I. Correspondence
    1948-2010

    Correspondence with friends, business colleagues, publishers, artists, and writers. Organized alphabetically within each year. The 2004-2010 correspondence includes lists of correspondents filed at the beginning of each year and often folders for form letters and incomplete names. A list of correspondents for the years 2004-2010 is included as an additional resource.

  • II. Printer's Files

    (Includes typescripts and proofs, logbooks, project files, art and negatives, bindings, engraved plates, work progress checklists, bindings, and technical papers).

  • III. The Michael Fragments. Poems By William Faulkner
  • IV. 1996 Additions
    1996, 1960-1990, 1970-1990

    (Includes personal and business correspondence, 1960-1990. Organized alphabetically by year, with relatives, friends, artists, authors, bookbinders, suppliers of printing equipment, and others involved with The Plain Wrapper Press; book files, work records for books printed by The Plain Wrapper Press, including typescripts, edited and typesetting typescripts; translators permission; information about binding, costs, and distribution; log books, sketches and layouts; bibliography and memoir (Hard Knocks: My Life as a Printer); Handpress Manual (Problem-Solving and Printing on the Cast-Iron Handpress). Drafts 1-21; miscellaneous, solicited, and unsolicited manuscripts. Boxes 111, 112; grants; logbooks (work records); complete sets of ephemera printed at the Press and commercially; taxes and receipts, 1970-1990).

  • V. Additions
    1998

    (Contains more records relating to the Handpress Manual (Printing on the Iron Handpress: A Contemporary Approach with Selected Readings on Historical Practices), and includes dummies, page proofs Sets 1 and 2, with author's manuscript corrections and revisions, highlighted references, corrected third set, design material for the Oak Knoll edition, photographs of printers including Richard Gabriel-Rummonds and Alessandro Zanella (Plain Wrapper Press), Harry Duncan (Rochester Institute of Technology. Elizabeth Corbet Yeats (Dun Emer Press), Frederic W. Goudy (Village Press), Albert Lewis and Harry Gage-Cole (Doves Press), Rino Grazioli (Officina Bodoni) and Robert Haas (Oficcina Vindobonensis) and miscellaneous photographs. Boxes 119-136).

Administrative information

Source of acquisition

Purchased from and donated by Richard-Gabriel Rummonds, 1984, 1998-2013.

Processing information

Processed by Manuscripts and Archives Division Staff, 1985-2005.

Manuscripts and Archives Division Staff and Susan M. Kline.

Using the collection

Location

Manuscripts and Archives Division
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, New York, NY 10018-2788
Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room, Third Floor, Room 328

Access restrictions

Boxes 1, 4, and 5 are closed until the year 2035.

Additional resources