09/05/2026
One of the companies most treasured by San Francisco’s philanthropists and tech innovators is also one of the city’s most old-fashioned.
The highly bespoke not-for-profit seems especially anachronistic in a city where computer processing speeds are measured in nanoseconds.
Arion usually only publishes three books a year, which it sends to subscribers for an annual fee of $3,500 at a “fine press” level and $10,000 for the rarefied deluxe tier; individual books can cost between $1,000 and $4,000.
Older volumes, like a 1979 edition of “Moby-Dick,” with illustrations by Barry Moser, renowned for his engravings, are so rare—only 265 copies were printed—that they sell on the secondary market for tens of thousands of dollars. (Book Alley, in Pasadena, has a copy listed for $25,000.)
Unexpected materials are used to package the books. The box for Arion’s 2020 deluxe edition of “Sea of Cortez,” a 1941 travelogue John Steinbeck wrote with Ed Ricketts, is sourced from the wooden planks of the ship the duo sailed on in the Gulf of California.
Arion’s supporters recognize the irony. They help sustain this boutique press because of wealth that has been accrued, in many cases, in a sector predicated on a steady supply of new technologies.
This is what many of the book buyers like about it. “I love the juxtaposition of the future of content and the past of content sitting in a single city,” said James G. Coulter, a founding partner of private-equity firm TPG Inc.
He displays his Arion books at TPG’s offices in San Francisco, next to an antique Enigma machine, the encryption device used by the German military during World War II.
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