A lot on their plate

Lord Byron chose his coat of arms, Sigmund Freud the riddle of the sphinx and Walt Disney Mickey Mouse, but, be they miniature works of art or merely a chance to show off, John F. Mueller finds all bookplates to be fascinating

HAVE you ever asked yourself ‘I wonder where I put that book, did I lend it to someone?’ Books are valuable to us, emotionally, financially and as a source of information. They may have an appealing content, they may be rare, they may be expensively produced— or all three. Even in the age of e-reading via tablets, real books mean something to us and we do not like losing them. The bookplate is an artistic way of solving a practical problem. It allows the marking of a book as someone’s property by means of a printed piece of paper stuck in the front of the volume.

Bookplates range from the highly decorative, featuring the heraldic devices, favourite pets or pastimes of the owner in exquisite drawings, to the simple, proclaiming only the owner’s name (usually known as ‘book labels’). The design is most usually rendered in black-and-white print, on good-quality paper and—ideally—glued with a non-yellowing adhesive into the book. They usually bear the inscription Ex Libris, meaning ‘from the books of’, which is what they are called in Continental Europe.