David R. Godine was born in Cambridge and educated at The Roxbury Latin School, Dartmouth College, and Harvard University.
After a brief stint in the Army, he worked for year as a printing apprentice to Harold McGrath at Leonard Baskin’s Gehenna Press in Northampton. In 1970, along with co-founders Lance Hidy and Martha Rockwell, he converted an abandoned cow barn on a Brookline estate into a printing office from which the company began issuing broadsides, pamphlets, and, ultimately, books, mostly printed from hot metal.
By 1975, both the barn and the ambition to make a living as letterpress printers were abandoned in favor of publishing. The company moved to offices in Boston’s Back Bay and subsequently to other locations in the area, remaining a part of the city’s publishing fabric until this day.
Books in order of publication:
The Red Pear Garden: Three Great Dramas of Revolutionary China – 1973
Great Camps of the Adirondacks – 1982
Godine at Forty: A Retrospective of Four Decades in the Life of an Independent Publisher – 2012
Godine at 50: A Bibliographic Biography of an Independent Press, 1970-2020 – 2021
Oak Lawn Library Friends 