San Francisco: The world’s most unusual books are entirely made by hand at the Presidio

All of the world’s great print centers have been located in humid environments. Paper is often transported by sea, of course, but humidity also just helps things keep humming, says Arion Press’ Blake Riley – the ink running smoothly, the machinery not becoming brittle and breaking down.

Arion Press is one of the world’s great printing centers. Located in San Francisco’s The Presidio, it is shrouded in chilly drifting fog from the ocean. A towering smokestack testifies to its former use as a hospital boiler plant. Inside, multi-ton letterpresses clank and whir, fires roar, melting down metal and bookbinders painstakingly fold pages upon pages upon pages. Some of the most exciting things in the rare-book universe are happening at Arion, a company with origins dating back a century and which still uses that century-old machinery.

“It is the last vertically integrated printing facility in the United States to make books entirely by hand, from start to finish, under one roof,” says Ted Gioia, director of public programming.

Arion employs some of the last typecasters in the world – the people who make and melt the lead-alloy types (and get tested regularly for lead exposure) and sometimes lose sensation in their fingertips from the job’s physicality. The press also has the largest standing collection of metal type outside the Smithsonian. “We have these elaborate machines that literally make a piece of lead alloy for every single space, letter, comma – everything that is printed in our books is a piece of metal we cast on-site,” says Gioia.

In a typical year Arion makes three books, printed in editions of 250 that go out to subscribers who pay between $2,400 to $10,000 a year for the privilege. They’re collector’s treasures, resting on the intersection of literature and art. Among the famous artists who have illustrated Arion’s editions are Richard Diebenkorn, Wayne Thiebaud, Kara Walker and William Kentridge.

That’s just scratching the surface. Some volumes include historical materials relevant to the titles, literally ingrained in the books.

“Last year, we incorporated the bricks from Edgar Allen Poe’s house (in New York) in an edition of his stories and poems,” says Riley, creative director and lead printer. “We ended up pulverizing those and making a pulp paper, and from that paper made labels for the book.”

In 2020, Arion produced a special edition of John Steinbeck and biologist Ed Ricketts’ “Sea of Cortez,” which chronicled their scientific journey through the Gulf of California aboard a sardine trawler called the Western Flyer.

“It was the Holy Grail for Steinbeck fanatics. (The boat) had been submerged, but this guy found and raised it and had it restored in Port Townsend, Washington,” says Riley. “The wood from the ship we managed to get ahold of. We trimmed it down to the heart and used some of it to create veneer labels and incorporate it into the box for the deluxe edition. So the boat that they wrote the story on is physically incorporated into the actual book.”

This year Arion is only making two books, because in October it will relocate, with all its heavy machinery, to Fort Mason, where it will resume public tours. The first volume is Octavia Butler’s “Kindred,” illustrated by Alison Saar, whose work focuses on the African diaspora. The second is Aesop’s Fables, but with morals updated by Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket.

“We decided the thing we could bring to it to make it interesting was a 21st-century spin,” says Riley. “Like, for the Boy Who Cried Wolf, the moral might be, ‘Don’t live somewhere where wolves run free.’ It’s cheeky, but also a way for the edition to stand apart while still respecting the original work. After all, next to the Bible, the fables of Aesop is the most-published book in the Western canon.”

Arion’s subscribers range from bibliophiles to art collectors to Silicon Valley billionaires – Laurene Powell Jobs is one example – and the company’s books rest in collections at the Getty Center, the British Library, Stanford University and the University of California.

With the growth of digitalization, one might think the number of collectors – as well as bookmakers – would be dwindling. But that’s far from the case.

“There’s been an uptick in the last decade of people who have begun to work in the book arts. Our interpretation of that is they are really responding to something that’s been removed from their central aesthetic lives,” says Riley. “People took such a quick and deep dive into technology, and then all of a sudden, they were caught out. And I think a lot of it has to do with that tactile, sensory, direct experience with the physical object.”