SOME little time after the death of Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks the Library of the British Museum acquired, through the kindness of his successor in the Keepership of Mediæval Antiquities, Mr. C. H. Read, some three hundred books, of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, bearing on their bindings armorial book-stamps. For lack of a better word these three hundred books have been dignified in the heading of this article by the title of a 'collection,' but it is due to the great reputation of Sir Wollaston Franks as a collector to say that he himself would probably have smiled if he had heard them called so. As all bookish people know, one of his real hobbies was the collection of book-plates, his countless specimens of which passed at his death to another department of the British Museum, that of Prints and Drawings, where considerable progress has been made in describing and cataloguing them. By the side of his thousands of book-plates these three hundred or so old books with armorial stamps on their covers are a merely subsidiary collection, sufficient to illustrate the method of marking ownership, which book-plates first rivalled and then, alas, almost entirely superseded.
The £500 which Sir Wollaston Franks gave for the copy of the 'Ptolemy' of 1490, with the badge of Mary Queen of Scots, recently the subject of one of the Bibliographical Society's Monographs, shows the spirit in which he would have pursued the collection of armorial bindings had he taken it up seriously. As it was, he seems to have given a standing order to several booksellers to send him any books or odd volumes, of which the chief value lay in the stamped arms, and which they were willing to sell for a small sum, and to have taken his chance. There are worse ways of collecting than this, for a bookseller who knows that he can always place a book of a certain class with a customer, will often be content to buy it at a venture for a small price and pass it on at once at a few shillings' profit without examining it very carefully or inquiring too curiously into its market value. As will be seen from some of the books soon to be mentioned, this was certainly the experience in this instance of Sir Wollaston Franks, and the foregoing depreciation of the specimens he thus got together must be understood as written solely to prevent his name in the title of this article from raising expectation too high.
Before describing any individual specimens, it may be worth while to say a few words about book-stamps in general. Compared with book-plates, of which the literature during the last ten or twelve years has grown with such rapidity, they have as yet received very little attention outside France, where Guigard's 'Armorial du Bibliophile' in its second edition (1892) gives as full information about most French examples as can reasonably be desired. In the third volume of 'Bibliographica,' Mr. W. Y. Fletcher wrote an interesting article on 'English Armorial Book-stamps,' and it is much to be wished that he could be persuaded to print in full his notes on the subject, which are certainly more complete— or less incomplete—than those in the possession of any one else. A few years ago the Grolier Club of New York held an exhibition of books bearing these marks of ownership, and printed a small catalogue of it, which I have not had the advantage of seeing. Other information, as far as I am aware, can only be obtained by painful search in books of heraldry and genealogy and in biographies.
Towards the close of the age of manuscripts, it became a fairly common practice, more especially in Italy, for book-lovers to cause their arms to be painted as part of the decoration of the first page of text. In the last years of the fifteenth century book-plates came into use in Germany, and during the next hundred years were slowly adopted both in France and England. But until the sixteenth century was far advanced the commonest way of marking possession of a book in England remained that of inscribing the owner's name on the title-page or a fly-leaf. Thus all the books in the large libraries of Archbishop Cranmer and Lord Lumley bear their names, 'Thomas Cantuariensis' and 'Lumley,' in the handwriting of their secretaries or librarians. One or two instances are found of names printed or written on book-edges. That of 'Anna Regina Anglie,' i.e. Anne Boleyn, on a vellum presentation copy of Tyndale's New Testament of 1534, is a well-known example of this. On the outside of books names are found from a very early period; but in the fifteenth century and the early years of the sixteenth they are mostly those, not of the owners of the volume, but of the bookbinder, as in the case of Conrad of Strasburg, Johann Richenbach, and André Boule. Every one, however, knows the inscriptions which the three great collectors, Grolier, Maioli, and Lauwrin put on their books. As the sixteenth century grew older the names or initials of the owner, with sometimes a date added, are found on a fair number of bindings. In Germany such names and dates were frequently branded in black on pigskin bindings. In other countries the names are, as a rule, stamped in gold. As late as the eighteenth century Lord Oxford used to stamp his name, 'Robert Harley,' on his books, in addition to his arms.
Coming at last to armorial book-stamps, we find that from the fifteenth century onwards books were often impressed with the royal arms. These were used both as marks of possession and also, at least in England (as noted by Mr. Davenport in his article on 'Some Popular Errors as to old Bindings' in vol. ii. of 'The Library'), as decorative designs on the trade bindings of loyal stationers. Crowned initials and royal badges are often found, and these nearly always mark royal ownership. When this use of armorial book-stamps was first adopted by collectors beneath the royal rank is not easy to say. Grolier is said to have occasionally placed his arms on his books, but I believe that until about 1560, the practice did not become at all common even in foreign countries, and in England it was probably some ten years later. It is, perhaps, worth noting that in France the fashion must undoubtedly have received a great impetus from the sumptuary law of 1577, which restricted the use of the elaborate 'fanfare' style of ornamenting books to those in royal ownership. The splendid bindings of a few of the books of Jacques Auguste de Thou (associated, rightly or wrongly, with the name of Nicolas Eve) must all have been executed before this date. Thereafter he adopted the plain morocco covers decorated only with the stamps of his arms with which all book-lovers are familiar. Other collectors followed his example, and in their respective kinds both the strong, massively stamped books of De Thou, and the more finely grained red moroccos of later French bookmen, in which the tiny stamp of arms has a Legasconesque delicacy of finish, offer examples of simple decoration which the wealthiest collector may well imitate.
QUEEN ELIZABETH'S FALCON BADGE
Of books bearing the arms of French collectors upwards of one hundred and fifty were brought together by Sir Wollaston Franks, but the English stamps, which number rather over a hundred, must engage our first attention. One of the earliest of these is a small stamp of the arms of Archbishop Parker, forming the centre of a rather decorative binding, obviously of English work. The book it is found on is a copy of Beza's Latin New Testament, printed at London by Vautrollier, in 1574, on the yellow paper occasionally used during the middle of the sixteenth century, presumably as less trying to the eyes than the ordinary white. Parker's patronage of John Day is well known, but in view of the likelihood of this being a presentation copy to the Archbishop from Vautrollier, it would be rash to credit Day with the binding of this volume, which is, moreover, not quite so original as Day's work at its best.
ELIZABETHAN PORTRAIT-STAMP