The history of bookplates starts in fifteenth-century Germany, with a crude woodcut of a hedgehog fastened to the cover of a Latin vocabulary, and runs through Albrecht Dürer, Cardinal Wolsey and Samuel Pepys to a single Victorian antiquary who left the British Museum some seventy thousand of them. A bookplate is a printed label that says whose book this is. It is also, very often, a small work of art, a coat of arms, a joke and a warning to borrowers.
The best guide to the early story is still a book from the period when collecting them became a craze: William John Hardy’s Book-Plates, first published in 1893 in the series Books about Books and now on Project Gutenberg. Where later research has corrected him, that is noted below.
Who is speaking: the book, not the plate
The Latin phrase ex libris, “from the books of”, comes from the opening words of many plate inscriptions. Hardy found the name illogical and explained why, in a sentence that changes how you read every bookplate:
It may, indeed, be laid down as a general rule, that whatever the sentiment expressed on a book-plate, it is clearly intended to be uttered by the book in which the book-plate is fixed, not by the book-plate itself.
W. J. Hardy, Book-Plates (1893), chapter I
The English word is younger than the object. Hardy traced one of its earliest uses in print to 1791, when John Ireland wrote in Hogarth Illustrated that shop bills and book-plates were Hogarth’s first performances.
Before printing, owners sometimes painted their arms straight onto the page. Hardy accepted as bookplates six fourteenth-century examples recorded by the German scholar Warnecke in Die Deutschen Bücherzeichen: coloured heraldic drawings in Italian manuscripts, each with an inscription naming the owner. The real need came with the press, when a hundred copies of one book had to be told apart, and Hardy had a theory about who created it:
The existence of book-plates is, therefore, largely due to the literary enthusiast who amasses a library by retaining volumes received on loan; the inscriptions on some of the earlier book-plates prove this to be so.
W. J. Hardy, Book-Plates (1893), chapter I
The hedgehog: the earliest German bookplates
Hardy calls the earliest printed bookplates certainly German. The most ancient he knew had been found fastened to the cover of an old Latin vocabulary, printed from a rough wood-block:
It shows us a hedgehog carrying a flower in its mouth, trampling over fallen leaves; above is the inscription, ‘Hans Igler, das dich ein igel kuss.’
W. J. Hardy, Book-Plates (1893), chapter VI
The motto is a pun: Igel is German for hedgehog, so the owner’s name sits beside a wish, roughly “may a hedgehog kiss you”. It reads like a warning to anyone who might take the book. Hardy gave no date. The American Society of Bookplate Collectors and Designers now identifies the plate as the first known bookplate, made for Johannes Knabensberg, and dates it to 1450.
Close behind it, Hardy places a small, roughly coloured woodcut of an angel holding a shield with a black ox, a ring through its nose: the arms of the Brandenburg family. An inscription in the book records that it belonged to Hildebrand Brandenburg of Biberach, who gave it to the Carthusian monastery of Buxheim, where he was a monk. The plate was printed on scraps of paper, which Hardy reads as a sign of how scarce paper still was.
A third early plate came from a book given to the same monastery, which suggests to Hardy that the first bookplates were the idea of a librarian, recording gifts.
Dürer and Pirckheimer
By the early sixteenth century, bookplates were fine woodcuts, and the greatest German artist of the age designed some. The most famous is the plate Dürer made for his friend Willibald Pirckheimer, the Nuremberg humanist. Hardy describes it closely. A very large helmet and crest stand above two shields: Pirckheimer’s arms, a birch tree (Birke, a pun on his name), and his wife Margretha Rieterin’s, a crowned mermaid with two tails. Angels play around them.
Hardy believed Dürer’s earliest dated bookplate was the one for Hieronymus Ebner, of 1516, and was unsure about the Pirckheimer plate: in one chapter he calls it earlier than Dürer’s 1524 engraved portrait of Pirckheimer, in another very possibly the same date.
The National Gallery of Art in Washington now dates its impression to 1502: a woodcut printed from two blocks, 17 x 11.8 cm, Woodner Collection. Its inscriptions run in Hebrew, Greek and Latin at the top, and Liber Bilibaldi Pirckheimer along the bottom, with Sibi et amicis at the centre: for himself and his friends. Hardy’s comment on that generous motto is the driest line in his book:
Here is an amiable intention; but the plan did not work, and we do not find the sentiment often repeated.
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W. J. Hardy, Book-Plates (1893), chapter IX
Pirckheimer’s books travelled. Princeton University Library’s Graphic Arts Collection records that the Earl of Arundel bought the library in 1636 and that it was presented to the Royal Society in 1667, through John Evelyn’s efforts. Hardy noted that collectors bought up the Society’s duplicate volumes for the sake of the plate; Princeton records that the Royal Society sold its duplicates at auction in 1925.
England: Wolsey, Bacon and Pepys
England’s earliest known bookplate, in Hardy’s account, is Cardinal Wolsey’s, and it is not printed at all. It is a hand-drawn and coloured sketch of his arms under a cardinal’s hat, found in a folio volume that later belonged to Henry VIII. Next came the woodcut plate dated 1574 for books Sir Nicholas Bacon gave to the University of Cambridge.
Then there is Samuel Pepys, whose diary entry for 21 July 1668 is often quoted as describing the design of his bookplate. In the Gutenberg text of the diary he writes that he only went to my plate-maker’s, and there spent an hour about contriving my little plates
. Hardy took this as the small plate with Pepys’s initials and anchors. But the editor’s note printed right under the passage disagrees:
This passage has been frequently quoted as referring to Pepys’s. small bookplate, with his initials S. P. and two anchors and ropes entwined; but if looked at carefully with the further reference on the 27th, it will be seen that it merely describes the preparation of engravings of the four dockyards.
Editor’s note, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 21 July 1668
A few days later, the plate-maker delivers my four little plates of the four Yards, cost me L5
. Pepys did have bookplates, and the introduction to the same edition describes portrait plates engraved by Robert White after Kneller. The famous diary entry just seems not to be about one.
Curses and warnings
Because the plate speaks for the book, it can threaten. Hardy devotes a chapter to inscriptions against book-stealing. His oldest English example is not printed but written in a book published in 1540, reported by a correspondent of Notes and Queries:
My Master’s name above you se,
Take heede therefore you steale not mee; … Looke doune below and you shal see
The picture of the gallowstreeW. J. Hardy, Book-Plates (1893), chapter IX
Below it, there really was a drawing of a gallows. The same year, Hardy notes, John Faber, Bishop of Vienna, gave his books to the College of St. Nicholas with a plate decreeing that each volume should remain there for ever for the use of the students.
When collectors started collecting the labels
By the 1890s people were collecting bookplates for their own sake. Hardy’s preface mentions a flourishing Ex Libris Society. Its modern successor, the Bookplate Society, founded in 1972, describes it as the world’s first such organisation, active from 1891 to 1908. In the United States, the American Society of Bookplate Collectors and Designers was organised in 1922. Charles Dexter Allen’s American Book-Plates of 1894 gives the earliest dated American example as the label of the Rev. John Williams of Deerfield, Massachusetts, 1679.
The greatest collector was Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks, Keeper of British and Mediaeval Antiquities at the British Museum. The preface to the museum’s 1903 catalogue of his bequest explains what he left when he died in 1897:
a collection of English and foreign book plates which is probably the largest and most comprehensive ever formed.
Preface, Franks Bequest: Catalogue of British and American Book Plates, vol. I (British Museum, 1903)
After duplicates were removed, the English portion numbered close to forty thousand plates and the foreign nearly thirty thousand. Cataloguing the English plates took E. R. J. Gambier Howe nearly five years, and they were mounted in some sixty albums of six to seven hundred plates each for the Print Room.
The history of bookplates in a timeline
| Date | Bookplate or event | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 14th century | Painted arms with ownership inscriptions in Italian manuscripts | Hardy, ch. I |
| 1450 | Hedgehog plate, “Igler”, for Johannes Knabensberg | ASBC&D; Hardy, ch. VI |
| 15th century | Hildebrand Brandenburg’s plate, Buxheim monastery | Hardy, ch. VI |
| 1502 | Dürer’s woodcut for Willibald Pirckheimer | National Gallery of Art |
| 1516 | Dürer’s dated plate for Hieronymus Ebner | Hardy, ch. VI |
| 1574 | Sir Nicholas Bacon’s gift plate, Cambridge | Hardy, ch. II |
| 1679 | Rev. John Williams, earliest dated American example | Allen (1894) |
| 1891-1908 | The Ex Libris Society, the first collectors’ society | The Bookplate Society |
| 1897 | Franks dies; his bookplates go to the British Museum | Franks Bequest catalogue |
| 1922 | American Society of Bookplate Collectors and Designers | ASBC&D |
Bookplates belong with the other marks readers leave in books, from notes in the margin (see a history of marginalia) to passages copied out by hand (the commonplace book). If you are starting a library and wondering whether to get one made, how to build a book collection covers the practical side, and quotes about reading may supply a motto.
Even the experts got them wrong. In 1676 the engraver David Loggan sent Sir Thomas Isham a bookplate as a New Year’s gift, 200 copies printed, explaining that it was very much used amongst persons of Quality to past ther Cotes of Armes befor ther bookes instade of wreithing ther Names
. The arms turned out to be wrong, and Loggan wrote again, as Hardy quotes him: I have taken the herald’s derection in it, but the Foole did give it wrong.
Sources
- William John Hardy, Book-Plates (1893; 2nd ed. 1897), Project Gutenberg #41142: gutenberg.org/ebooks/41142
- Charles Dexter Allen, American Book-Plates (1894), Project Gutenberg #47682: gutenberg.org/ebooks/47682
- The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Henry B. Wheatley, Project Gutenberg #4200: gutenberg.org/ebooks/4200
- E. R. J. Gambier Howe, Franks Bequest: Catalogue of British and American Book Plates, vol. I (British Museum, 1903), Internet Archive: archive.org
- National Gallery of Art, Albrecht Dürer, Liber Bilibaldi Pirckheimer (Bookplate of Willibald Pirckheimer), 2005.1.1.b: nga.gov
- Princeton University Library, Graphic Arts Collection, “Liber Bilibaldi Pirckheimer” (2017): graphicarts.princeton.edu
- The Bookplate Society: bookplatesociety.org
- American Society of Bookplate Collectors and Designers: bookplate.org