Gerald Giampa was a printer

Printer (publisher)

In publishing, printers are both companies providing printing services and individuals who directly operate printing presses. With the invention of the moveable type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg around 1450, printing—and printers—proliferated throughout Europe.Today, printers are found...

, typographer and author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

. When he was born, his parents lived in a tent in Duncan, British Columbia

Duncan, British Columbia

Duncan is a city on southern Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada.-History:The community is named after William Chalmers Duncan . He arrived in Victoria in May 1862, then in August of that year he was one of the party of a hundred settlers which Governor Douglas took to Cowichan Bay...

.

His interest in printing books came from his grandfather who liked to read. Giampa studied letterpress printing

Letterpress printing

Letterpress printing is relief printing of text and image using a press with a "type-high bed" printing press and movable type, in which a reversed, raised surface is inked and then pressed into a sheet of paper to obtain a positive right-reading image...

 and typography under Wil Hudson and Nick Schwabe http://www.p22.com/Lanston/Giampa/GiampaIntroduction.html.

Giampa's Cobblestone Press published works by Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

, Robin Blaser

Robin Blaser

Robin Francis Blaser was an author and poet in both the United States and Canada.-Personal background:Born in Denver, Colorado, Blaser grew up in Idaho, and came to Berkeley, California, in 1944. There he met Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, becoming a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance of...

http://www.p22.com/Lanston/Giampa/Robin-Blaser-Poet.html and George Bowering

George Bowering

George Harry Bowering, OC, OBC is a prolific Canadian novelist, poet, historian, and biographer. He has served as Canada's Parliamentary Poet Laureate....

 amongst others. Later expanding his company and re-naming it the Northland Letterpress Company, Giampa then purchased the US Lanston Monotype Machine Company http://www.p22.com/Lanston/Giampa/MonotypeKeyboardHands.html from M & H typefounders in San Francisco.

Giampa designed the Bodoni 26 font

Font

In typography, a font is traditionally defined as a quantity of sorts composing a complete character set of a single size and style of a particular typeface...

, which was named in the top 100 Types in a survey conducted by the Type Directors Club http://www.tdc.org/reviews/typelist.html.