Today, right this minute, you could purchase a 1988 letterpress copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses, with prints by Robert Motherwell, signed, for $40,000.00. Or, Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo for $850.00. Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin goes for $1650, with “a brown goatskin spine with gold foil-stamped titling and tan cloth over boards.” I have two close friends who are printmakers in southern Vermont where I live. I’ve witnessed inky fingers, and felt the texture of fine papers and etched metal plates. I have a framed print, titled “Hayfield,” hanging in my living room, made by one of the printmakers—number six in an edition of twenty. The other printmaker tells me one day we will take my poems through this process of ink and metal. Andrew Hoyem combined his passion for both literature and visual art in a career running Arion Press. He trained with Robert Grabhorn of Grabhorn Press before founding Arion in 1975, in San Francisco. At Arion, in addition to Ulysses, Hoyem letterpress printed Moby-Dick, and Leaves of Grass, and the Bible, as well as contemporary writers and artists including Kiki Smith and Kara Walker. Sixty of the Holy Bibles remain, for sale—New Revised Standard Version, printed on English mouldmade paper, the text set in Romulus, handbound in linen, or leather, and the weight of each bible is about fifty pounds.
-Morgan English