SAN FRANCISCO — Arion Press in San Francisco has carried on the tradition of hand printing books for the last 50 years and publishes limited-edition books illustrated by notable artists.

The production facility includes a letterpress shop with historic metal typefaces, a type foundry and a complete hand book bindery. “This craft is so labor-intensive and so hands-on you can imagine that it really is not just the labor of love, but actually kind of a very slow labor of love,” said Arion Press creative director Blake Riley.

The press operates alongside M&H type, the largest operating type foundry in the country. Brian Ferrett, typecaster and press operator shared the inner workings of the monotype system, which was introduced in the 1890s, “It casts each individual letter of a line of a paragraph of a book and you can cast an entire publication on just this.”

Arion Press publishes several unique, limited-edition books every year that are printed from metal types cast on site. “No two books that we make are ever the same. We essentially are recreating the wheel every time with the formats and the materials,” said Riley.

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The process is lengthy, though. Once the text is printed and proofread, the book goes to the handbook bindery where it’s sewn, many times by hand.

Bookbinder Jocelyn Lee said, “We are responsible, once all the pages are printed, for folding them and sewing them. We either machine sew them on our Smythe machine back there or we hand sew them. We use a 100% linen thread, and that’s archival. We also, here at the bindery, make all the covers ourselves.”

Arion Press recently moved its facility from the Presidio to Fort Mason in San Francisco and welcomes all visitors to experience the magic of this old-fashioned craftsmanship.

You can learn more by visiting here.