MODERN SURFACE ORNAMENT

NY: J. Sabin & Sons, 1877. First edition. 15" high x 12" wide. 24 plates illustrating designs by stained glass craftsmen, illustrators and architects, including Charles Booth. Three-post cloth binding (not original) has been re-covered. The plates are on tabs for the binding holes. VG+, Plates are clean; there are some stray pencil marks & smudges in the margins of some plates, not affecting the images. Originally issued in six parts, this book features 24 Anglo-Japanesque designs by Booth (Plate 1) and several other ornamentalists, including W.H. Wood, Arthur Halliday, Charles R. Lamb, O.S. Teale, H.E. Ficken, Charles M. Jenckes, Milton See, Otto Heinigle, George E. Harney, Louis D. Berg, and publisher J. O'Kane. "This work contains a great variety of detail ornament, such as panel and corner filling, borders, centers, diapers, etc., all of original design by artists of undoubted standing, and mostly prepared specially for this work." [Building Age. Vol. 5, No. 2, Feb. 1883] Charles Booth (1844-1893), a stained-glass artist from Liverpool, came to work in the United States by 1875, bringing with him the English aesthetic design principles espoused by Christopher Dresser and thereby adding a certain abstraction, a totally different dimension, to the window form. Booth adhered remarkably closely to Dresser's advice, his work dominated by Dresser's principles governing two-dimensionality of design and simplification of ornamental forms. Scarce. First Edition. Hard Cover. Very Good.