The summit of San Francisco fine printing — the private press at its most ambitious.
To collect fine printing is to prize the book as a made object: the choice of type, the quality of paper, the disposition of the page, the marriage of text and illustration. In America there is no finer name in this art than the Grabhorn Press of San Francisco, and its books were a natural specialty for a California house.
Edwin and Robert Grabhorn
Founded in San Francisco in the early 1920s, the Grabhorn Press was the work of two brothers whose combined gifts — one for design, the other for the press and for the hunt after fine paper and type — produced some of the most admired American books of the twentieth century. Their masterpieces, from a celebrated folio Bible to their editions of Western Americana and of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, set a standard that later fine printers still measure themselves against.
What Distinguishes a Fine-Press Book
The private press works to a different logic than the commercial publisher. Editions are limited and numbered; the type is often set and the sheets frequently printed by hand; paper is chosen for beauty and permanence; and the whole is designed as a considered object. A Grabhorn book announces these values at a glance — in the authority of its typography and the generosity of its margins. For the vocabulary of the limited edition, see our Glossary.
Collecting the Press
Grabhorn books are documented in a detailed bibliography of the press's output, and collectors pursue them by period, by subject, or simply by beauty. Because the editions were small, fine copies are scarce and steadily sought. The field connects naturally to Californiana — much of the press's finest work took Western subjects — and to the wider literature of the book, our Books About Books department.
The Larger Tradition
The Grabhorns were the greatest, but not the only, ornament of West Coast printing, and San Francisco's fine-printing tradition remains vigorous. Institutions such as The Book Club of California continue to commission and celebrate the finely printed book, keeping alive the conviction the Grabhorns embodied: that a text worth reading is worth setting beautifully.