From Richmond to illustrated books
Walker was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1883. He tried selling insurance before studying drawing in Virginia and New York. The foreword to Stories for Pictures (1912) introduced him by comparing his drawings with those of Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac. A commission to illustrate Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales followed in 1914.
Bookplates offered him another scale on which to work. These small labels, made for the inside cover of a book, had to accommodate an owner’s name as well as a design. Examples survive alongside his other work in American collections.
A book of his own
In Dream Boats and Other Stories he wrote tales, poems and a play and designed both colour plates and black-and-white drawings. The Doubleday volume here bears a 1918 copyright and a 1920 imprint. The Boy Apprenticed to an Enchanter gave him a different partner. Padraic Colum wrote the story and Walker illustrated it. Its title page spells his middle name Stuart, a variant that accounts for a second credit in library catalogues.
