Bookplates (Classic Reprint) - Tapa blanda

Excerpt from Bookplates

Helgenesis of the Bookplate must be sought afield. We are making up for lost time and promise soon to be in the van, thanks to the many brilliant stylists who now devote their art to the subject; but while we were still content with armorial bearings for these attractive sym bols, and had not escaped the tyranny of couchant lions, rampant leopards and chimeras dire, other nations al ready began to see the humanity implicit in ex-libris, and the designs of Albert Durer, Hans Holbein and the Little Masters of Germany, though they still embrace coats and crests and mottoes, lead the way to fresher air and better ground. Our modern bookplates are now nearly free of the Herald's Office; and other extraneous influences, including the French style and convention, have been abandoned for more fluent beauty, humour and imagina tion. In fact, a happy future is dawning for these fine things, and the time must quickly come when no book lover, worthy the name, can deny himself a work of art to link him with his book, long after his eyes shall read and his hands embrace it no more. We have already followed James Guthrie's admirable advice (than whom no man better understands what may become a bookplate), and let go the coat-tails of our ancient heroes to do some wayfaring on our own account. What, then, should an ideal bookplate be? Emphatically not a picture of the master's crest, or his coat, his houseor his library, but a line between his own personality and the treasure it adorns - a sign for other eyes, by which the possessor still holds for ever a sort of spiritual right in his volume, that owners to come should recognise and respect.

The proprietor's name and achievement must fitly be te corded: there should be close identity with him, and him only, for whose sake the work of art was created. It should be a sign for the initiated, a statement of facts in terms of fancy and pictorial poetry. But The Bookplate Magazine has created the necessary rallying-point for those who love the subject, and all that is being thought, said and done in this precious matter may there be learned by the growing body of enthusiastic connoisseurs devoted to it.

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