In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1:1)
In the tradition of Gutenberg and others in a lineage of fine printers, Andrew Hoyem '57 and his small staff at Arion Press in San Francisco are printing the Bible using 19th-century letterpress techniquesan endeavor few of today's printers would dare to attempt.
"It's the Everest for printers," says Hoyem, who has been in the printing business since 1961. It has been more than 60 years, he says, since a Bible of the type Arion is printing was produced by letterpress.
The 1935 Oxford lectern Bible, designed by an accomplished American printer, Bruce Rogers, was, according to Hoyem, "probably the most beautiful book produced in the 20th century." But since it was printed in the language of the King James Version, he says, the time is right for an updated edition. "If there's any desperation in doing this now, it's that I recognize that at this point I have the team, the space, and the equipment to do it, and I couldn't be sure that even two years down the line that would be the case."
The Arion Bible is intended to be easily read, says Hoyem. It is designed to be a large utilitarian, church lectern Bible. It will include the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha and will be printed in the New Revised Standard Version copyrighted by the National Council of Churches in 1989.
Founded in San Francisco in 1974 by Hoyem, Arion is balanced precariously between the city's history as a former hotbed of fine printing and its more recent swing toward the fast-paced computerized tempo of silicon chips and RAM. Arion Press, named for a poet in Greek mythology who wooed a dolphin to carry him from imminent death on the open sea, is blending old and new technologies to usher in the millennium with a new edition of the ancient biblical text.
ike stone inscription, letterpress methodology holds an important place in the history of the written word, says Hoyem.
"We still look at and admire Greek and Roman stone inscriptions as evidence of culture and the excellence achieved in rendering letter forms," he says. "It's tangible evidence, just as a printed book in our day is tangible evidence of what we represent as a culture."
Said to have been first used in the 15th century by German printer Johann Gutenberg, letterpress printing actually embeds ink into paper. By pressing pages over metal type, letterpress machines make three-dimensional indentations in the fibrous sheets.
The reader perceives dimension with letterpress, which creates light and shadow, says Hoyem. "The example of stone inscription is apt because it's something that people know and appreciate. It's where we get the Roman alphabet. You go from that to letterpress printing and see the indentation of the type and feel the tactile experience of the page."
"So much of what is being done today in business and e-commerce and e-books is not tangible. There's an insubstantiality to letters on a computer monitor," he says. "People who work at glowing screens day in and day out yearn for books that have a thickness and tactileness of pages that they can turn."
This tangibility of letterpress printing begins with the Monotype machine. Hoyem saved the country's oldest and last fully functioning type foundry, Mackenzie & Harris, from closure in 1989, incorporating it into the Arion Press operation.
Lewis Mitchell, who has worked as a typecaster with M&H for 50 years, will cast each of the tens of thousands of lines of Bible text on a Monotype machine. This complex machine melts down ingots of lead alloy, called pigs, and casts them into raised letters for the Bible in classic 16-point Romulus typeface characterseach as brilliant as a tiny polished sculpture.
Mitchell works surrounded by drawers of typeface stacked from floor to ceiling, each marked with the name and font size of its contents. The collection is in essence an archive of American printing history, inherited from legends such as John Henry Nash and the brothers Edwin and Robert Grabhorn.
After apprenticing at the Grabhorn Press, Hoyem partnered with the younger Grabhorn, Robert, in 1966. "I learned an enormous amount from both of them," says Hoyem. "At each stage I became interested in making books that were larger, longer and more complicated. I wanted to do something different from what the Grabhorn Press had done, so I began to collaborate with artists."
Since 1974, Arion has printed illustrated editions, such as Melville's Moby Dick, with wood engravings by Barry Moser, and James Joyce's Ulysses, with etchings by Robert Motherwell. Arion's most recent production, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, sports an aluminum binding and 12 illustrations by artist Wayne Thiebaud.
Imitation is the highest form of compliment, says Hoyem, noting his debt to his precursors in the printing world. "You acknowledge your predecessors in the way that you use their ideas, in the way you adapt their ideas for your own. As makers of books we are always playing off an earlier model."
Arion's production of the Bible makes its singular concession to the 20th century in the form of a 1989 Macintosh SE/30, itself already ancient in the history of personal computers. Hoyem received the complete NRSV Bible on diskettes from the Council of Churches, then he and his associates at Arion Press laid out the pages of the Bible using computer technology. Now perched atop a table in the foundry, the Mac communicates through a series of cables with the mammoth typecasting machine and directs the construction of each character for the Bible.
The computer-typecasting technology, created by a retired engineer in Palo Alto, has shaved months off the project by eliminating the job of manually typing the content of the Bible on the complicated Monotype keyboard, a process that has been superceded by digital type and offset printing.
As they are cast, the characters are arranged into lines of text. Lines are then assembled in steel frameseach page made of thousands of pieces of metal.
Pressman Gerald Reddan planes the type in each frame with a wooden block and rubber mallet so that all the letters are at the same height. At 10 pages a day, the project will take almost two years to complete. Once the entire Bible is printed, Mitchell will have lifted 35 tons of lead into and out of the press.
Sumner Stone, who was once director of typography at the design software firm Adobe, designed the red initial letters included at the beginning of each chapter of the book. Collectors, however, may choose one of the 150 copies that will be accented with hand-painted illuminated letters by calligrapher Thomas Ingmire.
Arion will produce 400 copies of the 1,350-page Bible. Exquisite all-cotton fiber pages measuring 18 by 13 inches from the Inveresk Mill in England will be sewn together by hand, using linen thread, and will be bound in goat skin.
Every detail has been pondered. "We're trying to provide a magnificent setting for the Bible," says Hoyem. For that magnificence, collectors and churches will pay $8,500 for a leather-bound edition, and an additional $2,500 for a version with the illuminated initial letters at the beginning of each chapter. For the less prosperous, clothbound editions will run $7,750, and an unbound version in a cloth box will cost $7,250.
At a time when computers threaten the existence of printed books it may seem odd for a printer to choose a project such as this. "The book is such an efficient mechanism, it's hard to beat it," says Hoyem. "But who knows what the future will be. People are so quick to say that it's the end of booksor not. We will all be proven wrong, I'm sure."
... and the Word was God.
