About the Theatre
by Archer, William
London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1886. Hardcover. Very Good. Hardcover. First edition of the first book of criticism by Archer (1856-1924), a prominent literary and drama critic of his day. Bound in original dark red cloth with gilt title and author to spine and front cover. Some bumping and rubbing, slight chipping to spine corners otherwise in nice condition. Front and rear hinges are somewhat cracked and there are a few loose signatures. Light foxing throughout. Includes full page... Read More
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History of the Redemptorists at Annapolis, MD from 1853 to 1903 with a short historical sketch of the preceding one hundred and fifty years of Catholicity in the capital of Maryland
by A Redemptorist Father; [Rev. Jos. Wuest, CSSR; compiler]
Ilchester, MD: College Press, 1904. Hardcover. Very Good. Hardcover. SCARCE. Signed and inscribed by the compiler. The Redemptorists are a Catholic religious congregation for priests and brothers. The order was founded by Alphonsus Liguori in Italy, The Redemptorists are especially dedicated to Our Lady of Perpetual Help and were appointed by Pope Pius IX in 1865 as custodians of the icon of that title at the Redemptorist Church of St. Alphonsus Liguori in Rome. The Redemptorists are by... Read More
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A Day in the Bleachers
by [Arion Press] Hano, Arnold; Mark Ulricksen, illustrations
San Francisco: Arion Press, 2006. Fine. Number 284 of 400 numbered copies with additional lettered copies for private distribution. Signed by the author and the illustrator. This is a delightful book by Arnold Hano, who attended the 1954 World Series between the New York Giants and the Cleveland Indians. The book was published with great delight by the proprietor of the Arion Press, who was a devoted season ticket-holder at the San Francisco Giants stadium. It was originally... Read More
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The Price: A Play
by [Arion Press] Miller, Arthur; Sam Washburn, illustrator
San Francisco: Arion Press, 1999. Hardcover. Fine. Hardcover. Number 280 of 300 numbered copies with 26 lettered copies hors de commerce. Signed by Arthur Miller on the half title page and by the illustrator on the colophon. This is a handsome edition of Miller's well known play. The Price is a two-act play written in 1967 by Arthur Miller. It is about family dynamics, the price of furniture and the price of one's decisions. The play premiered on... Read More
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The Maltese Falcon
by [Arion Press] Hammett, Dashiell
San Francisco: Arion Press, 1983. Hardcover. Fine. Hardcover. One of 400 copies printed under the direction of Andrew Hoyem, the press proprietor. It was the eleventh publication of the press. This copy is inscribed on the colophon: "To Joe Costello/29 VIII 83/Andrew Hoyem." This is a magnificent book from the Arion Press that more than does justice to this Hammett's novel. The preface describes this book as the apex of his work. The publishers write in a preface... Read More
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A Delicate Balance
by [Arion Press] Albee, Edward; David Littlejohn, introduction, Tom Holland, illustrations
San Francisco: Arion Press, 2011. Hardcover. Fine. Hardcover. Number 152 of 300 numbered copies for sale, of which 50 copies were reserved for the Aurora Theatre Company, and 26 lettered copies for complimentary distribution. Signed by the playwright and the illustrator on the colophon. This edition was published by the Arion Press on the occasion of the opening of the Aurora Theatre Company's season in September 2011, its 20th anniversary, with a new production of this play by... Read More
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The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit
by [Arion Press] Canetti, Elias; J.A. Underwood, translator from German; Karl Bissinger, photographs; William T.Wiley, etchings; Ferdinand Protzman, afterword
San Francisco: Arion Press, 2001. Hardcover. Fine. Hardcover. Number 156 of 350 numbered copies for sale and 26 lettered copies hors de commerce. Signed by Karl Bissinger under his photograph facing page 117 and signed by William Wiley on the mounted etching facing page 102. This elegant book compiled 29 photographs taken in Marrakech and vicinity by Bissinger in late 1949 while on assignment for a travel feature published by Flair magazine in February 1950. The six etchings... Read More
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Mrs. Bridge
by [Arion Press] Connell, Evan S.; Mark Oppenheimer, introduction; Laurie Simmons, photographs
San Francisco: Arion Press, 2009. Hardcover. Fine. Hardcover. Number 5 of 300 numbered copies for sale and 26 lettered copies for complimentary distribution. Evan Connell has signed, in pencil on the last page of text. Laurie Simmons has signed below her photograph on the last page. This was the eighty-fifth publication of the press, issued on the fiftieth anniversary of the novel's publication in 1959. The prospectus calls this a quiet masterpiece of mid-twentieth century fiction....Evan Connell (1924-2013)... Read More
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The Memoirs of Benjamin Franklin
by [Arion Press], Franklin, Benjamin
San Francisco: Arion Press, 2006. Hardcover. Fine. Hardcover. Number 293 of 400 numbered copies for sale, with 26 lettered copies printed for complimentary distribution. This title was printed in celebration of the three-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Franklin. The work was more commonly known as the Autobiography, but it was published here under the title Franklin himself used in referring to his manuscript. Unpublished at the time of his death, it has since become the most... Read More
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Williwaw
by [Arion Press] Vidal, Gore
San Francisco: Arion Press, 1996. Hardcover. Near Fine. Hardcover. Number 92 of 250 numbered copies and 26 lettered copies, signed by the author. This edition of the author's first novel, published in 1946 when Vidal was 21 years old, was issued in its fiftieth anniversary year. The novel was based on his war-time service on an Army freighter in the Aleutians. Bound in black cloth with title label to spine. Printed in Hess Bold type on Schiller German... Read More
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Call It Sleep
by [Arion Press] Roth, Henry
San Francisco: Arion Press, 1995. Hardcover. Fine. Hardcover. Number 264 of 326 copies of which three hundred numbered copies signed by the author in pencil. Henry Roth (1905-1995) wrote this momentous novel in 1934. It was a first novel, completed at the age of twenty-seven. Reviews were mixed and the novel slipped quietly into obscurity. After marrying in 1939, Roth moved to Maine where he worked as a woodsman, a schoolteacher, a psychiatric attendant in the state mental... Read More
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Selected Poems
by [Arion Press] Melville, Herman; Helen Vendler, editor and introduction; Barry Moser, frontispiece
San Francisco: Arion Press, 1995. Fine. Number 200 of 250 numbered copies, with 26 lettered copies hors de commerce. It is the forty-seventh publication of the Arion Press and rather scarce with no copies in commerce. The book shares characteristics with the sixth publication of the press, Moby-Dick, by the same author, of 1979, in that the same typeface is used, Goudy Modern ... it is printed on the same paper, which was made for that edition by... Read More
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Paradise Lost: A Poem in Twelve Books
by [Arion Press] Milton, John; Helen Vendler, introduction; John T. Shawcross, editor of the text
San Francisco: Arion Press, 2002. Hardcover. Fine in very good slipcase. Hardcover. Number 174 of 400 numbered copies for sale, with 26 lettered copies printed for complimentary distribution. This is a beautiful production of Milton's immortal work. The printer Andrew Hoyem writes that this edition pays typographic tribute to two earlier editions of Milton's epic poem: the second edition of 1674, the year of Milton's death, and the second Baskerville edition of 1759, which Hoyem owned and long... Read More
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The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman Three Volumes
by [Arion Press] Sterne, Laurence; Melvyn New, essay; John Baldessari, illustrations
San Francisco: Arion Press, 1988. Hardcover. Near Fine. Hardcover. One of four hundred copies. This is an adventuresome and inventive offering by the famed Arion Press. It is the 26th publication of the Press and is presented to the reader in three volumes. The first volume contains the complete text of the novel. The second volume is an essay of 42 pages by Sterne scholar Dr. Melvyn New of the University of Florida. Dr. New discusses Sterne's life... Read More
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The Nachman Stories
by [Arion Press] Michaels, Leonard; Robert Hass, Morton Paley, Robert Pinsky, and Diana Ketcham, essays
San Francisco: Arion Press, 2009. Hardcover. Fine. Hardcover. Number 48 of 300 numbered copies for sale and 26 lettered copies for complimentary distribution. This was the first collected edition of The Nachman Stories, the author's stories with Los Angeles mathematician Raphael Nachman as their hero. Written at the end of the author's life between 1997 and 2003. Leonard Michaels (1933-2003) was a prolific writer who received a Ph.D in English in 1967 and in 1969 became a professor... Read More
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Don Quixote
by [Arion Press] Cervantes, Miguel de; Edith Grossman, translator; William T. Wiley, illustrator Two Volumes
San Francisco: Arion Press, 2010. Hardcover. Fine. Hardcover. Number 40 of 400 copies for sale and 26 lettered copies for complimentary distribution. Signed and numbered by the artist, William Wiley. This is a superb deluxe edition of Don Quixote, considered the first modern novel and among the greatest works of literature in the world. It was published ini two volumes in 1605 and 1615. The Press commissioned the acclaimed translation by Edith Grossman (1936-2023) of the novel. She... Read More
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The Day of the Locust
by [Arion Press] West, Nathaneal; David Thomson, introduction; Lucy Gray, photographs
San Francisco: Arion Press, 2913. Hardcover. Fine. Hardcover. Number 84 of 400 numbered copies signed by the photographer, Lucy Gray. There were also 26 lettered copies for complimentary distribution. The author of this pivotal work died at the age of 37 along with his wife in a car crash in 1940, a year after this book was published. It took years for the book to become recognized as an American classic and for critics to agree now that... Read More
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Trout Fishing in America
by [Arion Press] Brautigan, Richard; Ron Loewinsohn, preface; Edmund Shea, photographic portrait of the author
San Francisco: Arion Press, 2003. Hardcover. Fine. Hardcover. Number 316 of 400 copies. Of the edition, 200 copies have a color lithograph by Wayne Theibaud signed by the artist. This copy is the standard edition and does not have the lithograph. Brautigan's early book, published in 1967 became an instant cult classic. Richard Brautigan was a literary idol of the 1960s and '70s who came of age during the heyday of Haight-Ashbury and whose comic genius and iconoclastic... Read More
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A Lie of the Mind: A Play in Three Acts
by [Arion Press] Shepard, Sam; Stan Washburn, illustrator
San Francisco: Arion Press, 1993. Hardcover. Fine. Hardcover. Number 270 of 300 numbered copies with 26 lettered copies hors de commerce. Signed by the playwright and artist on the colophon. The prospectus describes the playwright Sam Shepard as a master of the American vernacular whose distinctive voice has galvanized American theater. He speaks a peculiar revelatory language; exact meanings may sometimes eludes, and we can become emotionally transfixed without understanding just why. It writes of Stan Washburn as... Read More
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The Case of the Wolf-Man
by [Arion Press] Freud, Sigmund; Richard Wollheim, introduction; Jim Dine, etchings and woodcuts
San Francisco: Arion Press, 1993. Hardcover. Fine. Hardcover. Number 126 of 250 numbered copies, signed by the artist on his artist's statement preceding the text. There were also 26 lettered copies for private distribution. This was the forty-first publication of the Press. The text of this book is "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis" that was reprinted in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII, pages 7-122, translated from the German... Read More
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Tartuffe: Comedy in Five Acts, 1669
by [Arion Press] Molière (Jean Baptiste Poquelin) ; Richard Wilbur, translator; William Hamilton, illustrator
San Francisco: Arion Press, 2004. Hardcover. Fine. Hardcover. Number 283 of 300 numbered copies for sale with 26 lettered copies hors de commerce. Signed by the translator and the illustrator on the colophon. In the prospectus, the Arion Press publisher, Andrew Hoyem, describes how he came to select Tartuffe to be published by his press. He wrote to the noted poet and translator, Richard Wilbur, to ask him whether the press could use his translation of this play.... Read More
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The Waste Land
by [Arion Press] Eliot, T.S.; Vendler, Helen, essay; Marco Livingstone, essay
San Francisco: Arion Press, 2007. Hardcover. Fine. Hardcover. Number 297 of 300 numbered copies of this deluxe edition of Eliot's seminal poem. There were also 26 lettered copies for complimentary distribution. This is the 79th publication from the acclaimed Arion Press. In the prospectus the book is described as the first illustrated edition of Thomas Stearns Eliot's most important work. This is a complex and elegant presentation of Eliot's literary masterpiece that he wrote in the aftermath of... Read More
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Leaves of Grass
by [Arion Press] Whitman, Walt; Helen Vendler, introduction
San Francisco: Arion Press, 2014. Hardcover. Fine. Hardcover. Number 85 of 250 deluxe copies numbered in Arabic, with fifteen copies numbered in Roman for complimentary distribution. This was the 100th publication of the Arion Press. It is one of the most elegant and collectible books issued by the Press. The origins of Arion Press reach back to 1919, when the brothers Edwin and Robert Grabhorn came to San Francisco from Indianapolis. The brothers established the Grabhorn Press, which... Read More
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The Moonstone
by [Arion Press] Collins, Wilkie; Stan Washburn, illustrations
San Francisco: Arion Press, 2012. Hardcover. Fine. Hardcover. Number 101 of 300 numbered copies signed by the illustrator. There were 26 lettered copies for complimentary distribution. Designed and produced by Andrew Hoyem. This is the ninety-fifth publication of the Press. This is an elegant edition of the famed novel by Wilkie Collins, first published in 1868. Collins (1824-1889) is perhaps best known for this early work, which established many of the ground rules of the modern detective novel... Read More
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Godot: An imaginary staging by William T. Wiley of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
by [Arion Press] Wiley, William T., author and afterword; David Littlejohn, introduction; Andrew Hoyem, program note and synopsis
San Francisco: Arion Press, 2006. Hardcover. Fine. Hardcover. Number 286 of 300 numbered copies for sale with 26 lettered copies for complimentary distribution. Signed by William T. Wiley on the colophon. This exuberant and mordantly witty edition of this book was published on the hundredth anniversary of Beckett's most famous work. William T. Wiley (1937 - 2021) was an influential artist and educator who helped found the funk art movement and establish the San Francisco Bay Area art... Read More
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