Great Literature with Original Art

Arion Press founding publisher Andrew Hoyem and editor Diana Ketcham are pleased to announce Arion Press Classics, an offering from their personal holdings of limited edition books they issued between 1975 and their retirement in 2018. They are not affiliated with the ongoing publishing activities of Arion Press.

Andrew and Diana are offering pristine copies in their original wrappings. For some titles, only one or two copies remain.

Hard-to-find Arion Press landmarks such as Ulysses, the Bible, the Constitution, Leaves of Grass, The Great Gatsby (with Michael Graves) and the Poetry of Yeats (with Richard Diebenkorn) are included, as well as more recent publications with acclaimed artists such as William Kentridge, Kara Walker, Enrique Chagoya, Kiki Smith, Julie Mehretu, and Wayne Thiebaud.

We are proud to partner with Swan’s Fine Books, who will handle payment and shipping of orders placed here or on Swan’s website. Books and prints may be viewed at Swan’s Fine Books in Walnut Creek or in San Francisco by appointment. Please address your inquiries to Laurelle Swan. For current Arion Press publications, inquire here.

Available Books

  • The Lulu Plays

    The Lulu Plays features esteemed South African artist William Kentridge in one of Arion’s most ambitious artist books. This bilingual limited edition contains 67 prints bound into the book and a separate portfolio of four larger linoleum block prints.

  • South of Heaven

    Arion Press turned to pulp fiction with the novel South of Heaven by Jim Thompson, an original writer of the first rank. Provocative L.A. artist Raymond Pettibon contributes
    44 drawings.

  • Porgy & Bess

    This artist book of Porgy & Bess, the libretto by DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin, is the occasion for Kara Walker’s first series of lithographs. The book contains 16 lithographs with four in a separate portfolio.

Andrew Hoyem and The Arion Press

Arion Press is often called the most important fine press of the mid 20th century through early 21st century, known for monumental undertakings such as Joyce’s Ulysses, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and a letterpress printed Bible--among 113 works of poetry, fiction, history, and science, including specially commissioned texts and new translations. 

In the words of historian Robert Bringhurst, Andrew Hoyem’s career was “unrivalled, given the literary importance and scale of Arion Press books, the variety of literature and techniques employed, his revival of the French livres d’artiste tradition through collaborations with some of the most prominent writers and artists of his era, and in his sheer productivity.” Stanford historian Peter Stansky has compared Andrew Hoyem’s achievement to that of William Morris, Virginia and Leonard Woolf at Hogarth Press, and Ambrose Vollard.  His books were included among the greatest books of the 20th century in “A Century of Artist Books” at the Museum of Modern Art and the era’s one hundred greatest books in “A Century for the Century” exhibition at the Grolier Club.  The Press has been the subject of documentaries by the PBS-TV NewsHour and by Anthony Bourdain.

Andrew Hoyem

San Francisco printer and publisher Andrew Hoyem (b. 1935) studied printing at the renowned Grabhorn Press, where he worked in the early 1960s while publishing Beat poetry as a partner in Auerhahn Press. He then formed a partnership with Robert Grabhorn, upon whose death he founded Arion Press, in 1974, with additional equipment and type purchased from the Grabhorn Press. In 1989, Hoyem greatly expanded the capacity of Arion Press by purchasing and preserving Mackenzie & Harris, the nation’s oldest surviving typefoundry, thereby creating a unique working museum where the traditional bookmaking crafts, from making type from molten lead through printing and binding, are practiced under one roof. In 2000, Hoyem and Ketcham founded the educational non-profit The Grabhorn Institute. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has designated this workshop one of the nation’s “irreplaceable cultural treasures.” In 2018, Hoyem and Ketcham retired from Arion Press and the Grabhorn Institute.

Available Books