Andrew Hoyem

Who is Andrew Hoyem?

Andrew Hoyem is a typographer, letterpress printer, publisher, poet, and preservationist. He is the founder and director of Arion Press in San Francisco, which "is considered the nation's leading publisher of fine-press books," according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Arion Press "carries on a grand legacy of San Francisco printers and bookmakers," according to Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times.

As a publisher, Hoyem has focused on creating limited edition books of notable literature illustrated with original prints from prominent artists, including Jim Dine, Robert Motherwell, Jasper Johns, John Baldessari, Richard Diebenkorn, Wayne Thiebaud, Alex Katz, Martin Puryear, and Kiki Smith. Hoyem has published such contemporary writers as Seamus Heaney, Robert Alter, Tom Stoppard, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, David Mamet, and Helen Vendler.

Hoyem summarized the arc of his career in an interview with Elizabeth Farnsworth of the PBS-TV NewsHour with Jim Lehrer: "I started out by having a combined interest in literature and visual arts, and enjoyed drawing as well as writing poetry, and those two interests really came to one in the making of books by hand."