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I remember seeing my very first bookplate down
in the murky (and rather frightening) cellar of the house my family
moved to when I was eight. Deep in the shadows lay a battered
old trunk. My father prised off the lock and lifted the lid. Inside
were heaps of  musty
old books, and, opening the first, I saw pasted inside the front
cover a large black and white label. It was an engraving of a
massively fancy and impressive family coat of arms. Across the
top was written Ex Libris Viscount Molesworth.
Ex libris is Latin for "from the books of..." (or "out
of the library of...."). And in the days when books were
rare and precious, anyone who owned them would want to take particular
care that, if they were lent, or borrowed, or taken away by mistake,
there was the best chance of them finding their way home again.
Bookplates fell out of fashion as books became more common, less
expensive and easier to replace. But there's a long tradition
of using them - about four hundred years. There is even a Bookplate
Society
who know all there is to know about bookplates and the people
who designed them or used them. (The Society's details are at
the end of this article.)
Nobles and gentry (like my Viscount Molesworth) often used their
own coats of arms. Frequently the family name or family motto
was scrolled along the bottom, either in Latin or English. Styles
changed through the ages, but most of the old bookplates, from
Jacobean through to Victorian and Edwardian, appear stunningly
fancy and complicated compared with a lot of the ones we have
on our bookplates pages, reflecting the decorative styles of their
ages.
Once you start looking, you'll see what a huge range of things
show up over and over on bookplates: dragons, cherubs, trophies,
animals, festoons, weapons, wreaths, trees, ribbons, landscapes,
floral sprays. I could go on and on.
Many very famous artists have enjoyed designing bookplates for
themselves, or for others. (The bookplate Aubrey Beardsley made
for Mr Pollitt shows a nice fat naked lady with her bottom towards
us, taking a book from a tray, and bookplates can easily have
puns or jokes tucked away in the picture or the wording.)
 Lots
of people collect them. Some go for one particular artist or style.
Some look for bookplates of the royal or famous. You might look
especially for owls, lions, children or musical instruments -
anything.
One of the great pleasures of charity shops and jumble sales has
always been peeking inside the front of really dull-looking old
books you're sure that no one will ever read again, and finding
a bookplate, often with a name written on it, that sets you wondering
. . . wondering . . . It doesn't happen often, but just enough
to keep you hoping.
So, when you print off your favourite bookplate from our collection
and paste it in the next book that you've decided to put in your
Home Library, remember that, a hundred years from now, somebody
just like you might open your book and see it and start to wonder
who you are, just like me down in the cellar that day thinking
about that great reader, Viscount Molesworth.
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