From the colophon:

“This book began as a personal investigation into the flight of birds and slipped into a meditation on our friend Daedalus for equally personal reasons. He did learn to fly after a fashion and he had to understand much in order to do so. He seemed, as I looked further, to be the quintessentially western man; prideful, inventive, full of fear and rage in turn, possessed by a candor that was admirable; finally, not unwise. He was the appropriate conveyance for my own obsession with flight. I wrote the narrative and the book itself began to settle in, around and over the text during the fall of 1992. When I returned to The Press from my sabbatical leave, I went to work printing with the help of Sally Hegarty and Travis Jordan. David Curnutt made the countless negatives for plates and Charles Walters let us use his splendid photographs of skies. Greg Campbell of Campbell-Logan bindery produced the binding and its design.

In this book we have used halftones of photographs and Xeroxed images. We have employed color printing from Lucite sheets, drawings, some hand-lettering and handwriting. We have conflated all kinds of discrete and not usually compatible materials. Much of what we have done here has been an experiment. I seek ways to integrate experience through use of a very wide range of techniques for the letterpress and the difficulties that arise are all mine. The type is computer-generated Copperplate Thirty-one BC and the paper is Magnani Pescia Incisioni. There are thirty-five regular copies in this edition and this is number…”

James Trissel, Summer 1993