Frederick W. Reid papers

Born in 1914 in Grants Pass, Oregon, Frederick W. Reid grew up in Portland and Vancouver, Washington. Reid attended Reed College in the Class of 1938 for two years but, in 1936, left to join the armed forces during World War II and did not return to Reed. He was influenced by Professor Lloyd Reynolds while at Reed and was introduced to the work of Ezra Pound, T.S.Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, as well as to the Italic hand, which he learned at Reed. Many of his works were published in Reid’s calligraphic hand. Before leaving Reed, he had already had a poem published in the magazine, Poetry.

Reid decided to become a printer and settled in Los Angeles where he obtained some trade school training and went to work at the Ward Ritchie Press, known for its high quality printing. While there, he had two volumes of poetry printed, Cris et Mots privately, and Sixty-four Poems at the press of Grant Dahlstrom. He wrote both open-form poems and invented his own forms often based on the more formal past. After marrying, they moved to Arizona for his wife’s health and then to San Francisco, where he worked as a typographer mainly in advertising for Price Typography, a division of Mackenzie & Harris, until he retired. He became well-known in the printing world there among people such as Adrian Wilson and the Grabhorn-Hoyem partners. He was considered the “scholarly typesetter and proofreader. Frederick Reid continued to write and print his own works, sometimes writing them out in his fine calligraphic hand as in A Swell of Poems or setting the type for his own text in Linotype as in Hawks Over the City. He was married to his second wife, Beate Dietze, for 25 years; he died in July of 2007. [Based on a short biography written by Andrew Hoyem of Arion Press in the introduction to The Performing Word and that appeared online at http://www.frederickreid.com/biography.html.