Inspiration can be found anywhere. Gaylord Schanilec, wood engraver, fine printer and trout fly-fisherman found it on a river bank, in the form of the common mayfly.

Schanilec owns Midnight Paper Sales, a private press that publishes small, limited editions of illustrated books, often related to local history or geography. He designs, engraves and prints the books, and often writes the text. Each book project begins with an idea that evolves gently into the shape of the final book, a process that can take years. He is now hard at work illustrating and writing an as-yet untitled book on the species of mayflies (Ephemeroptera) found in his local rivers.

The idea for the book came to him in the summer of 2001 when, as usual, he spent as much time as he could fishing. This gave him plenty of time to contemplate the artificial fishing flies, hand-tied to imitate mayflies, with which he baited his hook. Trout are a major natural predator of mayflies in the wild, and trout fishermen have for centuries used local knowledge to tie appropriate artificial flies, called dry flies, as bait. This year, for example, is the sesquicentennial of Greenwell's Glory, a dry fly first tied by William Greenwell in 1854.

Not wishing to rely solely on fishermen's folklore, in the winter of 2001 Schanilec consulted Clarke Garry, a biologist at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls, who studies insect life in local trout streams. Under Garry's guidance, Schanilec bought a microscope, specimen vials and preservative agents, and developed techniques for collecting, preserving and documenting mayflies. He also read widely around his subject, including two late-nineteenth-century books by Frederick M. Halford, Dry Fly Fishing in Theory and Practice and Dry Fly Entomology, the highly prized special edition of which includes samples of dry flies.

Entomologists have now identified about 2,000 species of mayfly, some 150 of which can be found near Schenilac's home in the river hamlet of Stockholm, on the southern prairie of Minnesota and Wisconsin. Throughout the 2002 fly-fishing season, Schanilec collected hundreds of specimens, using information provided by local fly-fishermen on where and when to find particular species, such as Hexagenia limbata on the lower Rush River and Ephemerella subvaria on particular stretches of the south branch of the Whitewater River. He has so far selected seven of these species for wood-cutting, including E. subvaria. Garry described them taxonomically and identified them for him.

Schanilec makes painstakingly detailed drawings. He then carves his final images into hard blocks of end-grain wood using sharp, metal gouging tools, to produce precisely detailed engravings from which he prints distinctive images in several colours. Reduction cutting — carving away more of the surface of the wood block between printings — allows him to print two or more colours from the same block, rather than carve a separate block for each colour. This technique ensures exact registration but prevents reprinting, as the areas that have been cut away cannot be reused.

Using a letterpress printing press, Schanilec balances text and illustration on the pages he prints. The mayfly book, which will include engravings of 12 mayflies, including one of E. inermis (shown here), will be published in autumn next year in three editions: a large edition of portfolios of loose prints; a standard book, including both Garry's taxonomic descriptions and trout fishermen's folklore for each species bound alongside the prints; and a special edition, issued with hand-tied flies imitating each species, and an extra set of prints.

There is something rather magnificent about Schanilec's enterprise in capturing this most ephemeral order of insects between the covers of finely bound books. It recalls the remarkable eighteenth-century collaborations between artists and scientists in the Enlightenment.