Readers and writers: Author Hampl and artist/printer partner on project again after four decades

Mary Ann Grossmann, Pioneer Press
·7 min read
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“Forty years,” Gaylord Schanilec says with a laugh. “Forty years it took for me to get a manuscript from Patricia.”

Schanilec is an internationally known artist and printer and the owner of Midnight Paper Sales printing company. He’s talking about Patricia Hampl, award-winning poet and author.

They first partnered in 1982 when Schanilec did a two-color drawing frontispiece and ornamental rose decoration for the fine press edition of Hampl’s second poetry collection, “Resort and Other Poems,” published by Bookslinger Editions.

“Working on ‘Resort’ was pivotal for me,” Schanilec continues, “and I began angling for a manuscript from Patricia. It only took 40 years for one to materialize.”

Four decades later, they are again partners in creating Hampl’s new book, “It’s Come to This,” which they will introduce at 7 p.m. Thursday during a meeting of the Ampersand Club, free and open to the public, at the University Club, 420 Summit Ave., St. Paul. There will be 75 copies available at $1,500 apiece.

Turning the clock back, Schanilec recalls meeting Hampl for the first time in the early 1980s when they were standing on the front stoop of Bookslinger, a local distributor of small-press literary books.

“I had been fishing for a manuscript to illustrate,” he continued. “Then Jim Sitter (founder of Minnesota Center for Book Arts) managed to get the manuscript for ‘Resort’ from Patricia This was a huge gift that landed in my lap. She was just becoming famous because of “A Romantic Education.” (That 1981 book was a memoir about her Czech heritage, written after several trips to that country. It established her as influential in the rise of memoir.)

One of the reasons Hampl agreed to work with Schanilec on ‘Resort’ is because she has an interest in fine press books and printing going back to her time in the early ’70s at the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa where she was a classmate with the late Allan Kornblum. He printed the text of “Resort” and went on to found Toothpaste Press, later changed to Coffee House Press when he moved to Minneapolis.

“I had done printing myself and liked everything to do with the book as an art form,” Hampl says. “Allan and I took courses from Harry Duncan, a great, great man. I wasn’t a star like Allan but I did my projects, taking courses in setting type, printing a lot of handmade books, studying the art of the book.”

Time passed. Schanilec and Hampl went their separate ways, each building a distinguished career. Now they are together working on a limited edition of Hampl’s “It’s Come To This.” It’s her meditation on getting older (a worker asked her if she was still driving at her age), the boarded-up windows in St. Paul after the unrest over the murder of George Floyd, and living in this city where she was born. It was first published in the autumn 2021 issue of The American Scholar.

“This was my pandemic piece,” says Hampl, who lives in a brownstone on Cathedral Hill. She’s a winner of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, and her books include “The Florist’s Daughter,” about growing up in St. Paul where her father was president of Holm & Olson; “Virgin Time”; and “Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime”; as well as “Tell Me True: Memoir, History, and Writing a Life,” co-edited by Elaine Tyler May.

Hampl had been used to traveling the world looking for inspiration, but COVID changed everybody’s life, one of the themes of “It’s Come to This.”

“We were not only in the midst of an international pandemic, separating us from each other, making travel unlikely if not impossible, but solitude can unite us when we’re alive,” she says.

“I am in my 70s. It’s the whole idea of mortality. It’s about the whole racial reckoning going on since Reconstruction, the whole idea of two huge things bigger than the personal: pandemic and murder that took place near our town. I went around in my car taking pictures of boarded-up buildings in St. Paul. It felt like the world was making an incredible pivot; so was my life. All of a sudden I wasn’t young anymore. That came back forcefully when we were told that older people were at risk for COVID. Oops. That’s me. Yet with all these things, people came together. I felt a deep connection to the world, even though I lived alone with a dog.”

Schanilec lives near Stockholm, Wis., when he isn’t traveling, but last week he was home to can tomatoes and judging from the weary tone of his voice it sounded like the tomatoes were winning.

“I travel to book fairs a lot,” he says, explaining his extensive journeys in the United States and Europe. This summer Schanilec was artist-in-residence in Everglades, exhibited at the Manhattan Fine Press Book Fair, and at Tropic Bound, Miami’s first artists’ book fair. He’s won numerous awards, including a 2021 Knight Printmaking fellowship and was twice artist-in-residence at Minnesota Center for Book Arts. One of his most recent Minnesota-based projects was illustrating and designing the book “My Mighty Journey: A Waterfall’s Story,”‘ written by Minnesotan John Coy and winner of a Minnesota Book Award. (For more information go to midnightpapersales.com/about.html.)

When Hampl and Schanilec introduce “It’s Come to This” on Thursday, Hampl says she’s going to thank Gaylord for “this beautiful book.” Schanilec is going to tell the audience how much he loved working with her.

“We are both Czech descendants and that meant a lot to me,” Schanilec says. He was so sure he’d get another manuscript from Hampl, he purchased vintage Czech printing paper in the 1960s and stashed it away.

When the project finally got underway, Schnilec said, “It’s like leaping into a void because things come up.”

For instance, it took several contacts before he could find the typeface he wanted, and then he discovered it didn’t have italic. The bookbinder in Texas he’s worked with for years couldn’t do the job because his hands had given out after years of hand-setting type. The text was finally printed by Molly Brown of California.

The good news was that Schanilec had a fellowship in 2021 and met Lila Shull, a transplant from Tennessee who teaches design and fine art at the University of Minnesota.

“Lila was working on stone lithograph that was a beautiful pattern,” he recalls. They met at Hampl’s home and Lila created a design for the book’s cover inspired by the large leaves of the gingko tree outside Hampl’s door. Shull “printed from the stone,” in which a design is drawn on a flat stone, like limestone, and printed directly from the stone slab.

When “It Has Come to This” was published in The American Scholar, it was illustrated by a picture Hampl took of St. Paul’s bridges. She was on the walking path below Shepherd Road and aimed her camera west to the High Bridge.

Schanilec figured out where Hampl stood and took a 180-degree panoramic picture from the High Bridge to the Robert Street Bridge that he turned into a wood engraving titled “St. Paul Riverfront” that is in the back of the new book.

For Hampl and Schanilec their places in the arts world have changed dramatically in 40 years.

Schanilec: “The artist book movement that was emerging when Jim Sitter started Minnesota Center for Book Arts has taken the limited-edition book industry in different directions. No more old, musty volumes; now it’s a happening thing. I don’t like the term ‘artist books’ very much but I don’t know what to call myself. I guess a ‘bookie.’ ”

Hampl: “In the past few years, the question is what narrative does when it is fiction and what it is in memoir. Forms we thought were discrete and separate are now in happy and vexing ways all mixed up.”

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