BOOK PLATES

The bookplate — a printed label pasted into a book to indicate its ownership — is among the most intimate of all printed objects. Unlike the broadsheet or the engraved portrait, which were made for public circulation, the bookplate was made for a single owner, to be seen by the few people who handled a particular book, and it expresses the taste, identity and aspirations of that owner with a directness and specificity that larger prints rarely achieve. The history of bookplate design, from the earliest heraldic examples of the fifteenth century to the artistic experiments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is a history of private visual culture at its most personal and revealing.

The earliest printed bookplates, produced in Germany in the last decades of the fifteenth century, were heraldic in character: coats of arms, crests and mottoes that identified the book’s owner by the visual language of aristocratic identity. This heraldic tradition dominated bookplate design for two centuries, and the armorial bookplates produced for the nobility and gentry of Britain, Germany, France and the Low Countries through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are objects of considerable beauty as well as genealogical interest. The engravers who produced them worked in the mainstream of decorative printmaking, and the best armorial bookplates of the period are technically accomplished works that reward close examination.

The eighteenth century saw the development of pictorial bookplates that went beyond pure heraldry to incorporate landscape, architectural and allegorical imagery. Library interiors — the scholar at his desk, surrounded by the instruments of learning — became a favourite subject, and the chippendale style of rococo ornament that dominated English decorative art through the mid-century influenced bookplate design with particular force. The pictorial bookplates of this period are among the most aesthetically satisfying in the entire history of ex-libris design, combining personal identity with visual invention in formats of exceptional refinement.

The Arts and Crafts movement of the late nineteenth century transformed bookplate design once again, bringing to it the same commitment to handcraft, natural ornament and historical revival that characterised the movement’s broader decorative programme. Bookplates designed by the leading figures of Arts and Crafts illustration — Walter Crane, C.F.A. Voysey, Charles Ricketts and their contemporaries — are works of considerable artistic ambition, treating the small format of the bookplate as a challenge rather than a constraint. The Art Nouveau movement produced bookplate designs of similar quality, with the sinuous plant forms and female figures characteristic of the style appearing in ex-libris work of great visual sophistication.

The collecting of bookplates as objects in their own right — separated from the books they were made to accompany — developed in the second half of the nineteenth century and generated a substantial literature of catalogues, monographs and society publications. The Ex-Libris Society, founded in Britain in 1891, brought together collectors from across Europe and America and established the scholarly framework within which bookplate collecting has developed ever since. Original examples from the major traditions of ex-libris design — particularly those by identified artists or associated with notable collectors or libraries — are increasingly scarce and consistently sought-after.

For collectors of printed ephemera, graphic art history or the history of book culture, antique bookplates offer an accessible and rewarding collecting area. Their small scale makes storage straightforward, their subject range is effectively unlimited, and the best examples are objects of genuine artistic quality that reward extended attention. Each bookplate is also a biographical document, connecting a specific printed object to a specific named individual and the library they assembled.