A just-released book — part reprint, part new — reminds me of how much I like Dwight James Baum’s architecture. Sometimes I need reminding, because I don’t run across his buildings very often.

The subject of “The Work of Dwight James Baum” (Acanthus Press) is best known for Ca d’Zan, a house built in Sarasota, Fla., for circus magnate John Ringling and his wife, Mable. Baum is also renowned for his many houses in the Riverdale section of the Bronx — some of them in that neighborhood’s Fieldston enclave, where he resided. In Manhattan, Baum (1886-1939) is known for one thing: the West Side Y, on 63rd Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. The Y was apparently the architect’s only skyscraper.

It’s not just any skyscraper. Tall buildings comprising such varied uses — from swimming pools to guest bedrooms to gymnasiums — are extremely tricky to design. Hotels, for example, are often an architectural firm’s specialty. A clue to how Baum garnered this unusual commission appears on page 154 of the book, where we find a photo of the home Baum designed for Cleveland Dodge, in Riverdale. The colonial-style, shingled, and clapboarded white house, with shuttered windows, rounded dormers, and a colonnade of simple, slender square piers, is country simplicity itself. Dodge was president of the Young Men’s Christian Association, and Baum may have parlayed this domestic commission into the West Side Y job. In any event, Baum used his rare opportunity to design nothing less than one of the skyscraper masterpieces of New York.

Completed in 1930, the West Side Y brought the Romanesque skyscraper to its apogee. Francis Kimball’s Corbin Building (1888-89), on John Street at Broadway, may be the oldest still standing in the city. It’s a great Victorian slab of heavily outlined arched windows, with a dark, medieval air. It was built long before the city enacted its 1916 zoning code mandating that as buildings rise, they must step back at prescribed intervals.

In 1924, Arthur Loomis Harmon’s Shelton Towers Hotel (now the New York Marriott East Side, on Lexington Avenue between 48th and 49th streets) suggested how architects might use the new zoning requirements to aesthetic advantage by creating dynamic combinations of receding and projecting blocks. The received wisdom is that Harmon foretold the future Art Deco skyscraper, but couldn’t shake his traditional forms, such as the Romanesque corbeling that outlines the tops of each setback mass.

Baum, in his more committed handling of Romanesque forms, showed how the medieval idiom could bring a “breeze of beauty” — in the phrase of the historian John Lukacs — to the West Side skyline. The arcaded bases of the two buildings and the corbel outlines are similar. What Baum did was to make a building like no other in New York.

The Y’s dazzling plasticity might make Frank Gehry envious. A poor photo could give the impression of a hopeless heap of medieval devices. In person, the details are beautifully and lightly handled. The building plays with receding and projecting masses, blank and densely fenestrated walls, and the most studied asymmetry of any tall building in town. The beautiful speckled brick and tiled roofs contribute to the beguiling picturesqueness — and also to the lightness. This could so easily have been a big galumphing building, but in Baum’s hands it gallops.

It’s too much, perhaps, to ask that it dance, like so many of his houses, which can be seen in “The Work of Dwight James Baum.” The book first came out in 1927, and in the new edition, editor William Morrison has added photographs of Baum’s work from 1927 to his death 12 years later. Among the featured works here in New York are the English-style estate of Arthur Hammerstein, known as Wildflower, in Whitestone, Queens, and the Georgian-style John Von Glahn house (1921-22) at 367 Washington Ave. in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, which brought a little Forest Hills chic to the brownstone belt. The Von Glahn house is, so far as I can tell, Baum’s only building in Brooklyn. Best of all is Baum’s Mediterranean-style Fieldston estate, built in the 1920s for Anthony Campagna, and a perfect exemplar of Baum’s — and his era’s — virtuoso lightness of touch.

Indeed, of the 68 projects illustrated in the book, 32 are in the Bronx. “The Work of Dwight James Baum” is a tremendous visual resource. But I’m bothered that no dates or addresses are given for the buildings. I know these weren’t in the original volume, but would it have been so hard to have researched these and included them in an appendix? We’re unlikely to see another book on Baum anytime soon, and it’s a pity it isn’t perfect. But what a feast of buildings!