The press
Publishing at Acorn Abbey
David Dalton, who built Acorn Abbey, spent the first half of his career as a newspaper editor and the second half managing newspapers' publishing systems. He retired in 2008 from the San Francisco Chronicle.
Dalton started Acorn Abbey Books in 2011 — a small press given over to literary and scholarly titles, produced with old-fashioned editorial care and an eye for books that deserve to stay in print.
The press has published Dalton's own science fiction — Fugue in Ursa Major (2014) and its sequel Oratorio in Ursa Major (2016) — and Jonathan Rauch's memoir Denial: My 25 Years Without a Soul. Its current flagship is a new scholarly reader's edition of John Gibson Lockhart's 1823 novel Reginald Dalton, published in August 2026.
