Stokes, I. N. Phelps.
Random Recollections of a Happy Life
New York: [s.n.], 1941.
Red cloth binding with gold frame border, stamped title and author information on front cover, triple-rule gold tooling gilt-stamped lettering on spine.
New York Public Library: Archives | Manuscripts | Rare Books
L–R: Fig. 16. Random Recollections of a Happy Life, 1942.
Fig. 17. Detail: binding.
For his family and close friends, Stokes turned inward and penned his autobiography to celebrate the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday. In 1941, he issued this revised edition in a limited print run.
In this somewhat embarrassingly personal and often rambling work, Stokes lays himself bare, revealing emotions, nicknames, and a goofy antebellum manner. Nonetheless, a considerate, if obsessed, figure emerges, when he reflected on the nineteen-year production period for Iconography:
“I now realize that it involved an expenditure of time, energy, and money, which was probably out of proportion to the results achieved, and consumed many hours which should have been devoted, not only to my office, but to my family, and to social amenities, so that, on the whole, I suspect that it has proved a rather selfish, perhaps even a narrowing, influence on my life.”
Like any biography intended for family dispensation, the book focuses on familial anecdotes (memories of childhood, stories of siblings, parents, and grandparents), major accomplishments (serving as President of the City Art Commission, helping write the Tenement House Act of 1901, architectural design competition successes, charity and other benevolent endeavors, acting as Trustee at the New York Public Library) and retells things in a positive, if unmistakably architectural, fashion.8 Iconography figures prominently in the reminiscences, but the book is also a sort of love story: Recollections offers Edith’s biography intertwined with Stokes’; this edition, distributed after her death, serves as a sort of benediction.
Stokes died in 1944. NYPL acquired this copy in 1951.
8Many of his descriptions and anecdotes involve buildings or architects.
Manhattan's Icon 