SAN MARCOS, TEX. — On the day before New Year’s Eve, after making the 19-hour drive to Texas from Wisconsin, the writer and artisan Gaylord Schanilec began checking the status of the precious cargo that had been sitting, uninsured, in the bed of his Chevy Silverado. In the home studio of Craig Jensen, a bookbinder here, Mr. Schanilec plucked more than half a million dollars out of Rubbermaid storage bins. The money was in the form of 100 bubble-wrapped copies of “Lac Des Pleurs,” Mr. Schanilec’s ode to Lake Pepin, near his home in Stockholm, Wis., population 69. The going rate for each copy is $5,000.
The book took more than seven years for Mr. Schanilec to make. Now, Mr. Jensen would have to rush to complete the binding for 30 copies in time for the Codex Book Fair & Symposium in Berkeley, Calif., the premier international showcase for handmade books, which starts on Sunday.
The project began when Mr. Schanilec, a self-taught wood engraver and fine printer who seamlessly uses traditional techniques to modern ends, acquired a Lund fishing boat and retrofitted it with a drawing table and library so that he could create while pondering the lake. “I’m really into just going someplace I know nothing about, or into a subject I know nothing about, and just kind of letting it take me wherever,” Mr. Schanilec, 59, said.
“Lac Des Pleurs” is a much-anticipated fine press book, an age-old genre enjoying a golden period. These small-batch, highly collectible works are typically made with movable type on a printing press with production methods dating back to Johannes Gutenberg, who invented letterpress printing in the 1440s. Mr. Schanilec, an obsessive naturalist who likes salty language, is a master of this domain. In 2007, he won the prestigious Gregynog Prize for “Sylvae,” a survey of the trees on his 27-acre property in which impressions of their wood grains were printed directly onto the paper.
Mr. Schanilec’s latest, the 76-page “Lac Des Pleurs,” features his intricate and time-intensive engravings of the lake and its wildlife, accompanied by his original verse and the notes of European explorers of the area. Those start with Louis Hennepin, who christened it Lac des Pleurs, or Lake of Tears, because the Native Americans cried when their chief would not allow them to kill Hennepin and his colleagues. It also includes words by Mark Twain, who traveled there as a steamboat pilot in the 1850s, and Henry David Thoreau, who visited shortly before his death in 1862.
Mr. Schanilec printed the book on antique English paper using his Vandercook letterpress, which he cranks with his arm and a rickety hip. He blogs about his working process at midnightpapersales.com and had already sold 70 copies before the book was completed. He said he hoped to sell the remaining ones for $7,800 apiece after the four-day Codex show. The fair also features artist books made through silk-screen, calligraphy and digital printing, but the main draw is fine press books.
Peter Koch, a 40-year letterpress veteran who published a literary journal called Montana Gothic in the 1970s, started the foundation that gave birth to Codex. He conceived it as an alternative to the Frankfurt Book Fair, which he considered too focused on the publishing business; the Oxford Fine Press Book Fair (too insular, in his view); and the Oak Knoll Fest (too small). Mr. Koch wanted a lucrative marketplace for the product, which is often printed in standard and deluxe editions and is acquired mostly by special collections librarians.
“We didn’t have anything like it in the United States,” Mr. Koch said. “And yet I knew that the United States was thirsty and hungry for one of the finest arts known to man.”
Fine press books date back centuries. The genre’s modern era is usually traced to the British Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th century and William Morris’s Kelmscott Press. Since the 1970s, it has undergone a renaissance that is largely American-based and began with William Everson’s 1975 “Granite & Cypress,” a collection of Robinson Jeffers’s poetry that Mr. Everson published through his Lime Kiln Press. The book was packaged in a cypress wood box, complete with cypress stand, in effect monumentalizing it sculpturally. In the four decades since, the book arts have blossomed at universities across the country, including the master of fine arts programs at the University of Alabama and the University of Iowa.
Mark Dimunation, chief of the rare book and special collections division at the Library of Congress, met Mr. Schanilec not long ago in a chance encounter in Stockholm and recently acquired all of his works. “The man cuts the wood, cures the wood, trims the wood, cuts on that wood and prints with that wood,” he said. “It’s very much an individual artistic expression.”
That inspired act would be completed once Mr. Jensen, 64, formerly a book conservator at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, finished an arduous 34-step process that includes hand-sewing pages, assembling the cover and constructing a slipcase.
After Mr. Schanilec emptied his storage bins in Mr. Jensen’s studio, the pair examined a two-year-old dummy of the book. The frontispiece sets the tone with an image of Mr. Schanilec’s fishing boat, where he often sat contemplating mechanical hiccups that arose in the seven years he worked on the book.
Perfection is what printers are after, Mr. Schanilec said, but it is impossible to achieve. “You’re always hungry” for it, he said, “but you’re always frustrated.”
The book also opens with an exquisitely detailed, multicolored 2-by-3-foot map of Lake Pepin on handmade Moriki kozo paper that can be unfolded and laid flat. Based on a pocket-fishing map and United States Geological Survey materials, it took more than 500 hours just to carve into wood. Mr. Schanilec suggests that the map is the largest multiple-color wood engraving ever printed, and Mr. Dimunation of the Library of Congress said it was the largest one he could recall from recent years.
The other color images printed from Mr. Schanilec’s engravings include mussels, pelicans, a gull on a buoy and three species of fish. His initial intention was to catch and engrave all 70 species of fish in the lake, but he soon thought better of it. “I had made some calculations, and, at the rate I was going, it would take 125 years,” he said. “Lac Des Pleurs” completes a trilogy of natural history works by Mr. Schanilec, after “Mayflies of the Driftless Region” (2005) and “Sylvae” (2007), which Mr. Jensen called the most technically difficult piece he had ever bound.
“When people hear that a book sells for $5,000, $7,000, $8,000, they just think, how can that be?” Mr. Jensen said. “Well, then you finally hear the story behind it, and there’s who knows how many thousands of hours of just labor, never mind the thinking it up, the drawings, the art — all of the creative process.”
Mr. Schanilec hinted that this might be his last fine press book. “For me, this is just getting to be way too much,” he said. But a poem near the end of “Lac Des Pleurs” suggests that his creative juices will always flow.
I hold the line, waiting.
Hours go by. Days. Years.
Clouds build and dissolve,
the sun comes and goes —
and the moon!
Suddenly,
somewhere
something stirs...