Frances Butler

Butler was born in Webster Groves, Missouri. She claimed (in jest) descent from a treasurer of the Confederacy. Her father, Robert Denholme Clark, was a petrochemist, who relocated to Berkeley, California, where Frances attended Willard Junior High. The family lived in a ranch-style house in the forested hills above the Claremont Hotel.

When her parents later relocated to Tehran, Frances and her younger brother, William, attended the American School in Beirut while their parents were in Iran.

Back in Berkeley, she finished high school, and received an honors degree in History from University of California, Berkeley in 1961. Frances then attended Stanford University, where she earned her masters in History as a Woodrow Wilson fellow (summa cum laude). She would ride a Vespa across the San Francisco Bay Bridge to get there. The old western span of the bridge had expansion breaks every 50 feet, through which a strong gust of wind blew.

She married Jonathan Butler, a Romance philologist and polymath, and with a travel grant they lived in Sardinia for a year, where he wrote a dictionary of Sardinian. Escaping cold weather, they made trips to London, Heidelberg, and Florence.

After receiving an M.A. in Design in 1965, Frances began teaching in the Design Department at Berkeley. She influenced David Lance Goines, loaning him the book on Weimar-era posters on which he based his style. The Design Department was the center for the anti-Vietnam War protest movement, and many protest posters and banners were created in the college. It was eventually closed, popularly thought to be at the orders of Governor Reagan, but insiders say it was the college administrators who did not care for design. During this time, in the late sixties, Frances created posters and graphic design on commission and sewed a series of two dozen or more dresses and coats.

After the closure of the Department of Design, she took a teaching position at University of California, Davis, where her husband taught Italian, but they bought a house and lived in Berkeley. They started a textile printing company, Goodstuffs, in Emeryville in 1969 to manufacture screen-printed running yardage after her designs, which sold well, with her husband as manager.

The great tragedy of her life was a car accident on New Year's Day 1974, when a drunk ran into their Volkswagen Beetle: Jonathan was killed and Frances was in a coma for a month. Then she was in rehabilitation learning to walk again.

A year later, in April 1975, Berkeley Library School professor Roger Levenson suggested she take over teaching his class at The Bancroft Library, "Printing on the Handpress." She went to Arif Press in Berkeley, where she met Alastair Johnston who helped her with typesetting and printing. She invited him to be her teaching assistant, and this led to the founding of Poltroon Press.

She wrote a doctoral thesis on American designer Will Bradley, which she submitted to the Library School at Berkeley, but she was told by the dean, Robert Harlan, she couldn't be a Berkeley student at the same time as she was a professor at another campus. She then started over and wrote a new dissertation on the cosmology of Portuguese immigrant gardens in California (this was inspired by her friendship with architectural historian John Beach), which she submitted to the College of Environmental Design at Berkeley. During this time, the mid-1980s, she gave a course of guest lectures at Berkeley which were well-attended. Her lectures covered everything from Persian textiles, to cosmologies in garden design, to her passion for primitive and folk art. When she was defending her thesis, one committee member said, "We should be getting a degree from you!"

She wrote for many journals, including Fine Print and Visible Language. The publisher of Design Book Review, John Parman wrote, "Frances was an early and wonderful contributor to Design Book Review, the author of a number of memorable essay-reviews that set the tone for much that followed. It was remarkably generous and of course I learned a huge amount about the history of design."

A former student, Betty Ho, who studied graphic design at UC Davis wrote, "She was one of the more interesting and vibrant professors at Davis. I took an intro to design class with her my freshman year and dropped my last quarter of chemistry to major in environmental design. She took us on field trips to Mark Bullwinkle's yard sculptures, her shadow garden and to some printing presses. I took a typography class from her and I remember her slideshow of masculine ads (sans serif type) and feminine ads (cursive type). She was super knowledgeable and I learned a lot from her."

Around 1990 Butler was offered early retirement from UC Davis where she was chair of the Design Program in the Department of Applied Behavioral Sciences in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. She decided to look for property in the country and found a farm in the Capay Valley, in California, but groundwater tests showed high levels of DDT. She then turned her attention to France and toured the south but found it over-priced and over-populated. On her return north she visited a friend in the Dordogne who knew of a farm for sale that suited her well. She spent over 30 years there, with cats, dogs, and two donkeys, as well as becoming quite a local legend, first for her American ways (accidentally serving horse meat at a barbecue picnic), then as she decorated her buildings with colored plaster and mosaics, telling the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, and curious neighbors became admirers.