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Frank Lloyd Wright and books

Paul V. Turner

Besides his prodigious career as an architect, Frank Lloyd Wright is well known as a prolific writer—of books, articles, and public lectures.  Less known is Frank Lloyd Wright the reader, a man who had an extraordinary appetite for books.  His readings encompassed a wide range of subjects: not only architecture and the other arts, but history, philosophy, social and political thought, economics, novels, drama, poetry, and other genres.  Much of his reading was motivated by a desire for education and to formulate or confirm his principles of design, but much of it was done simply for pleasure, as we know from his own statements about the books he read, as well as the accounts of others.  A remarkable example of the intense response that Wright could have from reading a book is found in a letter he wrote in 1901.  Addressed to a friend, from whom he had borrowed an English translation of a romantic German novel by Johann Paul Richter, it reads, in part:

"I have read him... and have read him again. I began by indulging him a little, delighted with his homely effects..., but I respect and love him now.  [At first I was] charmed and sunned by his genial humor... but there came a grumble on page 260... like the ominous hush before the coming storm, and solemnly deep down, he begins, and gathering wrath and force and power he goes on building up grandly until with a terribly comprehensive reach, he crashes the universe in fragments, at our feet and commands us to look down—and we look, shuddering, into a godless chaos.  I read this in bed on a Sunday morning... while the church bells were tolling....  I shall never lose that impression.  And there, the beauty and tenderness of the man became invested all along with a new power and a deeper significance, until –– well, I am richer and happier for having read your book."[1]

Wright's love of reading continued for the rest of his life.  Shortly after his death in 1959, his widow, Olgivanna, wrote the following:

"He loved books.  He loved William Blake, Walt Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, and valued Samuel Butler [and Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Hugo, Dumas].  Among his best-loved humorists were Mark Twain, O. Henry, and Thurber, whose stories he liked to read aloud to me.  He was always reading to me or I to him and we had many a hilarious evening laughing together. . . . When he was preoccupied in a book, he would vanish altogether, and when he emerged he referred constantly to the book he was reading, often identifying completely with its author and his creative process. . . . Magazines, journals, newspapers, he devoured at terrific speed, particularly when we traveled, but the work of great writers he read with slow contemplation."[2]

Considering the importance of reading to Wright, and its possible relevance to the development of his thinking and the nature of his work, one may wonder why no comprehensive catalogue of his library has previously been assembled.  One reason is that there is no single repository of the architect's books.  Groups of them are in the archives at Taliesin West in Arizona, Taliesin in Wisconsin, Avery Library in New York, and the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio in Oak Park, Illinois.  Additionally, there are collections of books—such as those of his widow and other family members—that no doubt contain some works that belonged to Wright at one time. 

Moreover, many books that we know Wright read, judging from his own statements or other evidence, are found in none of these existing collections.  Many of the books Wright owned have been lost or dispersed over the years.  (Some apparently were lost after his death, but he himself had a rather non-proprietary attitude toward his books, often giving them to friends, clients, or apprentices after he had read them.)  One bit of evidence of the extent to which Wright's books were dispersed is a photograph, taken in the 1940s, of the architect and his wife in his bedroom at Taliesin, with shelves of books behind them. Careful examination of the photograph has revealed the identity of many of the books—and fully three-fourths of them are works not found in any of the surviving collections of Wright's books. (For the details, see the section of this website about the photograph.)

And then there are the books that Wright read but never owned—especially in his youth, when he did a good deal of reading in libraries and elsewhere. A useful definition of Wright's "library" should encompass all the books he possessed or read, whether or not he actually owned them, and whether or not they currently exist in the surviving collections of his books.  Reconstructing and compiling this "library" has been a complicated enterprise—requiring, for example, judgments about which books in certain collections originally belonged to Wright or were accessible to him, and the identification of authors and books that Wright said he read, or for which there is other evidence of his having read.

The nature of Wright's reading naturally evolved over the course of his life.  But his habit of serious and wide-ranging reading was established early.  Both his Baptist minister father and his school-teacher mother—herself the daughter of a Unitarian minister—put great value on knowledge and the written word.  Of his mother, Wright said, in his autobiography, that "Education was [her] passion," and that her whole family "was imbued with the idea of education as salvation."[3]  Recalling his early childhood, he wrote, "When she read to her children . . . it was from Whittier, Lowell or Longfellow, or fairy tales.  Usually poetry."[4]  And in describing the furnishings of his boyhood home in Madison, Wisconsin, he said, "And everywhere, books."[5]  

Wright recalled reading, with his boyhood friend Robie Lamp, a diverse group of works, including "Hans Brinker, Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture, Jules Verne's Michael Strogoff [and] Hector Servadac, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, The Arabian Nights [and] Whittier, Longfellow, Bryant."[6]  On a more mundane level, he admitted to being addicted to "the tattered illiterature of thrills—the Nickel Library—secretly read," which his parents would burn if they found them.[7]  Then, speaking of his brief period as a student at the University of Wisconsin, he said he did not remember his course readings;[8] but on his own he had read "Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, Heroes and Hero Worship, Past and Present, the father's calf-bound copy of Plutarch's Lives, Ruskin's Fors Clavigera, Modern Painters, Stones of Venice, gift of Aunt Nell and Jane, Morris's Sigurd the Volsung, and Shelley, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, a little of William Blake, Les Misérables, [and] Viollet-le-duc's Raisonné d'architecture."[9]  (Here he was apparently confusing Viollet-le-Duc's Dictionnaire raisonné de l'architecture française with his Discourses on Architecture.[10])

Describing his first years in Chicago, working for Joseph Lyman Silsbee and then Louis Sullivan, Wright recalled borrowing books from the library that was in his uncle’s Unitarian church, including Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament, Viollet-le-Duc’s Habitations of Man in All Ages, and a different translation of Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris from the one he had previously read—as well as taking a “study class” on the works of Robert Browning.[11]  And he said that while working for Sullivan the two of them often discussed books.  He said that Sullivan “adored Whitman, as I did”; that Sullivan gave him “Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy . . . to take home and read”; that Sullivan read to him his own essay "Inspiration"; and that Sullivan often quoted from Shakespeare.[12] 

Sullivan had a substantial personal collection of books.  When his possessions were auctioned in 1909, the auction catalog listed nearly three hundred book titles, over one hundred of which were on the subject of architecture—and most of these were probably kept in the firm's office.[13]  (A floor plan of the Adler and Sullivan office, during the period when Wright was working there, shows a wall of bookcases in the Consultation Room.[14])  This was probably the first large collection of architectural books to which Wright had easy access, and he surely took advantage of it.  Included among Sullivan's books were works on all the major periods of architectural history; on construction and engineering; on architectural drawing and ornament—as well as architectural and engineering journals of the period.[15]

Also in his autobiography, speaking of his period in Oak Park, in the first decade of the 20th century, Wright remembered often riding his horse over the prairies north of the town, “sometimes reining him in and reading from a book usually carried in my pocket, for I’ve always loved to read out of doors—especially Whitman”; he added that ever since boyhood he had been an “omnivorous” reader.[16]  And in his book A Testament, written toward the end of his life, he recalled that “Shakespeare was in my pocket for the many years I rode the morning train to Chicago.”[17]

In 1932 Wright wrote an article entitled "Books that have meant most to me," for the national grade-school magazine Scholastic.  In it, he focused on his boyhood and "early manhood" readings, but also noted "middle life" readings and more contemporary authors:

"The Arabian Nights fascinated me as a boy.  Aladdin and his wonderful lamp. . . . My father threw in Edward Everett Hale's The Man Without a Country and that made a deep impression.  I remember Don Quixote was with me early, almost as early as Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe. . . .  I should mention Wilhelm Meister.  I got to that through Carlyle, after Sartor Resartus.  I owe a lot to Shakespeare because of Carlyle, and to Goethe, the "great liberator."  [And] Victor Hugo, who declared for romanticism as a new freedom.  He wrote the best amateur essay on architecture ever published.  It is in Notre Dame de Paris. . . .  In early manhood I was a Meredithian to the bone for years—am yet.  When I discovered Samuel Butler, William Blake came to stay. . . .  Rabelais came along about that time.  But Shelley lifted me higher than was my wont in middle life, and I became one of Walt Whitman's lovers about the same time.  I see no chasm between Shelley and Whitman, though Old Walt is much more with me now.  So are Thoreau and Emerson. . . .  I have read with enthusiasm the great Russians . . . from Tolstoy and Gogol to Gorky and Dostoyevski.  Lately, finding the Bible in print by Cobden-Sanderson, I've found it entirely fresh reading and inspiring.  I like Carl Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ring Lardner, Westbrook Pegler, Alexander Woollcott, and the editorial observations of The New Yorker."[18]

By about 1930, Wright had begun writing reviews of recently-published books—such as Le Corbusier's Towards a New Architecture, Fiske Kimball's American Architecture, Claude Bragdon's The Frozen Fountain, and others.  Some of these book reviews were published in journals—including World Unity, The Architectural Record, and The Saturday Review of Literature––while others remained unpublished.[19]  Also by this time, as Wright was developing his plans for Broadacre City and formulating its underlying philosophy, his readings now included works on economics, political and social theory, and related subjects. 

Accompanying the model of Broadacre City that was exhibited in New York in 1935 were two plaques with lists of names (which the project “commemorated” or which were “required reading” for it)—including authors who represented these new interests of Wright’s, such as Henry George, Thorstein Veblen, Edward Bellamy, Giuseppe Mazzini, Silvio Gesell, and Peter Kropotkin.[20]  (Also on the lists were Goethe, Tolstoi, Thoreau, William Blake, Louis Sullivan, Spinoza, Voltaire, Walt Whitman, Nietzsche, and Emerson—as well as Moses, Spartacus, Heraclitus, Laotze and Jesus).  And in the revised, second edition of his autobiography, of 1943, Wright appended a similar list of authors and other persons who had influenced him:

"For the writing of this work I have . . . consulted and occasionally remembered Pythagoras, Aristophanes, Socrates, Heraclitus, Laotze, Buddha, Jesus, Tolstoy, Kropotkin, Bacon, William Blake, Samuel Butler, Mazzini, Walt Whitman, Henry George, Grundvig, George Meredith, Henry Thoreau, Herman Melville, George Borrow, Goethe, Carlyle, Nietzsche, Voltaire, Cervantes, Giacosa, Shelley, Shakespeare, Milton, Thorstein Veblen, Nehru, Major Douglas, and Silvio Gesell."[21]

Such lengthy recitations of oddly disparate authors and historical figures may strike one as questionable or as braggadocio.  Brendan Gill, in his biography of Wright, described this 1943 list as "wry bravado . . . thrown together to astonish and impress us."[22]  The suspicion might be justified, given Wright's tendency to self-aggrandizement and hyperbole; and one does, no doubt, have to take Wright’s statements with a grain of salt.  He may have said he had read an author or a book when in fact he only knew of the author’s views from other sources or had only leafed through a book or read a few lines in it. 

But various kinds of evidence reveal that Wright’s statements about his readings, including the suspiciously expansive list in his autobiography, are largely reliable.  For example, one of Wright's apprentices, who kept a diary of her life at Taliesin in 1942 (just as Wright was preparing this second edition of his autobiography), recorded one day that, "Frank Lloyd Wright read from Nehru's Glimpses of World History at tea"; and she noted that he read from "Laotse" one evening.[23]  Even the people on these lists who were not authors, or whose works have not survived, such as Buddha and Pythagoras, often turn out to refer to probable readings by Wright; there is evidence, for example, that his library contained a book titled Golden Verses of Pythagoras, and another titled Buddha: His Life and Teachings.[24]

Wright enjoyed the company of literary figures and developed close friendships with a number of them, including Carl Sandburg, Alexander Woollcott, and Lewis Mumford.  He loved good conversation with educated companions, just as he loved good literature, and he was influenced in his own writings by the writing styles of authors he particularly admired.  As Kenneth Frampton has said, Wright's literary output "points to the scope of [his] self-cultivation, ardently pursued throughout his life.  From this surely came his extensive vocabulary, his sense of rhythm, and his remarkable command of metaphor and simile."[25]

Wright's feelings about the books he read are also reflected in the ways he accommodated them in his own homes.  The first house he built for himself and his family, in Oak Park (as it was expanded in the mid-1890s), had a study, or library, but there were also places for books elsewhere in the house—especially in the large Playroom, which had built-in bookcases.[26]  And there were book cabinets and bookshelves in Wright's studio-office, adjacent to the house.  Wright's son John Lloyd Wright, in his book on his father, recalled the family's life in the house and revealed the way books were meant to be used and enjoyed with abandon, not put away to be carefully preserved:  "The library was books!  Long, thick, big, little books.  Covers without books, books without covers; colored, patterned, and textured papers in large folios, all piled up and pushed on wide ledges on either side of a long window."[27]  In his later homes, Wright provided no special room called a library, instead making places for books throughout the house.  In the first Taliesin, built by Wright about 1911 for himself and Mamah Borthwick, early photographs show books in several kinds of bookcases and shelf-units throughout the living room.  And in Taliesin West, constructed starting in the mid-1930s, books were accommodated in various places, including shelving in Mr. and Mrs. Wright's bedrooms.

Wright's opinions about the books he read, as seen in his comments on them in his own writings, naturally tended to be biased.  He often viewed his readings in terms of his own life and work, focusing on those aspects that had personal meaning for him.  But there can be no doubt that he read books seriously, and that many of them had a significant influence on his thinking about architecture, the other arts, philosophy, and life in general.  A full understanding of Wright's work and life requires an examination of his relationship with literature and books.

 

SIGNATURES AND ANNOTATIONS IN BOOKS

Judging from Wright's books that survive, he occasionally put his signature in books in his early years—up to about 1910—but after that time he seldom signed his books.[28]  And it appears that he almost never annotated books.

The archive at the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio in Oak Park contains about thirty books that belonged to Wright during his Oak Park period, and about half of them contain his signature, and sometimes a date or other information—such as "Frank Lloyd Wright, Oak Park, November 1907."[29]  Among Wright's books preserved at Taliesin West (roughly 170 of them), only four bear his signature.  Three of these signatures are undated, in books published in 1902, 1924, and 1941 (a State of Wisconsin book of specifications for road and bridge construction, which Wright may have signed because he used the book when consulting with engineers or contractors and wanted to avoid losing it).  The fourth signed book is puzzling: a 19th-century book in Welsh (a language Wright did not read); the first page has his mother's signature, and below it, "Frank Lloyd Wright/ 58"; it is unclear why he would have added his signature to one of his mother's books toward the end of his life.

As for annotations, only a small number of the surviving books contain notes or markings in the text that can be identified as Wright's.[30]  In a copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass that Wright acquired in 1948, he marked many passages, apparently to read in one of his talks to his apprentices.[31]  And some of Wright's other books have marginal markings that he may have made.  One can only speculate on why Wright almost never annotated or marked his books.  He clearly had strong opinions and reactions about the books he read, as seen in his comments about them in his writings and in his correspondence.  Perhaps he felt that it was unnecessary to write in his books since he expressed his opinions on them in these other ways.

 

WRIGHT'S KNOWLEDGE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES

Frank Lloyd Wright often mentioned reading books of non-English-language authors, especially French or German works, and for some titles it is not clear whether they were English translations (for example, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister or Hugo's Les Misérables, whose English versions usually kept the original titles).  It is therefore relevant to ask if Wright had any reading knowledge of foreign languages.

While a student at the University of Wisconsin for two semesters (January to December, 1886), Wright took a French course.  In describing this university period in his autobiography, he wrote, "Miss Lucy Gay . . . taught him [French].  He read the 'Romance of the Poor Young Man,' 'Le Cid,' etc."[32]  Since there is no indication that Wright studied French before this time, or later, it is unlikely that he was proficient in the language.  His claims of having read, in his youth, Viollet-le-Duc's Dictionnaire raisonné de l'architecture française (for which there was no English translation) resulted apparently from his confusion of this work with Viollet-le-Duc's Discourses on Architecture.[33]   Otherwise, the books by French authors that Wright said he read were apparently available in English translations.

As for the German language, Wright and Mamah Borthwick published, in 1912, Love and Ethics, a translation of one of the German-language writings of the Swedish feminist Ellen Key—described on the title page as a translation "by Mamah Bouton Borthwick and Frank Lloyd Wright."[34]  But since there is no evidence that Wright ever made an intensive study of the German language, it is unlikely that he could have translated the piece with Borthwick (who did read German); he probably just helped with the English text.  The same is no doubt true of Goethe's "A Hymn to Nature," which Wright published in the Little Review in 1915 (following Borthwick's death), with the statement that the German text "was found in a little bookshop in Berlin, and translated into English by a strong man and a strong woman [i.e., Wright and Borthwick]."[35]

It has also been pointed out that in his extensive study and collection of Japanese prints, Wright would no doubt have learned to read the signatures of the printmakers, as well as other Japanese characters pertinent to the artworks.[36]

 

THE RELEVANT BOOK COLLECTIONS

Included in this website's database are several collections or groups of books: some that are known to have belonged to Wright; some that may have belonged to him; and some that were accessible to him during a period in his life.  These groups of books are listed below—and each is described more fully in the "Collections" section of the website. Clicking on a collection's title below will take you to that collection.

 

Wright's books at Taliesin West

This is a group of about 170 books that are in the archive at Taliesin West, designated the "Frank Lloyd Wright Library."  Following Olgivanna Wright's death in 1985, the books were moved to the archive from Wright's quarters at Taliesin West and have been secured since then.  They can therefore be considered definitely to have belonged to Wright.

Olgivanna Wright's books

Three years after Olgivanna Wright's death, approximately 1,400 books at Taliesin West were placed in boxes and designated the "Olgivanna Lloyd Wright Library."  A list of the books was made, which in many cases gave only partial identification of them.  The boxes were not secured, and fewer than half of the books survive today.  Many of the works surely belonged originally to Wright himself, but identifying these is difficult.  The results of the attempt to do so are listed in two parts of this database: "Olgivanna Wright's books" and "Olgivanna Wright's lost books."

Wright's books at Taliesin

A recent inventory of the books at Taliesin, in Wisconsin, includes about 2,000 works.  Some could not have belonged to Wright because they were published after his death.  A few bear inscriptions showing that they definitely belonged to him.  But the majority can only be connected to Wright with varying degrees of likelihood.  About 180 such works are included in this database.

Wright's books in Oak Park

The Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio, in Oak Park, Illinois, has an archive that preserves books that belonged to Wright and other members of his family, mostly during the period when he lived in Oak Park, circa 1890-1910.  About forty of these books are included in this database.

Wright's books at Avery Library

The Avery Library, at Columbia University in New York, has about a dozen books that belonged to Wright, judging mainly from the inscriptions in them.

Hillside Home School books

The Hillside Home School, founded in 1887 by two of Wright's aunts in Spring Green, Wisconsin, closed in 1915 and the property was acquired by Wright and later incorporated into the Taliesin complex.  The school's large library thus came into Wright's possession.  About 130 of the books survive and are included in this database.

Anna Wright's books

Wright's mother, Anna Lloyd Wright, spent much of her later life living close to her son, and her library would have been accessible to him.  Moreover, some of the books had no doubt been known to Wright from his childhood days.  For the most part, Anna's books do not survive, but a list of about 120 of them was made following her death in 1923.  Although the list does not identify all the works clearly, a likely identification of them is included in this database.

Louis Sullivan's books

Louis Sullivan had a large library, dealing mainly with architecture and related subjects.  Many of the books were apparently accessible to Wright when he worked in the Adler and Sullivan office from 1887 to 1893.  Although the books no longer survive, they are listed in an auction catalogue of 1909.  About eighty of them are included here as likely to have been of interest to Wright and accessible to him.

Authors read by Wright

This website also includes a compilation of the many authors and books that Wright said he read, in his own writings—as well as those for which there is other evidence of his having read.  Many of these authors and works are not represented in any of the surviving collections of Wright's books.

Frank Lloyd Wright's passion for reading was a crucial force in his life and work.  This website will, I hope, contribute to a more complete understanding of the multifaceted character of the architect.

 

 


[1] Letter from Wright to Mrs. Sophia Austin Morris, 24 December 1901; provided to me by Kathryn Smith, June 2019.  The English version of Richter's novel was Flower, fruit, and thorn pieces; or, the married life, death, and wedding of the advocate of the poor, Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkas (Boston: W. Osgood Smith, 1876).

[2] Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright, His Life, His Work, His Words (New York: Horizon Press, 1966), pp. 140-41.

[3] Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (London, New York, Toronto: Longmans, Green and Company, 1932), p 7.

[4] Ibid., p 14.

[5] Ibid., p 30.

[6] Ibid., p 31.

[7] Ibid., p 31.

[8] Ibid., p 52. One of the books Wright used for a geometry course has been identified: Albert E. Church, Elements of Descriptive Geometry. And another has been proposed: Samuel E. Warren, General problems of shades and shadows.  See the entries on these works in the "Authors read by Wright" section of this website.

[9] Ibid., p 52.

[10] See the entry for Viollet-le-Duc in the "Authors read by Wright" section of this website.

[11] An Autobiography, pp 72, 74, 75, 77.

[12] Ibid., p 102; Genius and the Mobocracy (New York: Duell, Sloan and Co., 1949), p 9.  Wright also said, "I never liked [Sullivan's] writing in those early days," and that he considered it "too sentimental."

[13] "Catalogue at Auction...., Household effects, library, etc. of Mr. Louis Sullivan...., Williams Barker & Severn Co."  Copy seen at Burnham and Ryerson Library, Chicago, Nov. 2019.

[14] "New Offices of Adler and Sullivan, Architects," Engineering & Building Record, 7 June 1890, p 5.

[15] See the "Louis Sullivan's books" section of this website.

[16] Ibid., p 165.

[17] A Testament (New York: Horizon Press, 1957), pp 205-06.

[18] "Books that have meant most to me," Scholastic Magazine, Sept. 1932, as reprinted in Frank Lloyd Wright, Collected Writings, New York: Rizzoli, 1992, vol 3, pp 63-64.

[19] See, for example, the entries (in the "Authors read by Wright" section of this website) on Le Corbusier, Fiske Kimball, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Douglas Haskell, Raymond Hood, Claude Bragdon, Walter Raymond Agard, Louis Sullivan, Hugh Morrison, Paul Theodore Frankl, G. Hinkling, Dorothy Parker, Edwin Lutyens, Dimitri Tselos.

[20] Jennifer Gray, “Reading Broadacre,” Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly, Winter 2018, pp 16-17 and figs. 4, 5.

[21] An Autobiography, second edition (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943), p 561.

[22] Brendan Gill, Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright, New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1987, p 324.

[23] Priscilla Henken, Taliesin Diary: A Year With Frank Lloyd Wright, New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 2012, pp 72, 109.  Brought to my attention by Jack Quinan.

[24] These are two of the many books in Olgivanna Wright's library that probably belonged originally to her husband.

[25] Frank Lloyd Wright, Collected Writings, vol 2 (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), introduction by Kenneth Frampton, p 9.

[26] See Elaine Harrington, “Books and Libraries in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Oak Park Days,” in Kenneth Hafertepe and James O’Gorman, eds., American Architects and Their Books, 1840-1915 (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), pp 234-39.

[27] John Lloyd Wright, My Father Who Is On Earth, New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1946, p 16.

[28] Books are occasionally found that appear to have Wright's signature in them, but which are probably spurious.  In the 1990s, for example, a Wright scholar was given a copy of Helen Gardner's Art Through the Ages that had in it the inscription "Frank Lloyd Wright, Oct. 21, 1938" (information from David De Long, August 2018).  The signature is questionable, and it seems unlikely that Wright would have have signed such a work, especially at this time in his life when he virtually never signed his books.

[29] Margaret Klinkow, The Wright Family Library (Oak Park, IL: The Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio Foundation Research Center, 1994), pp. 6-9.  The entries in this catalogue say simply "Inscribed 'Frank Lloyd Wright'," etc., and it's not clear if the inscription was actually written by Wright or by someone else (the books should be examined to see if the inscriptions appear to be in Wright's hand).  The inscribed books are mainly works of literature, by authors such as Carlyle, Wordsworth, Ibsen, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

[30] A special case is a small number of copies of Wright's own books and articles that he annotated and marked in the process of revising the texts.

[31] See Jeff Goodman, "Grand is the Seen: Frank Lloyd Wright's Personal Notes on Leaves of Grass," in Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly, Fall 2016, pp. 24-29.

[32] Autobiography, 1943 edition, p 52.  For these two books, see the entries for Octave Feuillet and Pierre Corneille in the "Authors read by Wright" section of this website.

[33] See the entry on Viollet-le-Duc in the "Authors read by Wright" section of this website.

[34] Ellen Key, Love and Ethics, Authorized translation from the original of Ellen Key, by Mamah Bouton Borthwick and Frank Lloyd Wright, Chicago: The Ralph Fletcher Seymour Co., [1912].

[35] "A Hymn to Nature," Little Review I (February 1915), pp 30-32. 

[36] Observation to the author by Margo Stipe, September 2018.