My previous post on the subject of ex-libris or book plates as they are sometimes called, provided me with more information than I could decently fit into one post. hence this second part. On with the show.

The Bookplate Society has a very interesting article giving an overview of principal styles of bookplates in Britain 1600-2000 and it includes this one:

Seven Roads has a slightly different angle on the theme, these are book trade labels and as their website explains:

Anyone who handles old books will have come across these small and sometimes beautiful labels pasted more or less discreetly into the endpapers. Publishers, printers, binders, importers, distributors and sellers of books — new, second-hand and antiquarian — used to advertise in this way their contribution to bringing the book to market. Most of the earliest examples shown here belong to binders (e.g., the Marcus Ward ticket, ca.1841); this is a continuation of binders’ earlier practice of sewing into the binding a small ticket with their signature.

This one is from their Japanese collection for the Subon So book store in Tokyo.

And then there is this one from the Marriott Library at the University of Utah:

Paul Elder and Co. bookplate from the Marriott Library at the University of Utah.

I’m rather taken with the book shaped labels of which there are a selection on the site.

Libraries & Culture is the only journal devoted exclusively to the broad history of collections of knowledge that form the cultural record. Their website says:

For nearly 30 years, Libraries & Culture published a bookplate on the cover of each issue and an article inside explaining its origin and design, and giving the history of the collection that used that bookplate.

Rudyard Kipling bookplate, designed by his father John Lockwood Kipling from the collection at Libraries & Culture

The Virtual Museum at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies has a small and striking collection of ex libris from the Weisman Museum, collected by a Fritz Stransky before his execution at Auschwitz.

Bookplate by German Karl Michel dated 1923. Bookplate in a cubo-futurist style. An abstract ribbon lyrically joining the women in the image bears the title ‘the Donors of the German Organization for Ex Libris Art and Commercial Graphics.’

The American Society of Bookplate Collectors and Designers was organized in 1922 to further the study and collecting of bookplates.

This is the work of a little known American designer Theodore Brown Hapgood.

They provide a gallery page to present examples of personalized bookplate art by several contemporary artists and links to articles from their journal Ex Libris Chronicle -The International Collector, as well as links to other Ex Libris sites.

The next is a clumsy interactive display presented by the Knox College Library in Galesburg, Illinois. Their website states that this is the first in an annual series of exhibits which will attempt to recover some of the pride once taken in these book-related arts and crafts and the pleasure derived from them by millions of readers.

This is a bookplate by Enrico Vannuccini from the Irene Dwen Pace collection.

This next featured website is the Pratt Institute Ex Libris Collection . It’s a small collection with an even worse interface than the last. The site opens up windows making you think that your machine has been taken over by a demented sys admin. Finally the badly constructed window you want, delivers a page of thumbnails. Double click on one and you will see a larger version of it. Then you have to use the tools on the right to magnify it, in parts - each magnified view is only a section of the whole picture.

Even so, from this site is the heraldic bookplate belonging to one William Ewart Gladstone with the motto, “Fide et virtute;” and it features a coat of arms, a gryphon holding a sword, falcons, and an owl.

Heaps here amongst these varied websites to keep you interested for hours and still plenty left over for another post on yet another day.

So for now, logging off, Jools