Hand-sewn poetry chapbooks on the Olympic Peninsula, 1974.

Graywolf Press takes its name from a landscape. English Wikipedia says the press was founded in 1974 in Port Townsend, Washington, and that it was named for the nearby Graywolf Ridge and Graywolf River, and for the animal itself. A history published by the University of Minnesota Libraries on 5 February 2024, written by Adria Carpenter, puts it the same way: Graywolf was born between the ridge and the river, in Port Townsend, in 1974.

The founding is told slightly differently depending on who is telling it. The press’s own history says Graywolf was founded by Scott Walker. English Wikipedia and the University of Minnesota Libraries piece name two founders, Walker and Kathleen Foster. Wikipedia adds that they started out in a space provided by Copper Canyon Press, the poetry publisher that was also based in Port Townsend. Publishers Weekly, in a report by Claire Kirch dated 29 November 2024, describes Graywolf as founded in Port Townsend by Scott Walker to publish hand-stitched poetry chapbooks.

Those chapbooks are the heart of the origin story. According to the University of Minnesota Libraries, Walker and Foster set up their press in a “print shack” with the help of a chicken-raiser next door, and their neighbours were builders and fishermen, as Walker told the Minneapolis weekly City Pages in 2008. They specialised in limited-edition poetry chapbooks, each printed on a letterpress with type set by hand; once printed, the pages were folded one by one and then sewn by hand with needle and thread. Production could take months. Graywolf’s own history describes the same beginning: its early publications were limited-edition chapbooks of poetry, printed on a letterpress and hand sewn by Walker and his colleagues.

MPR News, in a report by Emily Bright dated 28 February 2024, summed up the same arc: Graywolf started as a maker of hand-sewn, limited-edition poetry chapbooks and now publishes short stories, poetry, novels, nonfiction and translated works. The University of Minnesota Libraries names the poets Tess Gallagher, Dana Gioia and Jane Kenyon among the authors who gave the press its early successes.

The name has stayed with the press through every move since. It describes a place in Washington State, but the house has been based in Minnesota since 1985. Today the press describes itself as a nonprofit literary publisher of poetry, fiction, nonfiction and work in translation.

Nonprofit status, a move east and three publishers.

The move to Minnesota was tied to a change in how the press was organised. The University of Minnesota Libraries history says that after ten years in Washington, Walker aimed to turn Graywolf into a nonprofit publisher and decided to resettle in the Twin Cities, then already home to two other nonprofit presses, Milkweed Editions and Coffee House Press. Graywolf says it was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organisation in 1984, and that in 1985, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and local philanthropic organisations, it moved to St. Paul. Publishers Weekly reported in 2024 that the press has been located in the Twin Cities since 1985. A staff photograph reproduced by the University of Minnesota Libraries shows the press in its St. Paul office in 1991.

The leadership changed in 1994. Graywolf says Fiona McCrae was appointed director and publisher that year, and English Wikipedia says she followed Walker’s departure. The University of Minnesota Libraries history describes McCrae as having been director and senior editor of Faber & Faber USA in Boston before she took over, and says she paired an editorial approach with what Mpls.St.Paul Magazine in 2016 called “friend-raising” as well as fundraising. MPR News, in a report by Marianne Combs dated 29 December 2006, described McCrae as publisher and director and reported that the press had used a reader-funded programme to open an office in New York and to back a new series of books on the art of writing, edited by the novelist Charles Baxter, who had begun working with Graywolf in the late 1980s.

Two more changes of address and partner followed. Graywolf says it joined forces with Farrar, Straus & Giroux for distribution in 2002, and that in 2009 it moved across the Mississippi River to Minneapolis; English Wikipedia places the new offices in the city’s Warehouse District. The press says its archives have been housed at the University of Minnesota’s Elmer L. Andersen Library since 2009.

The current publisher arrived in 2022. Publishers Weekly reported that Carmen Giménez, a poet, took the helm from McCrae in August 2022, and the University of Minnesota Libraries describes her as Graywolf’s third publisher, appointed after McCrae’s retirement. Her title is executive director and publisher. The same Publishers Weekly report quoted associate publisher Katie Dublinski describing the press as “author-centric”, and MPR News named Jeff Shotts as executive editor and director of poetry in 2024.

A name on the spine, a place in the name.

For a book publisher, the name has to work in several places at once: on the spine, where a reader scans a shelf, on the title page, where the house is named in full, and on the series that a house builds over decades. Some names describe where a press began. Graywolf Press was named for the Graywolf Ridge and Graywolf River near Port Townsend, Washington, where it started printing poetry chapbooks by letterpress in 1974, and it kept the name after moving to St. Paul in 1985 and to Minneapolis in 2009. Other names describe who a house belongs to. New York Review Books, started in 1999, takes its name from The New York Review of Books, the magazine that publishes it, and shortens it to the initials NYRB for series such as NYRB Classics and NYRB Poets.

Series design often does more of the identifying than the colophon itself. Writing in Eye in the winter of 2007, Rick Poynor described how Penguin’s classics covers of the 1960s, under Germano Facetti, held a series together with a consistent type style and title position, and how Katy Homans’ format for NYRB Classics keeps a title box in a fixed place while changing its colour from book to book, carrying that colour onto the spine and back cover, and leaving the small NYRB logo off the front. When reading a publisher’s identity, look at what stays fixed from title to title, where the house name or mark actually appears, and how far a series format, rather than a logo, tells a reader which list a book belongs to.

Fifty years on, from chapbooks to a digital lab.

Graywolf marked its fiftieth year in 2024 with its own archive on display. MPR News reported on 28 February 2024 that an exhibition of Graywolf’s archival history, “Graywolf at 50: First Drafts and Next Pages”, was on view at the University of Minnesota’s Andersen Library, and the University of Minnesota Libraries gave its dates as 19 February to 17 May. The exhibition drew on the material the press has deposited there, including an article from the Seattle paper The Weekly about Walker, published in July 1985, the year of the move to Minnesota.

The anniversary also went on the road. Publishers Weekly reported on 29 November 2024 that the press launched a 50th-anniversary series of literary salons around the country in April 2024, ending on 24 October 2024 at the University of Arizona Poetry Center in Tucson with the Peruvian poet Tilsa Otta and her translator, Farid Matuk. The same report said the press had begun its anniversary year with a new strategic plan that puts more weight on literature in translation.

The press has also stepped beyond the printed book. According to MPR News, Graywolf launched Graywolf Lab in November 2023, a podcast paired with a multimedia digital magazine organised in themed issues. Publishers Weekly described it as an online platform in which each “lab” begins with a group of artists discussing a theme, which is then expanded over several weeks by other artists, writers and thinkers, in formats including essays, poems, short fiction, interactive works and a podcast. Giménez told the magazine one of its guiding ideas was being “in conversation”.

The wolf also runs through the way the press speaks to readers. Its website invites visitors to “help keep literature wild”, and it calls its programme for sustaining members the Wolfpack. Both the press’s own history and the University of Minnesota Libraries account begin with the same craft detail: chapbooks set by hand, folded by hand and sewn by hand.

Graywolf’s link to New York publishing runs through distribution. Since 2002, by the press’s account, its books have been distributed by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and English Wikipedia lists that house, part of Macmillan, as Graywolf’s distributor in the United States. The books themselves carry the Graywolf name.

For a design guide, Graywolf Press shows how a name taken from one landscape can travel with a publisher to another, and how a craft origin in letterpress chapbooks can remain part of an identity long after the books are produced another way. Compare Farrar, Straus and Giroux, its distributor, or McSweeney’s, another independent literary house. For this guide we use ridge grey, river slate and charcoal with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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