As a printer, Lauren "Gehry" GERINGER of Iowa City has to be able to read "backward" and "upside down" to practice his craft.

Lauren GERINGER was born in Mount Ayr, Iowa in 1908. When he was two years old, his parents moved to Montana to homestead. Lauren grew up there and wanted to become a cowboy, but was bitten by the writing bug. At the age of sixteen, he was writing for a farm magazine, the Dakota Farmer. He continued to write his column, but when attempts to syndicate it failed, he stopped writing it. He wrote for weeklies and Sunday School papers. He wrote westerns and romances for the pulps under the name of Lars RAYMER, but this did not support him. In 1932, his father bought him a hand press from an itinerant evangelist and he began learning the printing trade. He returned to Iowa and stayed with relatives while working various jobs. In 1943, he got a job as printer at the Iowa City Press Citizen, where he worked for the next thirty years, before retiring as compositor in 1972. GERINGER has written and self-published several books, among them Shortcut Shorthand in 1980 and Cowboy in the Wheat, his memoir of growing up in Montana, in 1985. He continued to write and try to publish romance novels and westerns until he died but he was unsuccessful in this.

After his retirement he became very active in amateur printing and press work. He belonged to several organizations, and was president of the American Amateur Press Association in 1978 and of the National Amateur Press Association in 1988. From 1973 to 1987 he won an award nearly every year from the American Amateur Press Association, most usually the Journal of Overall Excellence for his small People Watcher amateur journal, which he handset and printed one page at a time in his basement. He won the Russell L. Paxton Award in Amateur Journalism from the Historians of Amateur Journalism in 1988. He printed books written by other people, such as Have Hearts Been Broken? by Jim Elshoff and How to Write and Publish a Book, which he co-wrote with Lenore Harris Hughes in 1977.

Lauren GERINGER died in January of 1992.

-JRoethler, September 2006

Transcription by Sharon R. Becker, July of 2010