Casting a Spell

Late one dark December afternoon in 1981, I came across a well-lit window in King Street, St James’s, displaying the work of four artists associated with the Whittington Press, a private press named after its Cotswolds village location. Lured inside by this bait, I was soon hooked and the gallery landed two sales without difficulty.

One of my purchases that winter afternoon was the first issue of Matrix, a journal full of information about presses, type and typecasting, wood-engraving and printing. Reading it I soon realized how little I knew about what’s involved in designing and printing fine books. Almost a quarter of a century on, I’ve developed a good eye for well-balanced illustration and text, and have derived a huge amount of pleasure from reading and collecting private press books. Graham Moss at the Incline Press has characterized the genre pithily, from the printer-publisher’s perspective: ‘The many shades of meaning contained in the term Private Press ought to boil down to a single common denominator: we publish what pleases us, rather than what pays.’ You need patience as well as cash to collect books published by contemporary presses. Years can elapse between ordering one from an enticingly worded prospectus and hearing the thud on the doormat that heralds its delivery. I’m impatient by nature, so I’m frustrated when books aren’t published on time. However, the waiting always seems worth it in the end. Given that we’re talking in years, it is ironic that the book that stimulated this article deals with the most ephemeral entomological order, poetically described by Louis MacNeice as ‘One only day of May alive beneath the sun’. The American artist Gaylord Schanilec is illustrating and writing Mayflies of the Driftless Region, which he plans to publish in the autumn of 2005 under his Midnight Paper Sales imprint. Matrix has consistently championed Schanilec’s work. I didn’t take much notice of a brief note in Matrix 8 regarding his book about the demolition of a river bridge at St Paul, Minneapolis, but its financial success enabled him to buy a small farm near Stockholm in western Wisconsin, three miles from the Mississippi river. In the first book produced there he captured the lives of four mid-Western farmers in interviews, their stories complemented with his double-page colour wood engravings of their properties. There was, however, no missing Schanilec’s own account of this local history project when it appeared in Matrix 10, for it was accompanied by his striking illustration of a farm in south central Minnesota. From then on I was careful to pay attention whenever his name was mentioned. I also made a point of looking out for his work, but it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that I bought a book from him – a Stockholm neighbour’s account of renovating an old house, illustrated with colour wood engravings. In collecting terms, I ‘dated’ MPS occasionally until 2004, when my relationship with the press changed to the bibliophilic equivalent of ‘going steady’. I established a standing order, promising to buy a copy of every book published by the press in future. By this means printer-publishers secure a guaranteed income, and collectors get a discount on the books. MPS, however, has an even more ardent suitor, in the form of the University of Minnesota, which buys the press archives too, for its collection. I first heard about Schanilec’s mayfly project at the biennial Oxford Fine Press Fair in November 2003 when he showed me a promotional broadside that he’d printed with his colour wood engraving of a species called Ephemerella inermis. Below, he’d printed a list of the structural characteristics that an entomologist would need in order to identify the species scientifically. It was a lovely paradox: replicating the delicate form and colours of the mayfly by engraving into hard, end grain blocks of maple wood. I decided on the spot that this was a project to watch. Schanilec’s interest in collecting and drawing mayflies stems from his passion for fly-fishing for trout. ‘The mayfly, in a variety of species, is a favourite of trout, or at least of trout fishermen,’ is his wry observation on the press website. ‘Its emergence into the world is specific. For example, Ephemerella subvaria, or the Dark Hendrickson, begins hatching in early April, and is done by the middle of May. Furthermore, it generally hatches from one until four in the afternoon, and only on specific stretches of specific rivers.’ Schanilec has approached the subject of mayflies in much the same way as he developed his book about farmers. Although he could hardly interview the insects he did the next best thing by consulting local anglers and Professor Clarke Garry, an  entomologist at the University of Wisconsin who studies insect life in local trout streams. Schanilec then bought a microscope, specimen vials and preservative agents and set about learning techniques for collecting, preserving and documenting mayflies. After drawing a specimen he sends it to Garry, who provides him with a taxonomical description for the species. Their collaboration and Schanilec’s use of scientific language in a ‘fine press’ context hark back to the eighteenth century, when similar collaborations between scientists and artists produced hefty botanical and zoological volumes of engraved plates of newly discovered plants and animals. I’ve kept in regular contact with Schanilec by e-mail, providing encouragement. He’s shrewd enough, however, to recognize that I’m also monitoring his progress in my impatience to get my hands on the book. He’s familiar with such behaviour. In 2000, he printed a broadside with text by Bill Holm, a Minnesota poet and author. Holm admitted that he loved books ‘as they might be loved by an illiterate sensualist. I love the bite of lead type on heavy rag paper, the sexy swirls of marbled endpapers, the gleam and velvety smoothness of Morocco calf . . . I feel my books. I run my hands over them as over skin or fur. I stroke them and sniff them . . .’ I know what he means, though personally the look of a book matters more to me than its feel. While Schanilec has been working hard, I’ve done some research too. My own fishing experience is limited. I have a half-inch scar on one fingertip as a permanent reminder of an Australian boyhood afternoon spent fishing for yabbies (freshwater crayfish) with country cousins, when I managed to tear my finger on a barbed-wire fence before we even reached the dam. The only skill required in ‘yabbying’ is to tie a piece of meat – preferably not from your own finger – on to a piece of line, drop it into a dam and then yank it out quickly when the crustacean’s claws seize the bait. Another afternoon decades later, spent with Norwegian friends line-fishing from a motor boat in the Lofoten islands, also required minimal piscatorial skill. It seemed impossible not to haul in codfish. Of the skilled art of fly-fishing I knew nothing. Help came from an unexpected source when I spotted an American exhibition catalogue in the bookshop at the Musée d’Orsay. Casting a Spell: Winslow Homer, Artist and Angler dealt with the nineteenthcentury American artist’s interest in fly-fishing and its influence on his work. Obviously Schanilec had stepped into Homer’s rubber waders. Paul Scullery’s chapter on the fly-fishing stories depicted in Homer’s art provided a useful primer on fly casting. I learnt that it’s an exercise in timing rather than strength. The angler tries to cast his line so that the dry fly, tied carefully to mimic a local species of mayfly, drops exactly in the right spot on the river’s surface to tempt a feeding trout. Somehow, that basic principle had eluded me previously. At first, Schanilec had simply referred to his continuing book project as ‘Mayflies’, but in the autumn of 2004 he added ‘of the Driftless Region’ to its title. This was another puzzle. Was he referring to stagnant areas of water? Searching the web for ‘The Driftless Region’ provided the correct, geological explanation. Northwestern Illinois, north-eastern Iowa, south-eastern Minnesota and south-western Wisconsin constitute a region that was not subject to glaciation during the most recent Ice Age. When the ice sheets that covered adjacent areas melted they left a deposit of rock and sand termed glacier drift. The Driftless Region is therefore named for its lack of glacier drift, a fact which is a source of local pride: one Wisconsin website exhorts browsers to ‘Come take a journey through the land the Ice Age forgot!’ That same autumn Schanilec printed a keepsake promoting Mayflies of the Driftless Region for the annual Oak Knoll Book Fest in New Castle, Delaware. Although circumspect on details of the book’s final form, the keepsake includes a fine colour wood engraving of an unidentified species from the Baetis genus of mayfly. Its structural delicacy and pale grey and lemon colouring are reminiscent of a sumptuous piece of art nouveau jewellery by Lalique. The book is likely to include Schanilec’s colour wood engravings of thirteen species of mayfly with Garry’s taxonomical identifications providing the core text. Schanilec will outline how his passion for fishing led him to mayflies and he’s also considering interviewing Garry, whose enthusiasm for mayflies would enliven the text. Then in October Schanilec advised: ‘I have ten images in my hands, with one or two more available specimens in the hands of my professor (I’ve decided to cheat and use his if need be). So, things are looking up. I’m debating what to do about various editions, which is difficult as I’m trying to anticipate the possible fly fishermen and natural history book collectors who might be interested.’ He may publish the book in three forms: a regular edition, of possibly 350 copies, consisting of wood engravings and text bound into a book; 26 copies with facsimiles of working materials and tied flies, the latter emulating the prized special edition of a late nineteenth-century book, Frederick M. Halford’s Dry Fly Entomology, which included samples of dry flies; and perhaps 13 copies with an original drawing and the actual set of wood blocks for one of the images, along with other materials. Including blocks would certainly increase collectors’ understanding of the printing process, although he warns that ‘that would mean breaking up the archival materials, and I’ll have to see what the U of M has to say about that, as they have had my complete archives up until now’. Whatever the final form of Mayflies of the Driftless Region, its publication will be an artistic and literary coming of age for the Ephemeroptera order, giving the lie to MacNeice’s lines, ‘but the trouble with us mayflies / Is that we never have the chance to be grown up’.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 6 © Colin Martin 2005