The Bookplates of Lionel Pries I

The Bookplates of Lionel Pries

By

Jeffrey Karl Ochsner

Lionel Henry ("Spike") Pries (1897-1968) is today remembered primarily as an inspirational architectural teacher at the University of Washington from the 1920s to the 1950s. However, Pries's entry in Who's Who in Northwest Art, published in 1941, indicates the breadth of his activities in the 1930s and 1940s, when he was a practicing architect, an exhibiting artist, and a recognized collector of a wide range of art objects, as well as a university professor. In this period, in addition to his teaching and his architectural practice, Pries produced and exhibited watercolors and oils; he made drypoint prints, which he gave to clients, friends and students; and he produced a variety of graphic items including a series of bookplates.

Lionel Pries was born and raised in the Bay Area of California in the era when the influence of the Arts & Crafts Movement was at its height. Although Pries's professional career did not begin until the 1920s, after the Arts & Crafts Movement had faded, Pries remained interested in the decorative arts throughout his life. His engagement with the decorative arts is nowhere better demonstrated than in his fascination with fine lettering and graphic design. Pries had a small collection of late Medieval illuminated manuscript pages and several examples of eighteenth century indentures, as well as books about lettering, printing and book design. His interests, however, extended beyond collecting and appreciation; throughout his life he designed bookplates, Christmas cards, and occasionally announcements or invitations.

The bookplates Pries designed for himself are generally autobiographical in character. His first bookplate, designed while he was a student in the architecture program at the University of California, Berkeley, shows two robed female figures sitting in front of a classical exedra in a garden, and likely reflects the influence of classicism in shaping the Beaux-Arts curriculum of the school. This bookplate is found in only twelve of the roughly 900 books that survive in the Pries collection at the University of Washington. Pries used this bookplate until 1920, but gave it up once he moved to Philadelphia and entered the University of Pennsylvania graduate program in architecture. For the next decade, he did not have a printed bookplate; instead he signed.

The Bookplates of Lionel Pries, II

In December 1923 Pries acquired Sallie B. Tannahill's P's and Q's: A Book on the Art of Letter Arrangement (1923), and in 1927 he acquired Richard Braungart's Das moderne deutsche Gebrauchs-exlibris… (1922), addressing contemporary German bookplates, but it was not until the 1930s that Pries again engaged in bookplate design. Initially he created a bookplate of rather traditional character-it shows a figure planting a tree, and may reflect Pries's knowledge of traditional European bookplates. However, he used this in only two books, and apparently abandoned it almost immediately in favor of the bookplates he used from the mid 1930s to the mid 1950s.

By the mid-1930s Pries had created four bookplates, each of which represented one of his interests. The first shows a small male figure with two large watercolor brushes-Pries primarily used this in books about art and artists. Pries apparently designed this bookplate for his university colleague Henry Olschewsky, but then decided to use it himself. (A large pencil sketch of this design (7-1/2" x 7-1/4"), with Olschewsky's name, not Pries's, survives in the Pries drawing collection at the UW Libraries.) From the late 1920s to the 1940s, Pries spent part of each summer in Mexico and he collected pre-Columbian artifacts. His second bookplate of these years shows a pre-Columbian carving; this bookplate is found primarily in his books on indigenous art and archaeology. Pries's third bookplate shows a reclining figure, possibly an angel. Pries used this plate most often in books on gothic architecture, religious art and similar subjects. The last, showing a classical structure with a stairway, was likely intended for architecture books. Pries may have intended each of the bookplates only for a single category of books, but over the next decade and a half, he was not entirely consistent in their use.

The Bookplates of Lionel Pries III

When Pries decided to create a new bookplate after 1945, he apparently studied multiple alternatives. He pasted these studies (and possibly some studies of earlier bookplates he had never used) on two pages of his "scrapbook"-these pages show the breadth of Pries's imagination, as well as his exploration of several bookplate designs reflecting a more modern graphic language. Pries selected one bookplate from this group and used it exclusively after 1950. It shows an Asian figure, identified by Richard Mellott (former curator at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum) as an attendant of the Buddha. It is the only one of his bookplates to dispense with the traditional "ex libris…," using instead the phrase "from the library of…" Unlike his earlier bookplates it was printed in red. The figure reflects Pries's post-1945 interest in collecting Asian (especially Japanese) arts and crafts objects.

Pries created cards and similar graphic works throughout his life. It seems likely that he created bookplates for friends and colleagues, but only one such design has been confirmed. In 1944, Pries designed a bookplate for University of Washington Professor Blanche Payne (1897-1972), who taught historic costume and apparel design in the School of Home Economics from 1927 to 1966.

The bulk of Pries's personal book collection was donated (by Pries's heir Robert Winskill) to the University of Washington in the 1990s, and that is the primary basis for our knowledge of his bookplates. A small collection of Pries's rare books was sold at auction, and Pries bookplates are now occasionally mentioned on-line in connection with books for sale by antiquarian and rare booksellers.