Founded in 2008, Albion Books is a one-man micropress specializing in limited-edition chapbooks, broadsides, and print ephemera as well as in hand-bound hardcover and softcover books. The press takes its name from its first home — Albion Street in San Francisco — though the inspiration to use it came from William Blake’s “Visions of the Daughters of Albion.” Since its inception, Albion Books has put out seven series of four to five limited edition handmade chapbooks of poetry or poetics, plus assorted print ephemera like broadsides, cards, and chaplets. Due to their limited edition size, many Albion productions go quickly out of print — but not before garnering positive notice! The press and some of its early productions were generously featured by Fred Sasaki on the Poetry Foundation’s blog, Harriet, in April of 2010. You can visit his blog entry here.
The press uses conserving natural resources and keeping production costs below $150 per project as formal constraints, while the goal remains to make as fine an object as possible within the given limits: 1) at least 50% of the paper for each project must come from materials leftover from previous Albion projects or from off-cuts donated by/bought from other printers; 2) all letterpress printing is done either on a 6” x 10” Kelsey platen press or on a shared Chandler & Price at the Virginia Center for the Book; and 3) all wood and metal type is hand set, as are all ornaments and any linocuts: neither plates nor new type are made for a print run. Though each edition is kept small to enable production by one person, the final rule of the press is meant to encourage and sustain gift economy within the poetry community: at least 35% of each edition must be given away or bartered.
If you’d like to know more about the early history of the press, as well as the theory behind the praxes of micropress publishing and setting type by hand, please check out Paradise Was Typeset, the inaugural volume in DoubleCross Press’s “Poetics of the Handmade” series, now available in a second edition.