Burnley Weaver: 1930s Modernism and Gollifox Press

Burnley Weaver’s self-portrait, block print

A remarkable parade of creative personalities strolled through Tryon during the Thirties. Writers and editors. Dramatists and musicians. Painters and printmakers. Many of them brought to the colony the spirit of Modernism, which became a driving theme in American arts during the era of the Great Depression.

Among them was Burnley Weaver (1898 – 1963) born in Louisville, Kentucky. After serving in World War I he attended Amherst College where Robert Frost was poet-in-residence at that time. Burnley enjoyed the drawing required in science courses but took no art classes. His older brother Bill had started a career in commercial art in Louisville, so after Burnley graduated they both took up residence together in exciting New York City. Bill fell in with the lucrative theatre world, and made his career with the powerful Shubert Brothers organization. Burnley proved useful to attend opening night performances by rival producers, creating subversive quick sketches of costume, scenery and staging tricks for Bill to take back to the Shuberts. His friendly personality got him contacts and coaching in design arts, and he observed Manhattan transformed by the new wave of Art Deco and Arte Moderne.

There he married Emma Lincoln, daughter of a Brooklyn physician. Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Smith College in Massachusetts, where she was in its Philosophical Club, Emma was interested in craft and design. She supported Burnley’s art-making avidly. In 1927 they moved to Philadelphia, at the peak of the Jazz Age. There they joined the avant-garde circle of Harold Mason, proprietor of Centaur Book Shop and Centaur Press, publisher of limited edition books featuring Modernist illustration. Burnley established his own printing operation he creatively named Gollifox Press, to experiment in design. Unorthodox fontography, fine papers and superb printing technique were his thing. In 1929 just before the Great Crash he brought forth his magnum opus sold by Centaur. It was a limited edition of 100 copies hardbound, with just 80 for sale, each book numbered.

Emma Lincoln, Class of 1922
Smith College yearbook

Modernist prints from
The New Philadelphia 1929

Weaver’s typography for his commentary is quirky, even outlandish, in the spirit of the Jazz Age. The edition is an American landmark of publishing, unique in layout and execution. The stock market crash in autumn 1929 crushed sales of luxuries. Unemployment skyrocketed. Banks failed. Burnley, like millions of Americans, found himself unable to support a wife and two children as the nation’s economy went into nosedive. His free-lance art work dried up. Then a job with Holmes Press as layout man and artist evaporated in 1932. The Weavers decided to relocate to the mountains of western North Carolina.

Red initials accent Burnley Weaver’s critiques of modern architecture he depicts.

courtesy Special Collections,
Pack Memorial Library, Asheville

Asheville was pretty and pleasant, although just as prostrate from economic collapse as Pennsylvania. Living cost was cheap, business space available virtually for the cost of paying the utilities. The well-known mountain resort city had many cultural and commercial connections with Philadelphia, so the Weavers found it welcoming. Burnley launched an advertising and graphic design business, deploying again the moniker Gollifox Press, to offer services to those few people still lucky enough to afford what he could do. Wealthy artist Emlen Etting came down from Philadelphia with avant-garde illustrations for Valery’s poem The Graveyard by the Sea; Gollifox printed a lovely edition of 300 copies, with handset type in French and English, for Centaur to sell. It’s now rare. For another Philadelphian, author Roger Williams Riis, Burnley printed Various Devisings; it’s even more rare today. Riis’ brother John earlier had worked as first professional forester at Tryon, North Carolina, after learning his profession under Gifford Pinchot who had been Vanderbilt’s forester at Biltmore Estate.

Pacolet Valley from Tryon N.C.
titled and signed Burnley Weaver in graphite

Besides printing and designing, and sharing marketing expertise, he worked on his beloved block prints. For Winston-Salem Art Center he presented a program where he demonstrated his technique, using a rubber offset, to transfer ink from a drawing to the printing block. A community of expert crafters was active who organized the Southern Highlands Handicrafts Guild for mutual support in the Appalachian region. Among them were Lucy Morgan’s Penland School near Spruce Pine and the Tryon Toy Makers & Wood Carvers. At Penland, Burnley participated in events where practitioners of mediums such as ceramics and fiber joined with woodcarvers. He carved new blocks celebrating the Craft Revival in the Appalachians, his prints complementing the esthetic of his contemporary crafters while offering images new and different for “picture buyers.” No catalogue raisonné is extant listing all the print images Weaver created in North Carolina.

In Tryon, Eleanor Vance and Charlotte Yale saw sales of handcrafted toys and expensive wood products evaporate as the Depression wore on. They spent their savings, to keep employing a few workers with no other options, to build their new home The Chalet. Although they tried new product designs to entice buyers visiting their Toy House, they’d always relied too on sales out-of-town. Direct-to-consumer mail order accelerated during the Depression, as many of the nation’s retail outlets and wholesalers went broke.

Cover of 1934 catalog by
Gollifox Press, Asheville

Product offerings in 1934 catalog.
A drawing by Burnley Weaver.

Tryon Toy Makers obviously needed an appealing catalog. Vance and Yale had no competence in graphic design and they were getting elderly. Sweet ladies out of money, they had no appetite or means for spending on some fancy new graphic designer in Asheville. Documentation telling us how Burnley Weaver was commissioned, undoubtedly by some now-unknown angel, to design and print their snazzy 1934 catalog no longer exists. Its colorful cover deploys a Moderne font and cheeky new doll designs.

Inside are new products like a $4 carved handbag top in a sleek greyhound design. The $10 English tea tray and the Wood-Carvers’s classic $10.50 fireplace bellows were up-market prices during the Depression. Worldly wordsmith Emma Weaver probably authored the new catalog’s bright copy to appeal to mail-order shoppers. Burnley may have come up with the clever design concept for a trio of “boo-bop” doll miniatures, caricatures of cartoon character Betty Boop, all the rage in the fun-hungry ‘30s.

“Swell girls” miniature dolls by Tryon Toy Makers

Burnley’s block print of the clubhouse at Tryon Country Club

Burnley and Emma Weaver got to know Tryon. They stayed at Pine Crest Inn, favored by well-off cosmopolites and then its most fashionable hostelry. Tryon Book and Paper Shop, owned by the wealthy Washburns from Minnesota, commissioned a stylish Burnley Weaver print of Tryon Country Club’s clubhouse to make up as a classy postcard. He executed a lovely block print of Screven Plantation owned by the Cleveland family. His Modernist print titled Pacolet Valley (the scenic way out from Tryon, by rail or highway) was sold through the book shop — stocked with other fashionable wares sourced from New York and Philadelphia on buying trips by Gertrude Washburn.

Old Cleveland Place, Tryon N.C.
Burnley Weaver, block print
signed and dated ‘33

The Weavers’s business in Asheville managed to survive the Depression. Burnley’s printing expertise and contacts brought to Gollifox Press interesting commissions for short-run book editions. Of poetry, for example, executed with highest quality to burnish prestige of North Carolina authors like Victor Starbuck and Edwin Björkman. For George Myers Stephens, Asheville newspaper publisher and mastermind of The Southern Packet, a monthly literary review, he designed color cover artwork and maps for a 1941 tourism guide to the Great Smoky Mountains. In 1944 Stephens’ own imprint published Fanny Watters’s Plantation Memories of the Cape Fear River Country. Its illustrations were from blocks cut by Burnley Weaver. Stephens and Weaver were nearly the same age, both well-educated, both deeply interested in Southern Appalachian heritage and culture, while ambitious to strengthen economic development in the mountain region.

Their son Vance Weaver grew up to be a printing industry technical whiz, based in New York. Daughter Ann attended Chapel Hill and eventually married architect William Dodge, son of a renowned Asheville designer and silver crafter. Emma Lincoln Weaver lived on for three decades after Burnley’s death. Very active in non-profit social work, Emma was also a deeply-informed writer about Southern Highlands craft.

1941 tourism guide