Frank Lloyd Wright: Graphic Designs for The House Beautiful Embossed Boxed Cards

The Arts and Crafts movement, with its rejection of corner-cutting mass production technology, gave rise to an enthusiasm for fine art printing, and Chicago—where Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) practiced architecture early in his career—was a national center for artisanally produced books. With a skilled hand and a powerful eye for elegant ornament, Wright designed several books for the tiny Auvergne Press in the late 1890s; The House Beautiful is the finest of them. Its text, by Unitarian minister William Gannett, proposed that spiritual, intellectual, and bodily health was augmented by a properly designed and furnished home. Gannett’s views dovetailed with Wright’s emerging theory of organic architecture, and The House Beautiful, in consequence, became an early-modernist duet between enlightened prose and visionary design.

The complex, exacting drawings adapted for reproduction in this notecard set were borders for the book’s text and carpet pages that introduced new chapters. They epitomize the cutting edge of avant-garde design, circa 1897.