Arion Press Presents Holiday Open House, Special Offers and More

Dec. 7 Holiday Open House and Special Offers

Celebrate with Arion Press on Saturday, December 7. The Press will be open from 11 to 5 for a holiday sale and free tours at noon and 3 p.m.

This is a rare weekend opportunity to visit the typefoundry, pressroom, and bindery. Among sale items are posters, broadsides, photographs, and selected Arion limited editions listed on the right.

Meet Arion Artists Mark Ulriksen, Lucy Gray, and Stan Washburn on December 7

On hand at the December 7 Open House will be New Yorker cover artist Mark Ulriksen (from2 to 3 p.m., shown at right), and Lucy Gray and Stan Washburn (1 to 4 p.m.). They will show their books, prints, and photographs with Arion Press and discuss other recent projects.

Make a Year-End Tax-Deductible Donation

Join the National Endowment for the Arts and the more than 500 individuals who contribute annually to preserve our unique facility for the study and making of books. In the era of decimated library budgets, such support is essential. You may donate online to support the Grabhorn Institute.

Welcome Orwell's Animal Farm in December

The next book from Arion Press is George Orwell's satiric masterpiece Animal Farm. This fable in which farm animals overthrow their human masters was first published in 1945, five years before the author's death at the age of 47, and grew out of Orwell's experiences in the Spanish Civil War. The 2013 Arion edition appears as Orwell is being newly appreciated, in part for his matchless satire on government surveillance. The illustrations are by Jonathan Hammer, an American artist residing in Spain, and the introduction is by veteran Orwell scholar Peter Stansky, emeritus professor of history at Stanford, and the author of The Unknown Orwell. Both will be present to celebrate the publication on January 2 (contact us for an invitation).

Adam Hochschild and Peter Stansky Discuss Orwell on January 2

Historian Adam Hochschild joins Peter Stansky the night of our publication party for a public conversation about Orwell's legacy and the genesis of Animal Farm. Hochschild, the author, most recently, of the instant World War I classic, To End All Wars, is currently working on a book on the Spanish Civil War. To see his historian's detective skills on display, you can read Hochschild's riveting, close-up account of the young Eric Blair (before he was George Orwell) and his wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy Blair fighting for the Republican cause in 1936 and 1937, and barely escaping capture. See the December 19 New York Review of Books.

Events for Kara Walker and Porgy & Bess

Arion Press celebrated with artist Kara Walker in New York in November at a reception at the Sikkema Jenkins & Company Gallery in Chelsea. On display were the letterpress printed edition of the libretto of Porgy & Bess and the portfolio of Kara Walker's separate lithographs. Among the guests were Arion collectors Agnes Gund, Nion McEvoy, Marvin Luria, Helyn MacLean, Bill and Stuart Buice, and Philip Bowles. Later in the week, Arion artists Kara Walker, Wendy Artin, and Lucy Gray were on hand at the Arion Press stand in the Park Avenue Armory during the International Fine Print Dealers Association Print Fair.

Here at the Press, an early viewing of the Porgy & Bess publication featured a visit from Diane Paulus, the Tony Award-winning director of the new musical version of the Gershwin/Heyward classic, which begins its national tour in San Francisco. Paulus was rehearsing in San Francisco with veterans of the 2011 Broadway production including Alicia Hall Moran (Bess), the wife of the popular SF Jazz resident director pianist Jason Hall Moran. On hand to meet Diane Paulus were Grabhorn board members Leslie Berriman, Paul Wattis, Philip Bowles, Bill Barlow, theater devotees Susie and Pat McBaine and Jean and Michael Strunsky of the Ira Gershwin estate. Listen online to the video of Diane Paulus' remarks on Porgy & Bess at Arion Press.

William T. Buice III Joins Grabhorn Board

We are delighted to announce that attorney William Buice has joined the board of the Grabhorn Institute. A tireless champion of the culture of books, Bill Buice has served as president of the Grolier Club and the University Club in New York, and is current chair of the board of directors of the Rare Book School in Charlottesville, Virginia. A collector of the English Romantic poets, he has recently entertained San Francisco audiences with a talk on the late 18th century publisher Joseph Johnson and a program of readings from Charles Lamb. He and his wife Stuart Buice, who collects Bloomsbury Group authors, are frequent visitors to San Francisco, where their daughter Merrill Buice and her family live.

Lucy Gray and Elizabeth Farnsworth in the November Issue of Brick

Please note the marvelous review of the Arion Press The Day of the Locust in the November issue of Brick, the Toronto-based journal run by novelists Michael Ondaatje and Linda Spalding. The writer is the rising literary light Allisa Valles, who finds revealing connections between the Hollywood ambiance described by Nathanael West and the interpretations of photographer Lucy Gray and film historian David Thomson. You can also read the appreciation of Lucy Gray's work for this greatest of Hollywood novels by writers Greil Marcus, Diane Johnson, and Geoff Dwyer.

We also recommend this issue of Brick for the Press's friend Elizabeth Farnsworth's essay "Fracked: North Dakota's Oil Boom", with photographs by Terry Evans. It is gratifying to see Farnsworth, the veteran international affairs reporter for PBS-TV, return to her native Midwest and a topic of such urgency. Her project includes an exhibition at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, up through late January. A poetry lover, Farnsworth was inspired in writing about the oil boom by evocations of the landscape in the work of Thomas McGrath, such as:

Southbound, the coulee
Carries its freight of moonlight toward the
fox-brightened river breaks.
All time condenses here. Dakota is everywhere.

Thomas McGrath, Letter to an Imaginary Friend

Samuel Beckett in Our Own Backyard

We are amazed and delighted to hear that the correspondence with Samuel Beckett of our friend and Lake Street neighbor Dr. Jay Levy will appear in the highly-praised series of the great writer's letters underway from Cambridge University Press. When Volume 3 is launched in San Francisco this week, some letters to Dr. Levy will be read by editor Lois Overbeck of Emory University. Jay Levy, an AIDs expert and professor of medicine at UCSF, met Beckett as a student in Paris in 1961, after showing him a term paper on Waiting for Godot he had written for his French class at Wesleyan. Like so many, this young American was to discover that "Beckett was a wonderful correspondent. He always answered every note or letter," Levy recalls. "His responses were cryptic but to the point." They will be in the next and final volume, number 4, which begins in 1960. Visitors to the Arion Press can see our tribute to Beckett, Godot, the play as told in pictures by artist William T. Wiley, another worshipper of Beckett. A few copies of the book are still for sale, along with charming unique hand-colored Wiley prints of scenes in the play.

Phone: (415) 668-2542

Email: arionpress@arionpress.com

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