About the Beehive

A House of Quixotic Publishing.

Odd and curious books for odd and curious people.

ON A TREE-LINED and slightly garbage-bestrewn street in West Philadelphia dwells Beehive Books, a boutique press committed to producing book art editions of distinctive literary and pictorial works with singular design sensibilities, the highest production values, and a special emphasis on comics and graphic art. We plan to bring you the very best there is in sequential storytelling, illustration, printmaking and book craft.

We like odd and curious things. If you're on this page, you probably do too. We like art that's moving, frightening, revelatory and alive. We like forgotten geniuses and lost works and mysterious tomes. We like creations that were pulled out of antiquity, and work that seems to materialize from an impossibly distant future. We like enigmatic historical artifacts and inexplicable zines and encrypted communications. We like books and artworks that crackle and seethe with true, weird magic.

The audience for this sort of work is a select group. Our work may not have broad mainstream appeal. But lovers of the weird and unique tend to love with their whole heart. So our aim at Beehive is to build an intimate group of collectors, readers, code-breakers, archivists, infonauts, futurists, scholars, fellow-travelers, and literary adventurers who make the impossible possible.

Since 2016, with the help of thousands of co-conspirators, we've published dozens of books too bizarre and beautiful for the mainstream literary marketplace. You can read reviews of those books in The New Yorker, Kirkus, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Forbes. We've been recognized by the Harvey and Eisner Awards, the Art Director's Club Awards, and the Communication Arts Design Competition. 

We called our company Beehive because we can't do it alone. A mega-structure like a beehive can only be the work of the industrious many. In imitation of our apian friends we strive to run an impressively designed, flawlessly functional sweetness factory. To do that, we're going to need you on our team. 

Because we are not precisely a publisher, not a brand, not a catalog of products, but rather a social phenomenon: a complex organic network of authors, readers, workers, collectors, manufacturers, critics, supporters and friends. We, like everything else, are an emergent property of a strange and unknowable world tumbling forward in time; with the right cocktail of subatomic elements, any given universe may eventually generate Pad Thai, iguanas, and Beehive Books. That strange formation known as Beehive comrpises phenomenally talented printers in Shenzhen and on Chestnut Street; the remains of what used to be a lot of trees, and our contribution to the continued deforestation of the planet; readers in hundreds of countries and thousands of cities; great steel ships, moving books from one end of the planet to another; artists and authors of genius, in Shanghai and New Jersey and the Iberian Peninsula, toiling deep into the night, sustained spiritually and materially by this work.

It never occurred to us until recently to be proud that we publish books made by human beings. Because not long ago, that was the only type of book that existed. But it occurs to me now that perhaps we, and all producers, should always have been proud to represent work made by humans. And maybe that's we feel protective of all the embattled arts workers and cultural producers everywhere, trying to survive the great heaving churn of whatever comes next -- those of us stubbornly holding onto the idea that connection matters, that our grubby little fleeting lives have fundamental value in their specificity and singularity, that we at our core are something other than consumers and sellers, economic units, ones and zeroes. We are us... and we hope you are us too.

So drop us a line at info@beehivebooks.com, and let's start a dialogue. Join our expedition. The journey promises to be one for the ages.