Most of our leading designers have hitherto been grouped in the eastern section of our country, or at least not much further west than Chicago. Some few designs, it is true, have been produced in California, but for the most part the book-plates of note have been marked with an eastern geographical origin.
In William Edgar Fisher we have a designer who has strikingly departed from geographical conditions of book-plate designing heretofore prevailing, and in faraway Fargo, North Dakota, has set up his studio from whence have come designs that are fresh, original and very pleasing. Mr. Fisher loves to work in a pictorial field. He makes a plate that tells a story, and in his best plates there is artfully placed something bookish that harmonizes with the design-form selected; and, because of art coherence and harmony in design that go hand in hand, his plates are more than satisfactory. The general eastern notion in regard to North Dakota is that nothing artistic can come out of the State, but the work done there by Mr. Fisher quickly dispels such an idea. The plates he has drawn are acknowledged as highly meritorious by the best American masters of book-plate designing. In all the plates from the hand of this artist that are here grouped, and which may be regarded as quite typical of him, there are only two that do not contain a book as a detail somewhere in the finished plate.
By Wm. Edgar Fisher
One of the exceptions is the plate of the Studio Club that gains infinitely by the omission of a book in the plate as produced. The grouping of the five observers (symbolic of the members of the Studio Club) around the feminine portrait is most charming, and to the writer it appears one of the happiest of recent productions in appropriate book-plates.
Mr. Fisher’s feminine figures that he introduces into many of his plates are likewise exceedingly effective. This is particularly the case when to the charms of femininity he has added those of symbolism, as in the case of the plate for Miss Winifred Knight, in which the graceful female masker appears at the shrine of the idealized god Pan, who writes, it may be something oracular, in her proffered album. The figure is gracefully posed and the lines of the arms and neck are marked by pleasant curves.
