Arion Press, the last full-service letterpress publisher in the U.S., has been profiled this week by The Boston Globe. Located on the edge of the Presidio in San Francisco, the fine press specializes in small print runs of highly illustrated books. They’ve published John Ashbery, Seamus Heaney, T.S. Eliot, John Milton, Allen Ginsberg, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wallace Stevens, and Helen Vendler regularly writes introductions for their new editions.

The process is unusual: the press’ in-house foundry crafts each letter; Arion tradesmen set many books completely by hand and others digitally. They print the books on surfaces like “mold-made paper” imported from Germany, and handbind each book with goatskin or mahogany. Tradesman work their way up over years of apprenticeship. Nathan Heller recently profiled the press for Harvard Magazine.

Brothers Edwin and Robert Grabhorn chose to start Grabhorn Press in San Francisco because they believed the city’s moist air was good for printing. They studied “allusive typography”—the idea that typefaces ought subtly to echo the period and style of the writing being typeset. In 1930, they published a gorgeous 400-copy edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, set entirely by hand. Andrew Hoyem joined Grabhorn Press in 1964, and later followed the tradition of San Francisco presses by founding Arion there.

In the late 1970s, using Grabhorn Press’s edition of Leaves of Grass as inspiration, Arion Press set out to print an ambitious new edition of Moby-Dick. Hoyem explained, “My goal was to make artists’ books that were entirely cohesive—so that you couldn’t separate the art from the typography, visually or in concept.”

Moby-Dick was handset in Goudy Modern typeface, printed on dampened Barcham Green handmade paper, bound in goat skin, and the trim size was an impressive fifteen inches by ten. Artist Barry Moser was enlisted for one hundred woodcut engravings, but Hoyem’s specifications for these must have been a challenge for the artist:

No main characters—including the whale—should appear in an illustration, he advised; no major action scene should be rendered. The idea was to let readers create their own mental images of characters and scenes based on the author’s writing, with the engravings there only to help them fill in the visual details (like whaling equipment) that they weren’t able to envision on their own.

To study the Arion Press edition of Moby-Dick today is to have an almost sacred experience of the power of physical print. Its ink is black, with wide margins and initial letters in a dark, aqueous blue. The paper is a faint blue-gray, like the surface of the ocean on a cloudy day. When the reader lifts a page to turn it, the watermark of a whale shimmers through. Because the letter w is particularly wide, Hoyem made the abutting spaces slightly narrower; every semicolon has a hairsbreadth gap before it, as if signaling the partial stop. The result is something that one would not think possible: a nearly perfect book.

Arion Press has published ninety-seven titles in the last twenty-nine years. Hoyem, now seventy-seven years-old, continues to head the press today. (Other editions of Moby-Dick—each impressive in their own way—are available here, here, here, and here.)