Jane Bissell Grabhorn

Early life

Martha Jane Bissell was born June 29, 1911 in San Francisco. Educated in France, where she learned bookbinding, Bissell returned to California as a teenager and became the student of Belle McMurtry Young, a prominent bookbinder. In 1932, she married Robert Grabhorn.

Career

Beginning in 1934, Grabhorn acquired substantial knowledge of typography and printing through working at the Grabhorn Press, which was owned and operated by her husband and his brother, Edwin. In 1937, Grabhorn established her own imprint, the Jumbo Press, which she used as a vehicle for experimentation and artistic expression. Named for a toy press, most of the products of the Jumbo Press were pieces of ephemera and displayed Grabhorn's wit and interest in lighthearted feminist satire. Her best known work for the Jumbo Press was her treatise, A Typografic Discourse for the Distaff Side of Printing, a Book by Ladies (1937), which was included in the compilation, Bookmaking on the Distaff Side, a collaborative feminist work by Grabhorn, Edna Beilenson, Bruce Rogers, and others. Grabhorn also wrote, illustrated, and published via the Jumbo Press A Guide & Handbook for Amateurs of Printing (1937).

Grabhorn founded the Colt Press (1938-1942) in San Francisco in 1938 with William M. Roth and Jane Swinerton. The Colt Press focused primarily on California-related subject matter. Notable publications include their first, Lola Montez: The Mid-Victorian Bad Girl in California, by Oscar Lewis (1938), as well as Kamehameha, King of the Hawaiian Islands, by Marie Louise Burke (1939), which was chosen as one of the fifty "Books of the Year" by the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and McTeague: A Story of San Francisco, by Frank Norris (1941). Grabhorn did the typesetting for the press and worked without pay during most of this period. Although she attempted to continue operating the Colt Press single-handedly after Roth left to join the Office of War Information in 1942, they were forced to close the press. Grabhorn then returned to work for the Grabhorn Press, where she was able to produce 15 additional titles under the Colt Press imprint. At the Grabhorn Press, she oversaw the bindery until its closure in 1965. She continued typesetting, her preferred avocation, for the rest of her life. Grabhorn also continued to produce Jumbo Press publications throughout her life, much of which are compiled in The Compleat Jane Grabhorn: A Hodgepodge of Typographic Ephemera, which she produced with her husband and Andrew Hoyem at the Grabhorn-Hoyem Press in 1968. Grabhorn died on October 1, 1973 in San Francisco.