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What Is an angel to a mother, what is a mother to a pelican doing the slow windhover over shoals of rotting shells?

The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins comes to mind—the “gash-gold vermillion” of “The Windhover”—so does Emily Dickinson, and Virginia Woolf’s later novels, especially “The Waves.”

Windhover served both as the official press of the university and as a working laboratory for teaching the handicrafts of book production — a role Mr. Merker formalized in 1986, when he founded the university’s Center for the Book, an interdisciplinary program for students of design, papermaking, typography and the preservation and history of books.

Ten years later Mr. Merker founded Windhover Press at the University of Iowa, where he had been enrolled in the Writers’ Workshop before becoming a printer and teacher of printing crafts.

Though neither Stone Wall nor Windhover were profit-making, both were influential in recognizing and publishing good poets early in their careers.