The young couple traveled abroad and lived for a period in Paris, where Booth studied at the École des Beaux-Arts.
They also spent time in Etaples, France with Michigan-born artist Myron Barlow, who taught Booth the fundamentals of working with pastels.
There, after the death of George Booth in 1949, James began to edit Cyril Player's biography of his father (published in 1964 as The Only Thing Worth Finding).
A large collection of his engineering drawings and several of his cars, including the "Bi-Autogo" and the "JB Rocket," were donated to the Detroit Historical Museum by his widow.
The "Da Vinci" is owned by the Northwood University in Midland, and the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn holds a few Booth cyclecars and Scripps-Booth models.
Growing up in a household that encouraged an awareness and appreciation of the arts, James Scripps Booth spent many hours sketching in and around his parents' home in Detroit.
There he had access to one of the largest private collections of old master paintings and etchings in the Midwest, and it was in the Scripps home that he was brought into the company of many distinguished artists, writers, and musicians.
He also produced several racing scenes and other works featuring automobiles during this period, giving notice that automotive themes were never far from his mind.
From his early teen years until the time of his death at the age of 66, James Scripps Booth maintained a passionate interest in mechanical engineering and automotive design.
He was a serious student of the automobile, closely followed trends and emerging technology in the industry, and was responsible for inventing many automotive features which became standard in time.
Booth acquired his knowledge of mechanics just after the turn of the century in his parents' garage, where he carefully dismantled and reassembled family automobiles to learn as much as he could about their operation.
As is evidenced from the marginalia of his schoolbooks, James Booth developed a precocious flair for automotive design at an early age.
In May 1913, he finally produced a vehicle that incorporated many innovative features: it had the first V-8 engine ever built in Detroit, possessed a compressed air self-starter, had a four-speed transmission, and even boasted a retractable arm rest.
The beautiful, clean lines and fine appointments of Scripps-Booth automobiles did, as Booth predicted, appeal to the tastes of wealthy clients.
Angered by this turn of events, Booth tendered his resignation to the company in the autumn of 1916, just as Scripps-Booth began to experience a severe drop in sales.
He was understandably horrified, then, when Stutz produced a car with a similar underslung drive a year after he had shown the firm the "Da Vinci" plans.