Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, New - Tailpiece - ca. 1910 - T-Shirt

This is a pen-and-ink tailpiece: a stylised lion-like beast with a flowing mane, set among acanthus-style scrollwork, drawn to close a section of printed text.

Visual Elements & Composition

Cream dominates the piece, with black ink carrying almost all of the drawing. The beast sits within a horizontal elliptical cartouche, and its mane and limbs break into scrolling flourishes that curl outward toward the edges of the sheet. The shading is built from fine hatched lines rather than solid areas, so the image reads as light and open on the page. Small printed marks along the sheet, including the word "Tailpiece" and the numerals 1953-48-85, record its catalogue identity.

Meaning & Symbolism

A tailpiece marks the end of a chapter or text block, so the ornament signals closure and gives the reader a pause before the next section. The lion-like beast and the scrollwork belong to the decorative vocabulary of baroque ornament, which early twentieth-century printers revived alongside the arts and crafts and fine press movements. Charles Scribner's Sons, the New York publishing house, used such ornaments to give its books a recognisable identity. This design comes from that tradition of treating the book as a whole work of art, where text and ornament were planned together.

Wearing the Tailpiece

A tailpiece was designed to sit at the foot of a column of text, and a tee gives it that same role. Printed across the chest, the cartouche and scrollwork frame the wearer the way the ornament once framed the end of a chapter. The drawing's open, cream-and-ink balance works on a plain shirt because the design occupies a defined area rather than filling the whole garment.