Book Lab, San Marcos

Yesterday, I went and visited Craig Jensen at his studio in San Marcos. Craig runs Book Lab II - a business that specializes in innovative bookbindings, special editions, conservation, and box-making. Portfolio boxes are the bread and butter of Book Lab's business - and Craig and his partner Gary make archival, cloth-covered boxes for the Getty, the Blanton, and many museum clients. We ended up in Craig's library, looking over past editions and projects that he's worked on. The one piece that absolutely blew my mind was Gaylord Schanilec's Sylvae project. I'm not even sure how quite to explain it, but here goes.

Schanilec lives in rural Wisconsin and got interested in the trees on his property. He surveyed his land and found over 24 species. He then took samples of each tree species and made wood block prints directly from the specimens. He made prints of the interior rings (end grains), as well as of the cross-section of the long grain. Here are the 24 wood samples that come with each book. Each sample is numbered and corresponds to a section/print in the book.



Schanilec was careful to closely match the ink color with the actual hue of the wood. I think this one was ash.



This amazing book also includes a map of Schanilec's land.


The hand-bound book is protected inside a cloth-covered box that also has a niche where the tray of wood blocks rests. The box set must weigh close to 40 pounds!

I found many things compelling about this project - the integration of wood into the design of the book covers and the documentation of the process through the wood blocks. The texts which encompass natural history, poetry, recipes, weird bits of trivia. But I think what moved me most about this project was that the materials came directly from the land where Schanilec lives and works. It reminded me in ways of the project that I wanted to do in my father's home town, using native plants from Ching Shui to make paper that would form the basis of a memory book/family history. Seeing Schanilec's book reminded me of what is possible.