News of the Grabhorn Institute
The Grabhorn Institute is the nonprofit arm of Arion Press, engaged in education and preservation efforts. Our programs include a lecture series, exhibitions, tours of the production facility, and apprenticeships in typecasting, letterpress printing, and book binding. Here is the 2007 Report Letter to supporters summarizing some of the institute's many recent activities.
There is much to report since we last wrote to you with news of the Grabhorn Institute. Our lectures, exhibitions, tours, and other educational programs have flourished, with special groups added to the regular weekly tours of our production facility. Aiding our public outreach is an e-mail newsletter and journal, launched in March with the help of new staff members.
We participated in the successful US/ICOMOS conference of 200 international preservations held at the Presidio. In a letter of thanks, Presidio Trust Director Craig Middleton wrote, “a number of the participants in your tour felt that visiting the Press was the highlight of their visit to San Francisco.” At the time of February’s CODEX Foundation Book Fair in Berkeley, we hosted visitors from England, Italy, and Germany. Closer to home, we conducted a special tour for 40 from Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center.
In the Grabhorn Institute Lecture and Exhibition Series, now in its sixth year, our exhibition “Embroidered Bookbindings” drew an enthusiastic audience of more than 500, with four sessions devoted to demonstrating bookbinding techniques. The show received coverage on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle arts section from writer Heidi Benson.
Another high point of the Series was award-winning author Adam Hochschild’s illustrated talk on the heroic printers and publishers of the British abolition movement, “Twelve Men in a Print Shop”. We held our program on May 17 to celebrate the May 17, 1757 meeting of London printers that led to the outlawing of the British slave trade by Parliament in 1807, an anniversary celebrated around the world this year. Our co-sponsors were the English-Speaking Union, the Book Club of California, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
The training of apprentices and young staff was enhanced by travel opportunities. We sent bookbinding apprentice Stephanie Heaney to a summer session at the University of Virginia Rare Book School. Graduate apprentice Kenneth Howard received a week of instruction with Rich Hopkins in Terra Alta, West Virginia, on the use of our newly acquired Monotype Supercaster. One of only a half-dozen in this country, our machine is capable of making up to 72 point type. Howard, who is being trained in typecasting by 76 year-old Lewis Mitchell, was also the subject of a 30-minute vodcast on his typesetting in metal of the credits of the new Daniel Day-Lewis film There Will Be Blood and will attend the film’s Hollywood premiere this month.
Executive Director Andrew Hoyem was honored with the Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Northern California Book Reviewers Association. This year Hoyem continued to lecture widely, addressing, among others, groups in Lexington Kentucky, Wilmington, Delaware, and at the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, Germany, where an exhibition of Arion Press books and prints was held in February.
Artist John Baldessari was the honored guest at the Grabhorn Institute’s annual Spring Benefit Dinner, joining such past honorees as Wayne Thiebaud and Martin Puryear, whose retrospective at the MOMA opened this month to enthusiastic reviews. The Folio donor group celebrated its third year with a talk by Stanford University historian Peter Stansky on Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press. Other fund-raising efforts led to our second grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
It was a year marked by distinguished visitors: John Stubbs from the World Monuments Fund stopped by, as did writers Tobias Wolff, Robert Alter, Lady Vaizey, David Thomson, and Diane Johnson, artists Kiki Smith, Bob Bechtle, and William Hamilton, and film producers Todd Black (The Pursuit of Happyness) and Lynda Myles (The Commitments).
Keep in mind that our weekly tour of the typefoundry, pressroom, and bindery is Thursdays at 3:00. We encourage special tours for schools, alumni groups, and book clubs.
Go to main page
There is much to report since we last wrote to you with news of the Grabhorn Institute. Our lectures, exhibitions, tours, and other educational programs have flourished, with special groups added to the regular weekly tours of our production facility. Aiding our public outreach is an e-mail newsletter and journal, launched in March with the help of new staff members.
We participated in the successful US/ICOMOS conference of 200 international preservations held at the Presidio. In a letter of thanks, Presidio Trust Director Craig Middleton wrote, “a number of the participants in your tour felt that visiting the Press was the highlight of their visit to San Francisco.” At the time of February’s CODEX Foundation Book Fair in Berkeley, we hosted visitors from England, Italy, and Germany. Closer to home, we conducted a special tour for 40 from Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center.
In the Grabhorn Institute Lecture and Exhibition Series, now in its sixth year, our exhibition “Embroidered Bookbindings” drew an enthusiastic audience of more than 500, with four sessions devoted to demonstrating bookbinding techniques. The show received coverage on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle arts section from writer Heidi Benson.
Another high point of the Series was award-winning author Adam Hochschild’s illustrated talk on the heroic printers and publishers of the British abolition movement, “Twelve Men in a Print Shop”. We held our program on May 17 to celebrate the May 17, 1757 meeting of London printers that led to the outlawing of the British slave trade by Parliament in 1807, an anniversary celebrated around the world this year. Our co-sponsors were the English-Speaking Union, the Book Club of California, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
The training of apprentices and young staff was enhanced by travel opportunities. We sent bookbinding apprentice Stephanie Heaney to a summer session at the University of Virginia Rare Book School. Graduate apprentice Kenneth Howard received a week of instruction with Rich Hopkins in Terra Alta, West Virginia, on the use of our newly acquired Monotype Supercaster. One of only a half-dozen in this country, our machine is capable of making up to 72 point type. Howard, who is being trained in typecasting by 76 year-old Lewis Mitchell, was also the subject of a 30-minute vodcast on his typesetting in metal of the credits of the new Daniel Day-Lewis film There Will Be Blood and will attend the film’s Hollywood premiere this month.
Executive Director Andrew Hoyem was honored with the Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Northern California Book Reviewers Association. This year Hoyem continued to lecture widely, addressing, among others, groups in Lexington Kentucky, Wilmington, Delaware, and at the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, Germany, where an exhibition of Arion Press books and prints was held in February.
Artist John Baldessari was the honored guest at the Grabhorn Institute’s annual Spring Benefit Dinner, joining such past honorees as Wayne Thiebaud and Martin Puryear, whose retrospective at the MOMA opened this month to enthusiastic reviews. The Folio donor group celebrated its third year with a talk by Stanford University historian Peter Stansky on Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press. Other fund-raising efforts led to our second grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
It was a year marked by distinguished visitors: John Stubbs from the World Monuments Fund stopped by, as did writers Tobias Wolff, Robert Alter, Lady Vaizey, David Thomson, and Diane Johnson, artists Kiki Smith, Bob Bechtle, and William Hamilton, and film producers Todd Black (The Pursuit of Happyness) and Lynda Myles (The Commitments).
Keep in mind that our weekly tour of the typefoundry, pressroom, and bindery is Thursdays at 3:00. We encourage special tours for schools, alumni groups, and book clubs.
Go to main page
posted by Arion Press 11/26/2007 (link to this)
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