B is for Bookplates - 5 - Mine

Some of you will be pleased to learn this is the last of these . . . for now; we will return to them in the fullness of time, along with the previously mentioned book-marks, one of which, a novelty polymer one, came in with a mixed-lot this afternoon!

So having been introduced to bookplates at a young age; 6 or 7 maybe, and knowing Mum had one, I had a hankering for one as I began to accumulate books myself, in my teens, when I was also visiting Thomas Thorp's myself, as a customer, on my way to and from Art Collage!

 

And these sketches date from that time (1981-3), I was actually working on an/my graphic interpretation of Celtic artwork, quite the hippy! These were in part for a Tattoo I never actually got done! Something which ironically pleases me now, given that every other buggers' got them, they've rather lost their cache, in their commonality.

 

You can see there's a bit of 'Slimfont' work going on as well, and a simplified version of the dragon ended-up on my carved tile, might-be-Roman, coaster.

This is where it would lead about 15 years later, these are a few colour studies I did on some photocopies, in various sizes, with my treasured magic markers - long since dried-out. Colour really doesn't work on bookplates, I don't know why, but they almost demand to be left understated! If I had to use one in would be the browns on the right, I'm a sucker for Autumnal colours!

 

Working out the layout and lettering, clearly 'slimfont' wasn't far away once I'd gone with the circles or bubbles concept! And my middle initial 'D' was dropped as it was going to obscure the tail . . . yeah, it's an embryo!

 

The two scraps of paper top-centre look like they might be the margins of 'Model and Collectors Mart'! Long-gone now I think!

 

I don't know what I was doing here, the cut-outs are presumably because I thought about reversing the image (no computer still! '97-98?), while the larger image (actually the same size as both the cut-outs and the tracing) might have been half-an-idea for a sundial?

The little blue sketch may be the first version, but therein lies the problem with the whole design, I eschewed the designs which used the tracing of rights-free stuff, and commercial lettering, for something wholly my own work . . . for my own bookplate; makes sense, right?

But . . . one of the books I bought at Thorp's, back in the nineteen-eighties, was the English-language, full-colour version of Frenchman Philip Druillet's Lone Slone/Delirius, published by Dragon's Dream, and, on the large, double page spread of his lovemaking with some universal god-head's daughter/princess (or something, I can't check as it's in storage), there are a bunch of bubbles and planets and stuff at the top of the page/panel, including something looking suspiciously like this?

 

And there is issue; there is a child produced by the union, it is being conceived in the panel-image, so it is an embryo! Now it would be wrong of me to claim this is an original, if it's derivative of the master's work!

 

In my defence, at art collage you are taught to sketch anything you like, anything that takes your fancy, something which was only reinforced many years later when we had to visit museums and produce copious works of what we saw, while at university as a mature student. After all, the great architect Santiago Calatrava is known to have based his overhead rail gantries on a sketch of a bull's head!

Now when I was working on the bookplate, I was sure I was dealing with a funny little sketch of a planet or something, and while I decided it did indeed look like an alien embryo and, if developed along those lines, would have connections to the embryonic ideas that come out of reading &etc . . . I also have to face the fact that by subconscious accident or forgetful design, I probably ripped-off Mr. Druillet! Hay-ho, I'm stuck with it now and it's stuck into thousands of my books!

But it's only stuck into the art/architecture/design and collectables/modelling/wargaming libraries, so I may return to the old designs, or make a new one altogether, when I get the rest plated-up in the next few years.

 

Perhaps one of the Oriental ones (previous-but-one post) could be used for my late mother's library of oriental art, ceramics and persian carpets, with a new one (I have half an idea for one with a rabbit in the bottom left corner and a distant warren in the background, top-right) for the natural sciences? And I'll need one for the History/military books? I wouldn't use bookplates for fiction, I find it an ephemeral art!

Oh, and if you find this bookplate in either of Michael Maughan's 1st or 2nd volumes of the Timpo guide, the Great Book of Corgi OR any of the Hornby Companion series (landscape hardbacks), they are mine, and the person who has them - shouldn't have, I think some may be in Colorado, if not they are long gone as the other suspect (and there were only ever the two) is dead! But the books are still mine!

B is for Bookplates - 4 - Drafts

We arrive at my efforts! It took me a while to get round to doing a bookplate for myself, although there were half-hearted attempts at them when I was a teenager, those efforts are somewhere in the storage unit!

Here I've copied some stuff, a woman, and some graphics from Mecanorma and/or Lettraset catalogues, which I've enlarged, in order to better trace those elements I wanted to use/transfer to the draft design.

 

Now, I can't for the life of me remember how I arrived at these coloured copies of the lady, or where she came from? At that time I had no copier, no computer . . . and the corner shop's photocopier might have had an enlarge feature, but I don't remember it being a colour machine, nor do the Lettraset and Mecanorma (French equivalent of Lettraset) catalogues have any colour artwork, as far as I can remember?

 

These sketches will date from around 1997/8, and I just don't know how I had the ability to produce these working scraps, but clearly I did! And having done so, got to work on them . . .

 

. . . first by reversing the image, and again; how? No feature like that on a photocopier? No computer until 2007? How can one totally forget a whole process? I normally have a very good memory (it's one of the features of Asperger's), but this is all a blank!

 

Anyway, you can see how I was going to join the two girls hair together to make the outer frame of the design, while on the right I'm using tracing-paper to lift some of the dry-transfer elements and try to bring them together in a more unified structure, I've drawn some new hair in, having traced her without her hair.

But again adding to the mystery, the two girls in the left-hand image have had all their lines go A) very broad and sausage-like, and B) there's a negative, white-space, thing going-on where the lines cross . . . I do have a vague memory of that being a negative-feature of the enlarging process, maybe I had help producing the preliminary materials from the studio guys at the sign fitting company I was working at.

 

They had Adobe, I think, matched with CorelDraw? Probably running on Windows 95? If she's a rights-free piece of clip-art, it would have been easy for Jason or Matt to enlarge, reverse one, and print them off for me?

 

However, I seem to have lost interest in a naked, fantasy princess bookplate, quite quickly and moved on to something more oriental, again using tracing to take images from a rights-free, images portfolio, which I'd bought from the previously mentioned Thomas Thorpe's in Guildford, many years earlier while at art collage!

 

And yes, that's a typo, but it took me until I was today-year's-old to realise it is Mecanorma, not Mecanorama . . . classic word-blindness! Googling Mikado as a typeface leads to a kids-friendly 'chunky' design and a couple of bog-standard and rather boring sans-serif types, which wouldn't have interested me then or now.

But, I did find a seller on Etsy who has a few sheets of the Mecanorma original for sale, and you can see that the note (on the back of the design - you can just see it through the paper) was pointing to a nice oriental typeface for which to produce the 'Ex Libris' and/or any name.

 

Meanwhile, this design had also been taken to, if not a near finished stage, at least a stage where you could see what the final design would look like? It may even have come before the one above - it has a certain air of abandonment about it?

 

I guess I would have been looking for a bamboo effect letter type? And no; I have no idea what happened or was due to happen on the 22nd, nor indeed, which month, but again, 1997 is a safe bet, or 1998!

I may return to these and get them finished as commercial prospects in a year or two, these days there's plenty of places like evilBay and Etsy to shift this kind of bespoke stuff, and production costs have come right down with home-computing, desktop publishing and the like, and I think there's a ream of licky-sticky paper in my stuff somewhere, but it may be a solid brick by now!

B is for Bookplates - 3 - Mum

And so we get to Mum's bookplate, for which I've found some of the 'working's out', which may be of interest to anyone thinking of designing one for themselves.

 

Listening to the obituary for Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, the 'singing nun' (aka the 'honky-tonk nun'), who was so much more, on the Radio, earlier this evening, it was saddening to learn she won a two-year scholarship to London's Royal Academy, but which, for reasons unknown, she never took it up, because a similar thing happened to my Mother.

 

She won a scholarship to the Slade, but never took it up and I never filly understood why, but it seems it was a combination of Orwellian post-war socialist means-testing, pride within the family and sexism; Uncle Johnny (male, firstborn) did go to Uni'? Doubly frustrating to miss-out, as the period she would have been there (the Slade) was among its high-points.

Anyway, suffice to say Mum clearly had a natural talent for such things, and some of the sketches she produced for her silversmithing designs are exquisite, although I haven't found her wild strawberry watercolour which was always my favourite?

 

These preliminary sketches/further studies are on two sides of an old envelope! Would it be 'airmail' with those blue stripes? She decided upon the family coat of arms (more of which in a future post), within a diamond or - heraldically speaking - a lozenge (when inherited through the female line) and having reproduced it on a photocopier (?) tried out a few layouts, and there may be more lost stages/preliminaries, this is just what I've found. To be honest, I prefer the lettering of the upper one?

The finished article, I don't know what the rule is with bookplates, but I am pasting mine over the bottom-right-hand quarter, so you can still read most of the one underneath and get one whole Talbot (what heraldic dogs are called; a now-lost hunting breed), unless it's a small volume or a cramped position (due to text layout or something) in which case I put mine right-over, which has a sad finality to it, almost the feeling of treading on a grave?

 

EAH, was her maiden name, Elizabeth Anne Hall, while Liz W was obviously for her married name; Walter.

Here's a working drawing for a design she did for a friend, I don't know if it ever went to print, and they eventually fell-out (over a Japanese submarine-commander's Katana parts of all things), despite remaining colleagues for several more years, but the details of such 'skeletons' pass with the parties concerned!

 

Like coins or stamps (or bottle caps, matchbook/boxes, cheese or cigar labels, travel/restaurant sugar packets - all the small collectables/paper ephemera!), the trick with bookplates is to produce a design which is interesting and aesthetically pleasing, yet also carries a certain amount of information in a small area, without it being unreadable and/or too busy or too plain. I'm not going to judge Mum's out-loud, but you can judge mine next!

B is for Bookplates - 2 - Great Aunt 'Nina'

Helena Invicta Hall, was always known as Great Aunt Nina, and I used to think she must have been Mum's Aunt, one of the siblings of my Grandfather? But in preparing this, from the ages of those involved, it's become obvious she must have been Grandad's Aunt, despite outliving him, so Mum's Great Aunt, and therefore My Great Aunt once-removed . . . I think!

 

She is best known publicly for her recent, posthumous memoirs; A Woman in the Shadow of the Second World War, which I have only recently discovered, which is sad, as my mother must have been the person who left the diary with the local record's office, as she handled Nina's estate as nominated executor, but I don't think she ever knew of the book's existence? It was Nina's money which bought us our Austin A35 van, with which Mum furnished the house.

 

She is better known to me, not as a diarist, but as one of the inter-war art mob, who were a mix of tail-end/surviving Arts & Crafts movement advocates, and full-on modernists (Gill Sans typeface) with a hint of Art Deco, which included Eric Gill (who we don't talk about any more, weird sinner), and his brother Gordon, the printer/publisher. Uncle 'Jock' (one of Grandad's brothers) was a keen amateur or naive artist in Suffolk around the same time.

 

I have a lot of her work which I will Blog one day; sketches, templates and proofs for Pub signs, Church and village fête posters & flyers, local authority announcements, shop-window things (opening times, open/closed signs, that kind of thing) she was a busy, jobbing commercial artist and signwriter.

In which skill, she designed two bookplates for herself, one earlier in life, and a later one, both of which we're looking at here. Above is what I believe is the first, printed by Gordon Gill's London works and dated 1900, she would have been about 27 then, but it may be a second printing of a student-days design? To the right is a roughly contemporary picture of her, I think it's dated '97 on the back, and that's the 18's for younger readers!

This, as far as I know was the one she was using up to her death in 1967, I was only three and barely remember the shenanigans of Mum whizzing back and forth to Sussex, but there are vague recollections.

 

A much more austere or simpler design, with nothing more than hand calligraphy, I actually found a box or two still in Mum's papers, but I don't know when it dates from! Reading Gill's history, you can see how Nina, too, was subscribing to the anti-technology/mass production of consumerism with this paired-down, minimalist style.

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"!

F is for Favourites

I have thousands of favourites, among which is this pressed, litho-printed, tin plate apple tree. I bought it at the Sandown Toy Fair a few years ago, from a dear little old lady who specialised in civilian solid and hollow-cast metal, and had the quality equivalent of a 10p box (everything was a pound!!) which contained some lovely pressed-wood farm animals and this; I had to have it!!!

It's about 55mm high, probably dates from before the war and unusually has the back painted as well as the front, albeit only black. If I could only save ten things from a fire this would be one of them, it's just so charming!!

Don't have a clue who made it, I suspect a German cigarette company but the Americans also produced a fair bit of this type of stuff between the two wars, so it's any one's guess....?