Mr. Northfield Entertainment Guide and By All Means Graphics owner Rob Schanilec is famous here in Northfield.
Rob has a brother named Gaylord Schanilec (Midnight Paper Sales) who’s equally famous in the town of Stockholm, Wisconsin and to some extent, the rest of the Western Hemisphere. Gaylord’s work as a wood-engraver was profiled last week in a StarTribune article titled A bookmaker, unbound.
"He’s one of the two or three finest color wood-engravers ever. He’s really that good," said Robert Rulon-Miller, a rare book dealer in St. Paul who has followed Schanilec’s career for more than 30 years. "He’s a man of many parts: engraver, printer, bookbinder, editor, writer, natural philosopher, and he brings all this stuff together into his books."
Robbie and I went to see his work and hear him speak on Saturday at the Groveland Gallery. That exhibition is profiled here on the MN Monthly site.
This is the first time Schanilec is exhibiting his prints independently from his books. Schanilec explains:
“These engravings were made for books that I’ve printed in the past 25 years. They were made to be seen within reading distance, about a foot from the reader’s face. They were sewn into bindings and destined to darkness on a bookshelf, along with their texts, until the book is opened and a reader, in due course, finds them. Now, here they are, framed on the vast white plains of these walls – like icebergs in an ocean – but emitting, I hope, the warmth of the world from which they came.”
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