Meet a ‘60s Activist Who <i> Hasn’t </i> Sold Out

The young people with whom David Lance Goines associated back in the Free Speech Movement days here might have been astonished at his cheery description of himself nearly 30 years later as “the handmaiden of industry.”

It’s an old-fashioned notion, redolent of Elihu Vedder and one of his creepy allegorical paintings, maybe with a diaphanously clad maiden named Science instructing a muscled youth, a guy by the name of Industry.

Nor is Goines sheepish about being a capitalist, which he is even though he doesn’t have any labor to exploit. Still, his Saint Hieronymous Press is a business. It’s even incorporated. And some samples of Goines’ output have at times sold for thousands of dollars.

Every now and then you read something about a former ‘60s radical who’s turned his back on his earlier self and peddles cigarettes to schoolchildren or junk bonds to unsuspecting retirees.

Relax. This is just the opposite. This is the story of a celebrated former activist who’s managed to harmonize past and present, moving easily between the old and the new. This man’s life is of a piece.

David Lance Goines is among California’s foremost poster artists. Yoking art to commerce, his distinctive designs have provided artful promotion for the legendary Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, Northern California Planned Parenthood, Ten Speed Press and other Bay Area clients.

Goines, 47, has a different perspective on economics than most people in business, having derived his from Marx and Kropotkin, yet he’s made money in an endeavor as bourgeois as designing wine labels. His stylized three-raven symbol for the Ravenswood winery, in fact, has achieved unexpected popularity among women as a tattoo. He has also been commissioned to create a poster heralding the rebirth of the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles, scheduled to reopen in October of 1993 after a $211-million renovation and expansion.

In his dingy shop full of special-order paper and antiquated equipment, Goines does five or six posters a year, charging about $15,000 each, including printing on a hulking green American Type Foundry offset press that dates back to 1954 and thus qualifies as prehistoric.

Goines is part of a thriving Bay Area cottage industry that has made Northern California a center of what might be called fine printing. Its practitioners operate the smallest of businesses and, in a region bursting with new technologies, work hard to keep old ones alive.

Bay Area groups such as the Colophon Club, an organization of about 60 art printers, bookbinders and others, meet regularly to exchange ideas and trade tips on keeping out-of-date equipment alive. Goines figures the area is home to more than 100 printers who use a letterpress, a machine long ago superseded by offset printing, but one that embosses each letter beautifully into the page.

San Francisco has a history as a printing center, and the computer has done so much to revolutionize graphics and publishing of all kinds that the new technologies springing up in the region have helped democratize the business, says John Downer, who is a prime example. He designs typefaces from his San Francisco apartment using an Apple Macintosh, which would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

Saint Hieronymous Press is a good place to see how the old and new come together. In one room is the letterpress Goines uses to print his business cards. In the other is a big-screen Macintosh and a shelf full of software.

Really, it all makes perfect sense. As an undergraduate at UC Berkeley in the early 1960s, Goines was among the students outraged to discover that the university barred political activities on its grounds. He and seven others were expelled in a dispute over their conscious violation of that policy.

The faculty supported the students, and all were later reinstated, but by then Goines had had enough of school. He quit to become a printer’s apprentice in a little shop on Martin Luther King Way here.

During the 1960s, the shop became known among activists. “If you read anything seditious, it came out of this shop and I probably printed it,” Goines says.

Unfortunately, the shop’s clientele was chronically short of money, and by 1970 the business was failing. Meanwhile, Goines had done a successful cookbook with his friend, Alice Waters, called “30 Recipes Suitable for Framing.” Both suddenly had some money. Waters opened Chez Panisse, and Goines bought the print shop.

Since Saint Hieronymous wasn’t succeeding financially at commercial work, he started printing books--often, books he wrote himself, including “An Introduction to the Elements of Calligraphy.” At one point, Saint Hieronymous had 17 or 18 employees.

Few business people are more adaptable than Goines. As his poster and graphic-design work grew, Goines saw that he needed to change direction, so he reduced his square footage to save on overhead and whittled his staff down to one--himself.

Then he concentrated on the highest-value aspects of the business. Goines was never against economic enterprise anyway. He was just in favor of free speech, and through Saint Hieronymous Press, he continues to uphold that right, exercising it on his own behalf and that of his clients. In business, he’s doing what he’s always done.

Quite simply, Goines is in the advertising business. Posters are a special form of advertising, of course, one perhaps best suited to Bay Area communities such as Berkeley, where there are lots of pedestrians. It’s therefore fitting that, along the way, Goines has helped create what might be called a Berkeley style.

Influenced by the Art Nouveau movement, particularly the German Jugendstil of the 1920s as well as the earlier Ukiyo-e wood-block style of Japan, Goines’ work looks as if it was made to hang in the Craftsman-style homes common in the East Bay.

At Chez Panisse, for example, whose interior is done in woody Craftsman style, we are served bottled water, and I note that the label fits the surroundings. It turns out that Goines designed it.

Like Berkeley itself, there is a hint of nostalgia about his posters, not just for a long-ago artistic or decorative movement, but for a more recent time as well. Clearly, Goines isn’t finished with that time. Nor is he finished adapting.

His latest project is another book, to be published by Ten Speed Press. It’s a history of the Free Speech Movement.

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A follow-up: In July, it was reported in this space that Los Angeles attorneys Erwin Sobel and David Daar had staked more than 15 years on a shareholder class-action suit against Teledyne, betting $3.3 million worth of time and expenses on a claim that the Los Angeles conglomerate defrauded investors in connection with a stock buyback. Teledyne had denied the allegation.

Last week, just shy of the case’s 16th birthday, the Delaware Supreme Court ruled that Sobel and Daar weren’t representing a class after all and that common law fraud had to be proved in the case of each and every individual. So a previous award of $1 a share, already narrowed by a lower court ruling excluding arbitragers, was narrowed further--to a single defendant. He’ll get about $5,000.

Sobel and Daar will fare even worse. Since they took the case on a contingency fee basis, and since it was ruled not to be a class action, they will likely get nothing.

“It’s as close to final as it can be,” Daar says.