THE ARCHITECT AS A BOOK-PLATE DESIGNER
By WILLIS STEELL
By Thomas Tryon
AMONG the book-plate designers of the present day the architect may, if he choose, take a high place. He is one whose studies have led him through the paths of artistic training where his eye and hand have learned to see color and form and balance of parts, and while the usual media of his profession are wood, stone, terra cotta and iron, there are many by-paths through which he must travel to appreciate the value of his pencil lines upon the flat.
No more delightful by-way than the book-plate route will open before him, hedged in as it is by purely artistic shrubbery and leading constantly to pretty and even beautiful designs in which the genius of architecture has played a great part. Moreover, all his preceding journey through the hard conventional country to which architecture at first seems limited, has equipped him thoroughly to give expression to his fancy. That the gift of imagination is among his endowments should be taken for granted, however, if the architect is to succeed in the line of drawing book-plates.
Fancy and imagination being in his mental equipment the architect can “rest” his mind in no more delightful fashion than by giving them full scope in this gem-like art. His experience, his collections of drawings, the work of others of his craft which he has studied, all tend to render his fund of information large, and if he has the key to book-plate art, inexhaustible, since nothing comes amiss to the pen of one whose facile fancy can grasp a good motive and direct it to a purpose other than that originally intended.
JAMES SEYMOUR TRYON
By Thomas Tryon
In the early days of art the architect was not only a designer of buildings but was also a sculptor and sometimes a decorative painter. He was called upon by his patrons to design whatever was needed at the moment, and these men were “all-round” artists, the day of specialization and the speculator not having dawned.