• "You Shall Look at This or at Nothing":Gaylord Schanilec and the Value of the Fine Press Book
• Alexa Hazel (bio)

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]

The cover and box of Schanilec's Lac des pleurs (Stockholm, Wisconsin: Midnight Paper Sales, 2015). Schanilec printed one hundred copies of Lac, originally priced at $5,000, after seven years of research and production.

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...

• “你应该看这个或什么都不要看”：盖洛德·夏奈莱克和精美印刷书的价值
• Alexa Hazel（生物）

美国作家，雕刻家和印刷商盖洛德·尚尼莱克（Gaylord Schanilec，1955年）的Las des pleurs ^1装在一个没有描述的盒子里，到达了“善本和手抄本”阅览室。盒子放在木板铺有地毯的房间里的一张宽敞的桌子上。读者们看起来很认真而且衣冠楚楚。泡沫垫和书镇纸都放在一旁。图书管理员会调整复杂的聚光灯。观众打开了第一层外壳，露出了Lac的定制勃艮第布艺盒子。书名的灰绿色罗马字体，²后来，我通过Schanilec的当代艺术得知，印刷者，作家和印刷商Russell Maret（1971–）被柔和的灰色线条所遮蔽。皮革深水蓝色的脊柱带有小鹈鹕。织物滑开，露出淡蓝色的内饰和书本的光滑封面，绿色，黄色和勃艮第的大理石花纹。涟漪扰动的表面既是表面又是深度，既是固体的又是短暂的，每个岩石或光斑都需要引起读者的注意。总体体验令人震惊-就像打开一盒珍宝。

Schanilec在一些精细的圈子中被描述为“杰出的多色木雕师”，³以文字和图像的方式探索并复制了他在自然界中发现的东西：昆虫，鸟类，树木，动植物密西西比河的佩平湖，瀑布和最近的都市花卉。像威廉·沃林格的“自然”抽象和同情，⁴中的无碛地区的蜉蝣（2005年），Sylvæ（2007），和紫胶（2015年），Schanilec的风格并不试图模仿自然，而是“一个果实对有机形式之美的感觉​​”：一种“感觉自己进入”“有机生命的幸福”的愿望。 他的声音昧而富于探索性，与他对色彩的运用一样微妙。

他的艺术品是什么？它们不便于分类。同时，文本-诗歌，轶事，论据-和图像，我们可以将它们理解为绘画，但可以将其视为书本。他们唤起了英国“私人”的称号[末页146]

Schanilec的《Lac des pleurs》的封面和盒子（威斯康星州斯德哥尔摩：Midnight Paper Sales，2015年）。经过七年的研究和生产，Schanilec印刷了一百本Lac，原价为5,000美元。

出版社”的传统，其中最著名的例子是丹尼尔出版社，TJ科布登-桑德森和埃默里·沃克的鸽子出版社，威廉·莫里斯的Kelmscott出版社和圣约翰·霍恩比的Ashendene出版社。 élan和至少他们的愿景的一部分，并以庄严的态度对待制表业。“私人出版”运动在地理和历史上仍然存在：对工业化的19世纪反应，如果将其用于当代作品，则该词将是不合时宜的。

两位艺术家也都从1970年代中期美国新闻界的复兴中了解了他们的创作活动，当时凸版印刷机（一种可追溯到十五世纪的技术）变得过时，从其使用价值中释放出来，因此便宜了。 “书艺”运动获得了繁荣的技术手段。⁶ A [末页147]编年史家和手工艺者Johanna Drucker也许过分乐观地认为，二十世纪是“艺术家书籍的世纪”。⁷ “艺术家的书”是艺术品，而不是艺术品的代表，其创作者在主题或美学上都与该书的生产过程有关。⁸然而，由于“艺术家的书”涵盖了该书的法典结构之内和之外的一系列艺术实验，从折纸到弹出式书，该术语暗示了太多内容，不足以充分说明Schanilec的对象。如果说“私人出版”是不合时宜的，那么“艺术家的书”就太不精确了。

当我要求Maret对他和Schanilec制作的物体进行分类时，他提出了两个术语：“第三流书籍”或“精美印刷艺术家书籍”。作曲家冈瑟·舒勒（Gunther Schuller）创造的“第三流”最初是指爵士乐和古典音乐的综合。桑德拉·基尔森鲍姆（Sandra Kirshenbaum），《五...