Arion Press
Encyclopedia
The Arion Press "is considered the nation's leading publisher of fine-press
Fine press
Fine press printing and publishing comprises historical and contemporary printers and publishers publishing books and other printed matter of exceptional intrinsic quality and artistic taste, including both commercial and private presses. Their dedication to fine printing distinguishes them from...

 books," according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Founded in San Francisco in 1974, it has published 80-plus limited-edition books
Limited edition books
A limited edition book is a description of a book which is released in a limited print run quantity, usually much smaller than publishing industry standards, and connotes a level of scarcity or exclusivity...

, most printed by letterpress, often illustrated with original prints by notable artists.

The press, writes Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

, "carries on a grand legacy of San Francisco printers and bookmakers." The press was founded by Andrew Hoyem
Andrew Hoyem
Andrew Hoyem is a typographer, letterpress printer, publisher, poet, and preservationist. He is the founder and director of Arion Press in San Francisco, which "is considered the nation's leading publisher of fine-press books," according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune...

, continuing the tradition of the Grabhorn Press of Edwin and Robert Grabhorn. Hoyem had been partners for seven years with the younger Grabhorn brother, and after his death Hoyem started Arion Press, preserving the Grabhorn's historic collection of American metal type.

Since 2001, Arion Press has been a cultural tenant at the Presidio
Presidio of San Francisco
The Presidio of San Francisco is a park on the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula in San Francisco, California, within the Golden Gate National Recreation Area...

, where it shares an industrial building with its typecasting division, M & H Type—the oldest and largest hot metal
Hot metal
Hot metal may refer to:*Hot Metal, a British television comedy series set in a newspaper office*Hot metal typesetting*Pig iron in a liquid state*HoTMetaL, a pioneering HTML editor for web pages...

 type foundry
Type foundry
A type foundry is a company that designs or distributes typefaces. Originally, type foundries manufactured and sold metal and wood typefaces and matrices for line-casting machines like the Linotype and Monotype machines designed to be printed on letterpress printers...

 in the U.S. for letterpress printers. The Arion Press gallery is open daily, and tours of the letterpress print shop, typefoundry, and book bindery are also available to visitors on a weekly schedule.

Arion Press has a nonprofit branch, the Grabhorn Institute
Grabhorn Institute
The Grabhorn Institute is a nonprofit organization formed in October 2000 for the purpose of preserving and continuing the use of one of the last integrated type foundry, letterpress printing, and bookbinding facilities in the fine press tradition, and operating it as a living museum and...

, founded to help preserve and continue the use of one of the last integrated typefoundry, letterpress printing, and bookbinding facilities in the world. In recognition of this effort, in 2000 the Grabhorn Institute was designated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation
National Trust for Historic Preservation
The National Trust for Historic Preservation is an American member-supported organization that was founded in 1949 by congressional charter to support preservation of historic buildings and neighborhoods through a range of programs and activities, including the publication of Preservation...

 as part of "the nation's irreplaceable historical and cultural legacy" under its Save America's Treasures
Save America's Treasures
Save America's Treasures is a United States Federal initiative to preserve and protect American historic buildings, arts, and published works. It is a public-private partnership between the U.S. National Park Service and the National Trust for Historic Preservation...

 program.

The press publishes three to four new books each year, in editions of 400 copies or less. "Its editions of such classics as Moby-Dick
Moby-Dick
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, was written by American author Herman Melville and first published in 1851. It is considered by some to be a Great American Novel and a treasure of world literature. The story tells the adventures of wandering sailor Ishmael, and his voyage on the whaleship Pequod,...

and contemporary works that pair poets and artists are considered to be among the most exquisitely printed books in the world," in the words of John King of the San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco Chronicle
thumb|right|upright|The Chronicle Building following the [[1906 San Francisco earthquake|1906 earthquake]] and fireThe San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California, but distributed throughout Northern and Central California,...

. The press's lectern edition of the Bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

 "will probably be the last lectern Bible to be produced using traditional methods [and] will no doubt be regarded as one of the finest examples of book-making."

Publisher Andrew Hoyem has focused on creating limited edition books of notable literature illustrated with original prints from prominent artists. The press's livre d'artiste series, launched in 1982, includes Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell American painter, printmaker and editor. He was one of the youngest of the New York School , which also included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Philip Guston....

's etchings for James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...

's Ulysses
Ulysses (novel)
Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, in Paris. One of the most important works of Modernist literature,...

, Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns, Jr. is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking.-Life:Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed...

's etching for the poetry of Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...

, Richard Diebenkorn
Richard Diebenkorn
Richard Diebenkorn was a well-known 20th century American painter. His early work is associated with Abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. His later work were instrumental to his achievement of worldwide acclaim.-Biography:Richard Clifford Diebenkorn Jr...

's etchings for the poetry of W. B. Yeats, and Martin Puryear
Martin Puryear
Martin Puryear is an African American sculptor. He works in media including wood, stone, tar, and wire, and his work is a union of minimalism and traditional crafts.-Life:...

's woodblock prints for Jean Toomer
Jean Toomer
Jean Toomer was an American poet and novelist and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance. His first book Cane is considered by many as his most significant.-Early life:...

's Cane
Cane (novel)
Cane is a 1923 novel by noted Harlem Renaissance author Jean Toomer. The novel is structured as a series of vignettes revolving around the origins and experiences of African Americans in the United States. The vignettes alternate in structure between narrative prose, poetry, and play-like...

. Other artists who have collaborated in Arion Press editions include Jim Dine
Jim Dine
Jim Dine is an American pop artist. He is sometimes considered to be a part of the Neo-Dada movement. He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, attended Walnut Hills High School, the University of Cincinnati, and received a BFA from Ohio University in 1957. He first earned respect in the art world with...

, John Baldessari
John Baldessari
John Anthony Baldessari is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lives and works in Santa Monica and Venice, California...

, Wayne Thiebaud
Wayne Thiebaud
Wayne Thiebaud is an American painter whose most famous works are of cakes, pastries, boots, toilets, toys and lipsticks. He is associated with the Pop art movement because of his interest in objects of mass culture, although his works, executed during the fifties and sixties, slightly predate...

, Alex Katz
Alex Katz
Alex Katz is an American figurative artist associated with the Pop art movement. In particular, he is known for his paintings, sculptures, and prints and is represented by numerous galleries internationally.-Life and work:...

, Kiki Smith
Kiki Smith
Kiki Smith is an American artist classified as a feminist artist, a movement with beginnings in the twentieth century...

, R.B. Kitaj, Sol LeWitt
Sol LeWitt
Solomon "Sol" LeWitt was an American artist linked to various movements, including Conceptual art and Minimalism....

, Mel Bochner
Mel Bochner
Mel Bochner is an American conceptual artist. Mr. Bochner received his BFA in 1962 and honorary Doctor of Fine Arts in 2005 from the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University...

, and Stephen Shore
Stephen Shore
Stephen Shore is an American photographer known for his deadpan images of banal scenes and objects in the United States, and for his pioneering use of color in art photography.- Life and work :...

. The press has published such contemporary writers as Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer. He lives in Dublin. Heaney has received the Nobel Prize in Literature , the Golden Wreath of Poetry , T. S. Eliot Prize and two Whitbread prizes...

, Robert Alter
Robert Alter
Robert Bernard Alter is an American professor of Hebrew language and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967.-Biography:...

, Tom Stoppard
Tom Stoppard
Sir Tom Stoppard OM, CBE, FRSL is a British playwright, knighted in 1997. He has written prolifically for TV, radio, film and stage, finding prominence with plays such as Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul, The Real Thing, and Rosencrantz and...

, Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an American poet, painter, liberal activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers...

, David Mamet
David Mamet
David Alan Mamet is an American playwright, essayist, screenwriter and film director.Best known as a playwright, Mamet won a Pulitzer Prize and received a Tony nomination for Glengarry Glen Ross . He also received a Tony nomination for Speed-the-Plow . As a screenwriter, he received Oscar...

, and Helen Vendler
Helen Vendler
Helen Hennessy Vendler is a leading American critic of poetry.-Life and career:Vendler has written books on Emily Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, John Keats, and Seamus Heaney. She has been a professor of English at Harvard University since 1984; between 1981 and 1984 she taught...

.

Arion Press books are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...

, the Huntington Library, and the British Library
British Library
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom, and is the world's largest library in terms of total number of items. The library is a major research library, holding over 150 million items from every country in the world, in virtually all known languages and in many formats,...

, among others. Three of the Press's books were honored among the one hundred great books of the 20th Century in the 1994 Museum of Modern Art exhibition “One Hundred Years of Artists Books.”

External links

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