#cabezadevaca

SU Special Collections has several beautiful examples of books printed by the Grabhorn Press. The brothers Edwin and Robert Grabhorn started the press in 1919 in San Francisco and had a thriving business that lasted until 1965. Shortly after the closing, the younger brother reopened the press with an apprentice named Andrew Hoyem, and it became the Grabhorn-Hoyem Press. Hoyem then established the Arion Press in 1974, which still uses some of the Grabhorn type and equipment to this day!

In the above photograph, we have the signature of Edwin Grabhorn himself. Joseph Blumenthal’s The Printed Book in America (1977; Trustees of Dartmouth College) describes his typographic style as “vigorous and innovative” as well as “large and lavish and, occasionally, flamboyant.”

In the Relation of Alvar Núñez Cabeça de Vaca (1929), of which SU Special Collections has two copies, the type indeed appears large and majestic. What is interesting about our copies is that we have a rare uncolored edition as well as a colored one, so you can see the before and after of how the artist Valenti Angelo filled in his designs for the Grabhorn logo and the elaborately modified version of the coat of arms for Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. 

As seen in this last photo, the Grabhorns also brilliantly reproduced the signature of Cabeza de Vaca, almost as if to give the explorer’s stamp of approval to the reprinting of his narrative.

The story of Cabeza de Vaca itself is a fascinating tale of survival and interactions with various native tribes all across what is now the southern United States and northern Mexico as well as the explorer’s mystical experiences as a faith healer among the natives. The account in the Grabhorn printing was found originally in the second edition of the Relation, which was printed at Valladolid in 1555 and translated into English by Buckingham Smith in 1871. At the time, only 100 copies of Smith’s translation existed, so the Grabhorns decided to reprint it in 300 copies to make the explorer’s tale more accessible to American English-speakers.