Making a new Bible the old way

On many days, Andrew Hoyem wears a rather conservative bow tie to work at the Arion Press on Bryant Street in San Francisco. As a sartorial garnish, it hardly reflects a man on a daring two-year publishing journey.

"We are in Psalms and Proverbs now," he says, working at a table and hoisting a heavy steel frame containing lead type. He is preparing pages 543 and 558 of an extraordinary limited edition of a Bible named the Arion Bible. It may well be the last Bible in the United States to be printed by letterpress using lead type and put together by hand.

Near Mr. Hoyem is a venerable ink and oil stained two-color press about the size of a pickup truck waiting to clatter into life for another printing run. The pages will be printed as a four-page signature from a 20-page section. All-around worker and pressman Gerry Reddan, who cleans the press every night, is standing by.

The Arion Bible, a folio designed by Hoyem after much consultation with scholars, is intended to be utilitarian, a church lectern Bible printed in the language of the New Revised Standard Version. All 1,300 pages will be hand-bound. It will join the historical publishing line of fine letterpress Bibles stretching back 500 years to the Gutenberg Bible, the first complete book in movable type ever printed.

Hoyem likes the idea of joining the ranks of fine Bibles and sees the Arion Bible as a millennium marker, "a statement of typographic excellence at the end of the 20th century."

Using classic 16-point Romulous typeface and exquisite all-cotton fiber paper from the Inveresk Mill in England, the pages of the Arion Bible will measure 18 by 13 inches. For a leather-bound edition in a leather box, collectors and churches will pay $8,500 with an additional $2,500 for illuminated initials at the beginning of each chapter. The clothbound edition is $7,750, and an unbound version in a cloth box is $7,250. Four hundred Bibles will be printed.

Wearing a denim apron splotched with ink, Hoyem is performing the critical "lockup," a step that surrounds the lead type of a page within a steel frame by using wooden pieces locked into position with tightened wedges.

"I have done lockups thousands of times," he says, pounding the type with a mallet to make sure it is flat within the frame. "I have done this literally hundreds of times on our Bible, but I still have to watch carefully what I am doing to correct anything before it goes to press."

From melting the lead, to proofreading, to physically lifting 40-pound frames of type, the consensus of Hoyem, as publisher of the Arion Press, and his small crew of eight craftspeople, is that a hand-wrought Bible is intrinsically valuable. Dozens of steps could easily be eliminated by today's computerized printing technology, but the publishing result would be far different, they say, a loss of quality and meaning. "The difference is that we are embedding the type into the paper," Hoyem says, holding a freshly printed page and showing the difference, "but the other kind, from a laser printer, is floating on the surface. What you are seeing here is rather like a stone inscription, a cut into stone with a three-dimensional effect. All along the way, we make it a little better because we are right here, working on it with our hands."

Still, he sees a reawakening in the esthetics of typography today by some younger printers who are paying attention to the history of printing. "I was much more critical of what was going on in typographical design 10 years ago than I am today," he says. "But it's true that not many people are left who are devoted to this line of classic work."

He did make concessions to the digital age on the Bible project. In selecting the New Revised Standard Version, and to ensure as much accuracy as possible, he started with a computer program of the Bible licensed by the National Council of Churches. By reformatting it, he rigged a way to change the old, conventional method of casting monotype hot lead -somewhat like a player piano roll - to respond to digital signals that shape the lead. Then a laser printer provided the proofs. From then on, from printing to binding, everything is done the old-fashioned way.

Page: 1 | 2