Leonard Baskin (1922-2000) founded the Gehenna Press in 1942 while a student at Yale. The first Gehenna Press book was On a Pyre of Withered Roses (1942), and the press then went into hiatus, until 1951's A Little Book of Natural History. Until 1953, books were printed in Worcester, Massachusetts and then, from 1956, the Press established an office in Northampton, Massachusetts at the Metcalf Printing Press. Between 1958 and 1976, Baskin employed Harold McGrath (d. 2000) as pressman, with the responsiblity for typesetting and printing. From 1957, Sidney Kaplan, a friend of Baskin's, became, as Baskin put it in the 1992 Fifty Years exhibition catalogue of the Press's works, 'the editor of the press' (p. 37). Additional 'syndics', or editorial supporters of the press, are celebrated in the 1999 Gehenna publication Syndics of the Gehenna Press.

In 1974, the Baskin family moved to Lurley Manor in Devon in England, expecting that the move would be permanent, and that the Press was effectively defunct. After several years of publishing dormancy, however, the Press was re-established at Lurley, a process which began with the purchase of presses in 1978. Bruce Chandler came from the US to assist in setting up the pressroom, and in printing the first books produced at Lurley. D. Robert Wakefield, a sculptor, who had, from 1974, assisted Leonard Baskin in his sculpture studio became the Gehenna Press's pressman and etching printer.

In Devon, the Baskins lived only twenty miles away from Baskin's friend and collaborator, the poet Ted Hughes, whose poetry featured in the first Gehenna Press book published from Lurley, Primer of Birds (1981) and in the subsequent books Mokomaki (1985), Capriccio (1990), Howls & Whispers (1998) and the posthumously printed Oresteia (2001). Other poet collaborators include James Baldwin, Anthony Hecht and Ruth Fainlight.

When, in 1984, the Baskins returned to the US to live in Leeds in Massachusetts they continuted to employ D.R. Wakefield to print etchings for the books and commissioned Ken Shure as a sales agent for its publications. During this time, from 1983's Unknown Dutch Artists until Fancies, Bizarries & Ornamented Grotesques in 1989, the Press published under the imprint Eremite Press (with the exception of 1988's Icones Librorum Artifices) to avoid the risk of a title/ownership dispute, dating from the early 1980s when the Press sold publishing rights to a Belgian, Jacques de la Cave.

The last book printed by Leonard Baskin himself was Blake and the Youthful Ancients (1956). Amongst other subsequent contributers, the letterpress printing was accomplished by Arthur (Art) Larson at Horton Tank Graphics, Daniel Kelleher at Wild Carrot Letterpress, Carol Blinn at Warwick Press and the Baskins' son Hosea Baskin, who printed Jewish Artists (1993) in Leeds. Arthur Larson also printed woodcuts, and Michael Kuch, etchings. The Oxbow Press (Roberta Bannister and Gail Alt), a photo-lithographic/offset printer, printed many of Gehenna's prospectuses and a few books as well, including The Gehenna Press: The Work of Fifty Years exhibition catalogue. Leonard Baskin continued to define the sensibility and typography and frequently the binding design of the books, as well as commissioning writers and illustrating the majority of the Press's works.