Gold plated Handsome volume features Rockwell Kent’s more than 160 bookplate designs

The life of the artist Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) reads like a saga. From travels to the chilly ends of the Earth (Alaska, Greenland, Tierra del Fuego) to numerous extramarital affairs, Kent lived life to the fullest, mixing fame and what was frequently misfortune. One of the most accomplished graphic artists of the last century, he also was one of its most fervent socialists and peace activists.

Kent’s roller-coaster existence is recapped in a handsome new volume, “Rockwell Kent: The Art of the Bookplate,” which focuses on his designs for bookplates – more than 160 created in the span of 50 years. In a synchronistic manner, author Don Roberts weaves biography with iconography. Thus, we read of Kent’s friendship with Margaret Sanger, the birth control crusader, and also of the plate he designed for the books she donated to the New York Academy of Medicine and the Library of Congress.

“The art of the bookplate precludes glory for the artist,” Roberts writes in his preface. “It is, after all, only an artistic slip of paper that serves its purpose by disappearing, sometimes forever, between the covers of a book.” Even so, Kent often took great pains to create an ex libris (Latin for “out of the library of”), researching a subject and working through draft sketches with the individuals who commissioned the plates.

The symbolism in the bookplates is simple yet resonant. For painter and prot?g? Stephen Etnier, Kent drew a figure with oars and a canvas heading for the shore – a young man setting off to row the seas of life and art. Another, designed for Mary Wheelwright, a Northeast Harbor resident who founded the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe, shows a female figure in a doorway with a bird flying skyward through sunbeams.

A bookplate designed by Kent was something of a status symbol. Stanley Marcus, president of Neiman-Marcus, wrote the artist, “We are expecting a new member of the family in August and wouldn’t it be a terrible thing for a child to come into the world to a father who doesn’t possess a bookplate?”

Kent had a special “allegiance” to Maine, having spent several years living on Monhegan island early in his life. Around 1950 he accepted a commission from the Bangor Public Library to design a bookplate for the volumes purchased through the Louise Baldwin Thompson Fund. Then city librarian, Felix Ranlett, sent him general specifications, including this thought: “We are doubtful if symbolic human figures, either clothed or unclothed, are desirable for this bookplate.”

Offered two sketches, Ranlett chose one showing a tree stump, but with reservations, one of which was that, “in Maine … the burnt stump is above all else a symbol of devastation of the forest fire.” The librarian suggested that Kent consider a rocky crag, “symbolic of the strong character of Louise Baldwin Thompson, and of the rugged strength of the State of Maine.” Kent kept the stump, but added a pine sapling growing from it. “The new tree growing out of the old is very good symbolism,” Ranlett wrote him, “and it has a particular application here since the original Bangor Public Library, which was founded in 1883, was destroyed by fire in 1911.”

One of the special pleasures of this book is reading the many excerpts from correspondence, journals and memoirs that Roberts includes in his text. At the same time, the production values are truly impeccable, something Kent, the illustrator of fine press editions, would have appreciated. Notes in the margins, printed in a smaller type, help illuminate the text.

Interest in Kent’s work has flourished over the past 10 or so years, especially in Maine. The Bowdoin College Museum of Art, the Portland Museum of Art and the Monhegan Museum have mounted important shows. Down East Books published “Rockwell Kent’s Forgotten Landscapes,” reproducing many of the canvases the artist gave to the former Soviet Union. Next summer, the Farnsworth Art Museum will present a show of Jamie Wyeth’s collection of Kent’s art.

“Rockwell Kent: The Art of the Bookplate” adds substantially to the literature of one of America’s most important artists and heightens our appreciation of his graphic oeuvre. Perhaps, too, it may help revive the art of the bookplate.

Carl Little is a writer and art critic who lives on Mount Desert Island. He can be reached at clittle@mainecf.org. “Rockwell Kent: The Art of the Bookplate ” was published earlier this year by Fair Oaks Press in San Francisco.