Book History

American writer, engraver, and printer Gaylord Schanilec's (1955–) Lac des pleurs¹ arrives at the Rare Books and Manuscripts Reading Room in a nondescript box. The box is placed on a spacious map table in a wood-paneled and carpeted room. The readers seem serious and well-dressed. Foam cushions are set aside, as are paperweights. The librarian adjusts a sophisticated spotlight. The viewer unfolds a first layer of casing to reveal Lac's custom-made, burgundy cloth box. The gray-green Roman typeface of the book's title,² drawn, I later learn, by Schanilec's contemporary, the typographer, writer, and printer Russell Maret (1971–), is shadowed by softer gray lines. The spine, in a leathery deep-water blue, features a small pelican. The fabric slides apart to reveal a pale blue interior and the book's smooth cover, a marbled constellation of greens, yellows, and burgundies. The ripple-disturbed front is both surface and depth, solid and ephemeral, and each rock or spot of light calls for the reader's attention. The overall experience is astounding—like opening a box of treasure.

Schanilec, described in some fine-press circles as the "preeminent multi-chromatic wood engraver,"³ explores and reproduces—in text and image—what he finds in the natural world: insects, birds, trees, the flora and fauna of the Mississippi River's Lake Pepin, a waterfall, and, most recently, urban flowers. Like "naturalism" in Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy,⁴ in Mayflies of the Driftless Region (2005), Sylvæ (2007), and Lac (2015), Schanilec's style is not an attempt to imitate nature, but rather the fruit of "a feeling for the beauty of organic form": a desire "to feel himself into" the "happiness of the organically alive."⁵ His voice is diffident and exploratory, and is as subtle as his use of color.

What are his art objects? They elude easy classification. Simultaneously text—poetry, anecdotes, arguments—and image, we can appreciate them as paintings and yet handle them as books. They evoke the British "private [End Page 146]

press" tradition, of which the Daniel Press, T.J. Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker's Doves Press, William Morris's Kelmscott Press, and St John Hornby's Ashendene Press are the most famous exemplars. Both Schanilec and Maret draw on these pioneers for inspiration, share their élan and at least part of their vision, and approach bookmaking with equivalent solemnity. The "private press" movement is nevertheless geographically and historically situated: a nineteenth-century reaction to industrialization. The term would be an anachronism if applied to contemporary work.

Both artists also understand their creative activities with reference to the American press revival of the mid-1970s, when letterpress printing machines—technology that dates to the fifteenth century—became increasingly obsolete, freed from their use value, and thus cheap, and the American "book arts" movement acquired the technical means to flourish.⁶ A [End Page 147] chronicler and practitioner of the craft, Johanna Drucker, suggests, perhaps overoptimistically, that the twentieth century was the "century of artists' books."⁷ "Artists' books" are works of art, not representations of works of art, and their creators concern themselves, thematically or aesthetically, with the process of the book's production.⁸ Yet because "artists' books" encompasses a range of artistic experimentation within and beyond the book's codex structure, from origami to pop-up books, the term suggests too much to serve as an adequate description for Schanilec's objects. If "private press" is an anachronism, "artists' books" is too imprecise.

When I asked Maret to classify the objects that he and Schanilec make, he proposed two terms: "third stream books" or "fine press artist books." "Third stream," coined by composer Gunther Schuller, originally referred to a synthesis of jazz and classical music. Sandra Kirshenbaum, in Five...