Interview with James Nowak: On Collaboration

James Nowak is a writer, medievalist, and book artist from Wellington County. His debut poetry chapbook, Draw Me the Sky, was published in August 2024 by Vocamus Press. James previously operated a small letterpress studio just outside of Eden Mills. He continues to dabble in the book arts, presently collaborating with the hide tanner Daniel Stermac-Stein to produce a series of sheep-parchment envelopes for Someone Editions’ literary letterpress publishing imprint, The French Letter Society. James studies medieval literature and philosophy at the University of Toronto.

Can you discuss any interdisciplinary collaborations between yourself and book historians or book-makers that have contributed to a deeper understanding of this material?

I think that being able to talk with Daniel, to watch him working, and to spend time in his tannery and his sewing studio for more than a decade now has probably been one of my biggest influences. I came to medieval studies and the book arts a few years into our friendship. So my interest in these things developed, not exactly in response to, but certainly in tandem with, those long hours talking in the tannery, and watching him work.

As I was becoming interested in calligraphy, it was natural that I’d talk to Daniel about parchment. I forget how it happened – my guess is that I, not-so-subtly, made it known I was on the hunt for some parchment, or maybe I showed him the quills I was cutting – but somehow he ended up making me a few pieces of parchment from goatskins. That’s what started it. And it just set the standard for what calligraphy had to mean, even before I’d written anything: I knew in rough terms how much work had gone into the parchment; and I knew an animal had lived and died a life whose meaning exceeded that of anything I could write on their skin. So it imposed a much different circumstance than my usual mindless lurch from blank page to blank page.

A bit later, when I got into bookbinding, I went to Daniel for leather, for help with the skiving (thinning down the edges of the leather with a special knife), and other things like that. This kind of work-bench, conversational collaboration did a lot to counterbalance the rarefied associations which often coalesce around manuscripts: they are objects for the mind, meant to be displayed behind glass, kept in special collections, and so on. Of course, I understand that special care needs to be taken to preserve these beautiful manuscripts, and I don’t contest that at all. But working with Daniel gave me insight into how these things were actually made, on the ground: in pretty humble circumstances, with simple tools, and a lot of collaboration between many human hands and minds.

Sometimes manuscripts seem less like artifacts and more like old lawnmowers: you can learn to fix them, to maintain them, and even to make them, if you pay attention in the right way.

Letterpress is a core part of the artisanal book trade, as is vellum. Do you sense any other similarities between the two?

Surely, there are more links than I can think of. One that comes to mind presently is that – in very different ways – letterpress printing and calligraphy done on parchment both employ the depth-perceiving abilities of the eye.

The very skilled printers, like Deborah, understand that type and paper and ink do their work in three dimensions, and that a well-printed letterpress page gives they eye some depth – even if very minor – to perceive. The same is true with writing done on parchment, though the effect is achieved in a much different way: the depth of the parchment itself engages the eye.

I don’t have the evidence to prove it, but I suspect that, beyond the obvious tactile pleasure of a letterpress book or a piece of calligraphy, the mind does something different when it looks into these pages, irrespective of the content of the texts they spell out. In my own experience, reading on screens – utterly two-dimensional – seems to promote very flat and depthless ways of thinking.

How do you feel about combining your work with Deborah's?

Working with Deborah has been a pleasure. She is a true craftsperson, and seems to implicitly understand some of the things that Daniel and I love about parchment. We never had to explain or justify why we love this stuff; she just gets it. It’s rare to find someone like that, especially someone with such a technically and aesthetically capable mind.

So Deborah’s expertise in these regards made all of our discussions fruitful and rewarding, and just made it easy. Her invitation to collaborate prompted us to try new things and to get more deeply involved with each other as craftsmen, and with the skins themselves. In the end, we were surprised by how beautiful the envelopes turned out. Plus it was fun. What more could you ask for?