A documentary by Jörg Adolph and Green Wetzel. In English and German with English subtitles. Unrated. Opens Friday, April 6, at the Vancity Theatre

How to Make a Book With Steidl may seem like too prosaic a title for an art documentary, but it makes sense because this is also the name of the instructional pamphlet that master printer Gerhard Steidl hands to his big-league clients when they decide to let him publish their rarefied works.

These customers include painters and photographers Ed Ruscha, Robert Frank, Jeff Wall, and William Eggleston—big enough names to entice Steidl to leave his German print house (he calls it “my laboratory”) to discuss book strategy with them in fascinatingly varied studios in New York, Los Angeles, and Vancouver. He also hits Paris to compare notes with Karl Lagerfeld, and he travels to Lübeck, Germany, to oversee author Günter Grass’s own cover art for a new edition of The Tin Drum.

Codirected by filmmakers Jörg Adolph and Gereon Wetzel (the latter brought us the foodie doc El Bulli: Cooking in Progress), the film follows a few books to fruition, most notably Ruscha’s new take on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (230 copies, $11,000 each) and photographer Joel Sternfeld’s iDubai, a collection of cellphone pictures (a bigger run, $38 each).

Steidl is a gawkily compelling, gently arrogant character whose perfectionism seems well suited to the places where high craft and elevated art meet. The only autobiographical info he divulges has to do with his father, a printing-press cleaner with little appreciation for books, and it’s obviously a crucial one. Like many of the images he champions, the exploratory, hand-held camerawork in this How to Make a Book is sometimes deceptively naive—much like the bluegrass music he listens to while churning out his rare, small masterpieces.

Watch the trailer for How to Make a Book With Steidl.