Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Artist's Books Leave Impression

Printer carves his own plates, prints valuable volumes by hand

By Annysa Johnson of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Sep. 18, 2007

There's more than a little irony in the giant clock on the wall of Gaylord Schanilec's studio in western Wisconsin.

Tracking time is almost futile in this space, where the technology of Gutenberg keeps company with those of Gates and Jobs.

Schanilec makes books. But you won't find them on the shelves at Schwartz or Borders. These are rare tomes, printed often by hand on the finest of papers, and coveted by collectors around the world.

As much as he loathes the comparison, Schanilec makes books in the same way Picasso made art, or Stradivari violins.

It takes time.

"That's the essence of this work," said Schanilec, who is nearing completion on his most ambitious project, a silvae, or book, of trees in the 20 acres of woods surrounding his home and studio just this side of the Mississippi River.

"I don't keep track of time. That's something I've insisted on," said Schanilec, who is collaborating on the project with fellow printmaker Ben Verhoeven.

"It takes as long as it takes."

A poet turned wood engraver and printer, Schanilec operates Midnight Paper Sales from his home and studio near Stockholm, a rural village on the bluff overlooking Lake Pepin.

Named for the novel way it secured paper stock in its early days - poaching scrap after dark from the loading dock of a Minneapolis printing company - Midnight Paper is one of 20 or so publishers around the country that have succeeded in creating exclusively "fine-press" books.

Like others in this rarefied niche, Schanilec uses antiquated technology - lead type and hand-cranked or letterpress machinery - to publish works featuring his own intricately carved wood engravings and writings by himself and others.

His volumes, which can sell for thousands of dollars, are found in the special book collections of institutions, including major universities and libraries, and in the private collections of bibliophiles bent on preserving the so-called book arts.

"Part of the strength of his reputation is his printmaking, and the books are just an extension of that," said Max Yela, who heads the special collections library at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and has been buying Schanilec's work since the 1980s.

"When you look at a Schanilec print, light comes out of it. . . . They're just luminous," said Yela, who considers Schanilec "among the finest American wood engravers."

As a printer, he said, Schanilec is known for his attention to color and registration, the way his type "just kisses the page."

Schanilec, who grew up in North Dakota, had been eking out a living doing pen-and-ink illustrations for small presses in Minneapolis in the 1970s when he began teaching himself wood engraving, inspired incredibly enough by the detailed illustrations of an old Sears catalog.

It was Verhoeven's uncle, Gary Egger - Schanilec's friend and studio-mate in those days - who really got things started when he rescued an old Vandercook proof press on its way to the dump.

Since then, Schanilec has made a name for himself documenting the world around him - the demolition of the century-old High Bridge in Minneapolis, his farmer neighbors in western Wisconsin, the complex and delicate mayflies that populate his stretch of the Mississippi.

He gained international prominence with a six-month commission in Wales to illustrate a book on the poems of Walt Whitman. And in 2000, he was asked by the Grolier Club of New York, the nation's pre-eminent book collector society, to reprint the rediscovered wood blocks of engraver Rudolph Ruzicka, first published in the early 1900s.

Some of those prints appear, along with new originals by Schanilec, in the 2002 book by the late Newsweek editor Ken Auchincloss titled "New York Revisited."

In the midst of the project, terrorists flew suicide planes into the World Trade Center. In what may be the book's most poignant image, Schanilec shows the twin towers appearing to fade into the horizon, there in the mist and yet not.

Schanilec, whose projects tend to evolve from one to the next, has turned his attention to the natural world, a return of sorts to his youthful interests in the sciences.

His award-winning 2005 book "Mayflies of the Driftless Region" features 13 engravings of the ethereal mayflies in microscopic detail, its text a dialogue with entomologist Clarke Garry.

And at 52, he envisions building a kind of floating observatory and spending the rest of his days documenting life, wild and otherwise, along the Mississippi.

But for now, Schanilec is focused on the silvae, his most expensive and complex venture to date.

Modeled after the studies of trees dating back to 17th century England, the book documents 25 specimens found on his property, with text by Verhoeven and Schanilec exploring their history and native uses, the process of printing with them and more.

Although the book includes a single engraving of a tree - a maple, its branches laid bare in winter - the rest of the images are of the wood itself, of specimens taken from the trees and placed directly on the press.

Each specimen was cut by Schanilec, and cured and dried in an 1880s log cabin on the property that's spilling over these days with modern woodworking machinery. Each piece was selected for its unique features and printed to accentuate them. It might be the decay of the birch, where the wood rots faster than the bark, or the faint purple hue in the grain of the lilac.

The work is meticulous, and the most minute of details can take hours, days even, to perfect.

On this morning, Verhoeven is hand-mixing ink to conjure a green that's more golden than blue, and Schanilec is drawing out the pinhead-size dot at the center of a piece of nannyberry.

"It's an educated guess," said Verhoeven, who had just graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and was on his way home to Oregon when he was introduced to Schanilec by Egger in 2005.

"Sometimes you hit the nail on the head and sometimes you smash your thumb - and you use a lot of ink in the process."

The nannyberry, meanwhile, is trying Schanilec's patience. For the last hour or more, he has been fixated on that dot - the tiniest feature on the smallest specimen in the book - in an effort to perfect the registration.

He runs it through the Heidelberg press, carves a little more from the wood, cleans the rollers and re-inks, readjusts the plate and tries again. And again. And again.

"This is the kind of thing that drives you crazy," said Schanilec, examining an imperfection only he and Verhoeven can detect.

In recent weeks, they have been putting in 12-hour days, six days a week. In the end, only 151 copies will be published in two editions ranging in price from $950 to $7,500. The deluxe edition, with its medieval-style binding, will include a sample of each specimen in a handmade wooden box.

All of this is being documented by Verhoeven on the Midnight Paper Web site - www.midnightpapersales.com- in an effort by Schanilec to make his work more accessible.

"Because nobody gets to see it otherwise," said Schanilec, who is trying to impart the complexity of the process as much as the final piece.

"I'd hate to think I'm doing all of this just for classes visiting a special collections library. You can barely scratch the surface of it there."

END