Archives West Finding Aid

Frank McCaffrey (1894-1985) was a letterpress printer, publisher, politician, and artist. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and moved to Spokane, Washington with his family at the age of four. Fascinated from a young age by printing, he began an apprenticeship in Spokane. By 1913, he was living in Seattle and working as a journeyman printer. Seattle would remain McCaffrey's home and workspace for the rest of his life. In 1919 McCaffrey bought Acme Press, a commercial publishing firm in Seattle. He founded Dogwood Press in 1931 as a trademark within Acme. At Dogwood, McCaffrey printed "for the pleasure of the doing" and in printing, he saw "the same opportunity for subtle expression of personality as painting or modeling." His central artistic goal was for a book's presentation to reflect and enhance its content. Some hallmarks of the Dogwood style included rough, untrimmed page edges and stout boards covered with patterned cloth. McCaffrey used the Dogwood trademark for many of his finest and most limited productions. For McCaffrey, printing had always been a personal pursuit, and the Dogwood Press was his personal creative outlet. He sold Acme Press in 1952, but retained Dogwood. He continued printing, and published a number of small paperback pamphlets for friends, as well as the occasional hardbound book. His books covered a broad range of topics and themes, and often championed Seattle authors and Seattle history. In the early 1980s, he donated a large quantity of his printing materials to the nascent book arts program at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.

McCaffrey was also an involved citizen; he served on Seattle's city council for two-and-a-half years and ran for mayor twice. Frank McCaffrey died in Seattle in 1985, at age 90. In an obituary, Seattle Weekly wrote: "His rich life, with a dash of politics thrown in, recalled the Greek ideal of devotion to beauty and a commitment to public life."