B is for Bookplates - 1 - Overview

I did mention a while ago that going forwards I'd be posting more 'nostalgia', and I probably meant fewer toys and/or more 'other things'! The term 'small scale world' covers a multitude of aspects (especially if you google it!), or sins, from microscopy to maps, and as it's my 'little' corner of the on-line universe, it should better represent me right or wrong, and as a title, covers doing so!

 

One of my abiding interests since I was first taken to the long-gone Thomas Thorpes book shop in Guildford (for many years the best second-hand bookseller away from Hay-on-Wye or London), and saw a small display of them at the top of the stairs, is bookplates, and as I earned a certain degree of opprobrium posting stone-eggs here, over an Easter past, I thought I'd try to annoy everyone with bookplates this Easter!

 

The simplest form of bookplate is this one, which may be a home-made or home designed one, or a commercially bought one, like those which I saw that day back in the 1970's. It was customary for people to design their own and then get a local printer to run them off, round here it's always been Chartalith at the other end of town! Ex Libris, for those who don't know, is Latin for 'From the Library of . . . '

These are all commercial bookplates, bought in packets of 20, 50, sometimes only 12 or 15, more as a novelty these days, and again, like those I saw in Thorpes, you buy a few packets, only to find the design long-gone from the catalogue when you need some more!

 

Coloured ones were a rarity, not so much now, where - in the right gift shop/garden centre mega-store - you can find quite garish full-colour ones among the more traditional designs. Here the green one has the motif of an owl, long associated with wisdom and bookishness. 

 

The small one at the top is both pretty, and pretty innocuous, while I rather like the art-deco chap, smoking in a club armchair and clearly hiding from the viewer - reading is a solitary activity!

Of course the great and the good leave more clues than a 'John' or a 'John Smith' and I've managed to track one of these chaps down, the one on the left seems to be this Penn, and I was able to provide Graces Guide with a copy of his Arms, remember; we only live as long as people remember us.

 

Excerpt of my eMail to Graces; "...There is a handwritten date, in pencil, on the blank flyleaf '1880', while a similar plate in a US library is reported to have come from his wife or daughter, from the time they were in Norfolk, further digging reveals they must have been tenants as Tavenham Hall was divided-up into flats which were rented-out by the owner until 1921 when it became a private school!

But it was your page which confirmed all the snippets I'd got from that there interwebamathingy, so I feel you should have a copy! I actually use your site quite a bit in my Toy Industry research.

Sadly, there seems to be no connection with the British Admiral, nor the Pennsylvania Penn's? The arms seem quite busy, with the right-hand side being maybe related to engineering? The rings? I don't know..."

 

Non Sine Laboure = 'Not Without Labour'. While the chap on the right drew a blank I'm afraid - Non Sufficet Orbis = The World is not Enough' . . . stolen by a recent Bond movie!

I love these two for their Arts & Craft look, the Figgis's could be any one of several likely pairings on Google, they seem to be quite a common surname and various Samuel and Anne Figgises have married or born several other Samuel or Anne Figgises!

 

The one on the right is not actually a bookplate per se, but rather a printers/publishers piece of marketing/advertising ephemera, George Allen being quite a well-known publisher, now Allen & Unwin, he originally worked with John Ruskin, the great supporter of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, as Ruskin's assistant, this 'plate' is mid-century I think, that's the 19's for you younger readers!

This could be the naval artist William J. Popham, and the plate might have been designed by Eric or Gordon Gill, or my Great Aunt once removed Helena Hall, who worked with the aforementioned (more on her in a subsequent post), but I have no empirical evidence for any of it, or even who this Popham is?

 

What is also of interest is that the rendition of the Edelweiss flower is almost the same as the design of the German Army's Alpine Jager cap-badge, itself relatively unchanged from the WWII version, they're having been implicated in few Nazi atrocities, got to keep it/their esprit de corps, during the de-Nazification of the rest of the Armed Forces, after the war?

This is in an 1832 edition of Robinson Crusoe, and it was funny trying to track it down on Google, because, as the original work was first published on 25 April 1719, it was by the 1830's, well out of copyright (Pooh Bear came out of copyright only the other day), and there are many reprints from the time, many illustrated, in single or twin volumes, this one is one of the more valuable versions, but not one of the mega-money ones! I'll cover it - the book - another day.

 

We can see young Mathieson won his copy as a prize for a combined History-Geograpgy-Gramar class, and the teacher, George Gartley, probably had the presentation plates printed at his own expense? Indeed, he may have paid for the prizes out of his own pocket, but you hope the head-teacher or governors helped?

Google gave some clues as to the nature of the rather Orwellian numbered school facilities of the time, but I couldn't find anything on Number 9 specifically

A close-up of the actual bookplate; Mathieson went on to better things and I've found this page, curated by the Charles Rennie Mackintosh project, which is almost certainly him;

 

https://www.mackintosh-architecture.gla.ac.uk/catalogue/name/?nid=MathTA

It doesn't say whether he ever worked with the great master, but one suspects his workshops did work for some of Mackintosh's building projects, and it's also interesting to find that A) he stuck around Glasgow giving back to his community and B) founded a lasting, legacy prize, after winning one as a child.

The motto Fac et Spera translating to 'Do & Hope' is meant to be understood that prosperity comes from working, and keeping hope and faith in God.

So we've seen one or two non-Bookplate items already, but here's a few more. The one top right was awarded to my Father, who must have been arse-licking as he was as atheist as me, all his life, but I have a vague memory of him telling me he liked going to Sunday School, because it ran at the same time as church, but in the village hall (so you got out of 'Church'), and he had a crush on the Sunday School teacher!

 

To the left is a presentation plate, but no one has filled in the details, and I didn't note it when scanning the plate (everything in this post is in my [now] library), but I think it was something new-looking, so there was probably a bulk/multiple presentation, which somebody forgot to get somebody-else to sign?

 

From Wikipedia: Nihil sine Deo, Latin for 'Nothing without God', is used as a motto of the German Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen royal family and was the motto of both the former Principality of Romania and the former Kingdom of Romania, so a pre-war/wartime book/event?

 

While the jade green one is from another household-name publisher, and was pasted into a printed copy of the lecture referred to, so presumably they were presented to those who attended the lecture? And note, more colour among the 'presentation plates'.

This is an oddity, it seems to be a memorial bookmark (we will look at bookmarks another Easter,; there's hundreds of them, old, modern, memorial and advertising/commercial, but they are distributed to the four winds at the moment), which caused/causes you to remember the deceased everytime you pick up the book? And I say 'causes' because he was also findable, here;

 

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/196064502/henry-peter-swan

 

And I'll try to get this card uploaded to that page, so like the Penn arms, it has a chance of surviving me. It looks as if it's a distant relative of Dr. Swan who has set up the page? Per Stellam Omnia is a rather fatalistic-sounding 'all by the stars', which I'm taking to mean everything is in the hand of the fates, rather than a lot of night-work without candles?

Finally, this is neither a bookplate nor a presentation plate, but rather a decorative frontispiece to a book I haven't dared look-up the value of, having consigned it - temporarily - to a shipping-container with all the extremes of temperature that entails.

 

It is from a 17-somthing, two-volume edition of Marlow's Faustus as the play-script, re-bound (in the 18-somethings?) in a single leather-volume with all the fancy tooling, now quite aged, but still in one piece. The panel has clearly been designed, however, to be signed in the celestial sun-ray/cloud-break by the owner.

 

Hand signing being as common as dedicated bookplates; we all know there is a certain charm, or frisson of nostalgia associated with finding an old annual with a biro-scrawled "To Jim from Nana Mabel and Uncle Bob", or even finding, in smudged pencil, in an old Ladybird book, or Observers guide, "This book belongs to Jane"!