Founded by printer-poet Dave Haselwood in 1958, the Auerhahn Press published many key poets of the San Francisco Renaissance

San Francisco Renaissance

The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range of poetic activity centered on San Francisco and which brought it to prominence as a hub of the American poetic avant-garde. However, others The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range...

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Stated in advertisements appearing in Evergreen Review

Evergreen Review

Evergreen Review is a U.S.-based literary magazine founded by Barney Rosset, publisher of Grove Press. It existed in print from 1957 through 1973, and was re-launched online in 1998...

, Poetry

Poetry

Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...

, City Lights Journal and Big Table magazines, the press’s goal was “to re-marry good printing and writing,” and to this end the Auerhahn published 28 letterpress-printed titles between 1958 and 1964. Most were chapbooks handset by Haselwood, later with 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...

, in a creative and subtle variety of fonts. Its first title was The Hotel Wentley Poems by John Wieners

John Wieners

John Joseph Wieners was an American lyric poet.-Biography:Born in Milton, Massachusetts, Wieners attended St. Gregory Elementary School in Dorchester, Massachusetts and Boston College High School. From 1950 to 1954, he studied at Boston College, where he earned his A.B...

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The press was based in San Francisco and published the first books of many emerging and soon-to-be influential poets, including Wieners and Lew Welch

Lew Welch

Lewis Barrett Welch, Jr. was an American poet associated with the Beat generation of poets, artists, and iconoclasts.Welch published and performed widely during the 1960s...

. Its catalogue, uniformly out of print, includes works by Jack Spicer

Jack Spicer

Jack Spicer was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. In 2009, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer won the American Book Award for poetry.-Life and work:...

; Diane DiPrima; Philip Lamantia

Philip Lamantia

Philip Lamantia was an American poet and lecturer. Lamantia's visionary poems were ecstatic, terror-filled, and erotic which explored the subconscious world of dreams and linked it to the experience of daily life.-Biography:...

; Michael McClure

Michael McClure

Michael McClure is an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955 rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums...

; Philip Whalen

Philip Whalen

Philip Glenn Whalen was an American poet, Zen Buddhist, and a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and close to the Beat generation.-Biography:...

; David Meltzer

David Meltzer

David Meltzer is an American poet and musician of the Beat Generation and San Francisco Renaissance. Lawrence Ferlinghetti has described him as "one of the greats of post-World-War-Two San Francisco poets and musicians." Meltzer came to prominence with inclusion of his work in the anthology, The...

; William Everson

William Everson

William Everson , also known as Brother Antoninus, was an American poet of the San Francisco Renaissance and was also a literary critic and small press printer.-Beginnings:Everson was born in Sacramento, California...

 (Brother Antonius); Charles Olson

Charles Olson

Charles Olson , was a second generation American modernist poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance...

; and the first edition of Exterminator

Exterminator

Exterminator may refer to:*A practitioner in pest control-Competition:*Exterminator , racehorse, the winner of the 1918 Kentucky Derby*X-Terminator, a competitor in Robot Wars-Fiction:...

, an early collaboration in cut-ups by William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs

William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...

 and Brion Gysin

Brion Gysin

Brion Gysin was a painter, writer, sound poet, and performance artist born in Taplow, Buckinghamshire.He is best known for his discovery of the cut-up technique, used by his friend, the novelist William S. Burroughs...

. These among others were the “insurgent American writers” that the press detected in its search for the “bold, free and courageous in modern writing”.

Thanks to the printer’s touch as much as to the collaborative energies of artists like Bruce Conner

Bruce Conner

Bruce Conner was an American artist renowned for his work in assemblage, film, drawing, sculpture, painting, collage, and photography, among other disciplines.-Early life:...

, Ray Johnson

Ray Johnson

Raymond Edward Johnson , known primarily as a collagist and correspondence artist, was a seminal figure in the history of Neo-Dada and early Pop art...

, Robert LaVigne, Robert Ronnie Branaman and Wallace Berman

Wallace Berman

Wallace Berman was an American visual and assemblage artist. He has been called the "father" of assemblage art and a "crucial figure in the history of postwar California art".-Personal life and education:...

, the Auerhahn’s books—and its ephemera—seem to float in the shadows between high art and faded handbill.

“The first & final consideration in printing poetry is the poetry itself,” Haselwood wrote in 1960. “If the poems are great they create their own space; the publisher is just a midwife during the final operation & if he has to do a lot of dirty work that’s the way it should be. Contrary to what a lot of people including publishers think, publishing is not a gentleman’s profession, it is the profession of a crook or a madman.”

As the press grew influential, if not solvent, artistic conflict followed, most notably with DiPrima, Robert Duncan

Robert Duncan (poet)

Robert Duncan was an American poet and a student of H.D. and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black...

 (who canceled his book in mid-production), early collaborator Jonathan Williams

Jonathan Williams (poet)

Jonathan Williams was an American poet, publisher, essayist, and photographer. He is known as the founder of The Jargon Society, which has published poetry, experimental fiction, photography, and folk art for more than fifty years...

, and Spicer, who in an occasional poem dated October 1, 1962, wrote: “This is an ode to John Wieners and the Auerhahn Press / Who have driven me away from poetry like a fast car.”

In 1964, Haselwood turned production and last rites of the Auerhahn Press over to his partner Andrew Hoyem and started Dave Haselwood Books.