A DELIGHT TO ALL WHO KNEW IT: THE MAINE SUMMER ARCHITECTURE OF WILLIAM R. EMERSON, by Roger G. Reed, Maine Historic Preservation Commission, 144 pages, $29.95.

Traditionalists were mortified in the late 1800s when a Boston architect designed buildings in Maine that utilized the Shingle Style, a new concept in interior planning and exterior ornamentation that departed radically from the boxlike Revivalist and Colonial architecture that preceded it.

William R. Emerson (1833-1917), about whom little is known aside from glimpses of a tragic life and eccentric personality, was the iconoclast who dared to invent the Shingle Style.

His existing structures — those that didn’t succumb to fire, or dismantlement because the owners couldn’t pay the taxes — dot the Maine coast from Bar Harbor to Kittery, and are studies in the marriage of nature and art. Evident is the hand of a free spirit who explored every decorative effect possible with the wooden shingle.

Emerson’s first major Shingle Style design, a Bar Harbor cottage called Redwood, established his reputation as one of the foremost architects of summer residences in New England.

The home appears startlingly modern by today’s standards in a photograph taken around 1885, six years after its completion. Commissioned by Charles J. Morrill, a Boston financier, Redwood is remarkable because of its varied roof design, and its simple and open floor plan with the three main rooms — hall, parlor and dining room — extending off the entry hall.

Leafing through the book’s many photographs and drawings, it’s impossible not to be dazzled by the breadth of Emerson’s imagination, and the proliferation of his work between 1879 and 1900. He seemed never to have used a similar design twice.

Photographs of tiny St. Jude’s Episcopal Church in Seal Harbor, completed in 1889, show a rustic building, shingled inside and out, that contrasts sharply with the palatial Mossley Hall in Bar Harbor, finished in 1883, which resembled an English country home in its multi-faceted elevations.

Reed, an architectural historian, clearly intended his succinct profile of each building to be palatable to the general public, eschewing arcane language.

The author strives for objectivity, but occasionally singles out latter-day goofs that distorted Emerson’s original designs. A good example is the much-changed Mt. Desert Reading Room, now the Bar Harbor Motor Inn, certainly the architect’s most visible surviving building.

A rich study of a revoluntionary architect, the book shows how one man changed the character of the Maine coast, and how the rich and famous of another era spent their money and their idle time.

Richard R. Shaw is the NEWS editorial page assistant.