The Bicycle Diaries. One New Yorker’s Journey Through 9-11. Impressions Ten Years Later by Gaylord Schanilec.

Wisconsin: Midnight Paper Sales, 2011.. One of 250 copies, signed by the artist and author. 7 colour wood engravings by Gaylord Schanilec with one repeated on the upper cover. Printed in 12 point Emerson on Zerkal mouldmade paper. 8vo., original brown silk cloth by Campbell-Logan Bindery with a wood engraving on the upper cover and a printed paper spine label.||An extraordinary response to 9-11.Goodman writes, “I could set my position in time by that moment, like the frozen clock at Hiroshima.” For the next three months, Richard rode his bike almost every day from the Upper West Side to the World Trade Center disaster site, or as near as he could get to it. When he returned home, he wrote about what he had seen.
On the morning of September 11 in 2001, Gaylord Schanilec sat at his engraving table in Wisconsin working on New York Revisited, a book celebrating the city at the turn of the 21st century. His reaction, like that of most Americans west of the Hudson, was to ask himself, “What can I do?” A week would pass before he was able to contact Kenneth Auchincloss, the author and driving force behind New York Revisited, a book that Gaylord had been commissioned to produce by the Grolier Club of New York. Ken agreed that the tragedy should be acknowledged, but quietly. He felt that to let the tragedy overshadow the original purpose of the book--to celebrate the city, his “home town”--would be unfortunate.
The Bicycle Diaries is, ultimately, the answer to Gaylord’s question, “What can I do?” Each letter, every word, of Richard’s diary has been cast in metal and carefully printed onto the pages of the book. |