As chance would have it, the Press issued in the same year two of the most experimental novels in English literature. The preceding item on this checklist owes much to the precedent of Tristram Shandy. Sterne's novel, through its own graphic and typographic devices, illustrates itself. John Baldessari, a Shandean artist of the present, paid homage to the parson of York with parallel wit in a separate volume. The book was included in a retrospective of Baldessari's career organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles that travelled to several other institutions.

Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), was an obscure country parson when he self-published the first two volumes of this novel in 1760. When he died eight years later, he was rich and famous, and his book, unlike any other work of English fiction, had garnered extravagant praise and abundant censure. He acknowledged inspiration in the writings of Rabelais, Cervantes, and Montaigne, but Tristram Shandy was and remains an original, provocative, and hilariously funny book. The text was highly unusual in its typographic presentation, and Arion Press went out of its way to be faithful to the details of the setting, which include asterisks for naughty words, a marbled page, and a black page.