Prints

Hole in the Donut: Scrape 22
Gaylord Schanilec
MIDNIGHT PAPER SALES 2025 WHEN HENRY DAVID THOREAU died in 1862, he was ten years into a practice of recording the natural phenomena of his Concord home, a practice that culminated in a series of charts he referred to as his ‘Kalendar’. Three years ago I began doing the same here in the wilds of western Wisconsin, but instead of turning to books as the source of information regarding species identification, as was the case with Thoreau, I turned to an iPhone 13.

 

 

In recent travels I’ve continued this practice. Hole in the Donut: Scrape 22 is the result of a residency in the Florida Everglades during the summer of 2023. On my first evening there the iPhone identified a bird in a tree as a penguin. When compared with the official HID list by biological technician Kevin Casey Brooks, the phone proved to be wrong, or at least misleading, about 50 percent of the time. Kevin and I corresponded for a year. I’ve hand set our correspondence in metal type, with 1/2 point rule from a collection of old brass newspaper rule echoing the lines generated when one clicks on an email correspondence to find the various entries presented from the last to the first. On one’s smartphone we’ve come to accept this reversal as logical, but in the physical world it throws one backward into a confusing chain of correspondence. In the context of a hand-printed book this anomaly is, I think, interesting.

7 french-folded sections wrapped in a 2-foot-long, 6-color engraving of the sun setting over Scrape 22 & various other engravings with poetry, biological conversation & a scurrilous species list. Contained in a clamshell box. 9.5 x 12.5 inches. 60 copies printed, of which 55 are for sale. $1,800.