Next we find the Rococo style introduced from across the Channel, and this before long time, merging into the well-known Chippendale style, so closely associated with English bookplates. After this, in English bookplates comes the festoon, or wreath-and-ribbon style, in which certainly many charming ex libris were engraved. As Mr. Egerton Castle points out, one of the surest ways of knowing this later Georgian style is by the spade shape of the shields, and altogether a manner which calls up memories of designers and architects such as Sir W. Chambers, Adams, Wedgwood, or Sheraton.
CHAPTER II
BOOKPLATES CHRONOLOGICALLY
Very early plates—Albert Dürer—Other German artists—Early English.
THE bookplate here given as a frontispiece, may be the oldest in the world. At all events, it remains to this day a fifteenth-century bookplate in a fifteenth-century book. The work is a Latin treatise on logic, in a German hand. Mr. W. H. J. Weale has very kindly looked at the book, and writes: “The binding is German, I think Bavarian; but although the same stamps, or rather, to be accurate, some of them, occur on several bookbindings I have copied, I have never been able to locate them. The S. Benedict with the book, and glass with the serpent issuing from it, is evidently German; the arms have nothing to do with the Saint, or the order, nor are they the arms of an abbey, but no doubt those of a layman to whom the book belonged.”[A]
Now to come to the real or almost personal story of engraved bookplates or ex libris, as we may call them indifferently. First we will talk of the oldest, and then gradually come down to our own time. Germany was the fatherland of bookplates, and it is of great interest to remember that it was, too, the fatherland of printing and of wood-engraving.
The earliest known engraved bookplate is that of Hildebrand Brandenburg, a monk of the Carthusian Monastery at Buxheim, near Memmingen, to which he was evidently in the habit of presenting books. The woodcut shows an angel holding a shield on which are displayed the arms of the Brandenburg family, a black ox with a ring passed through its nose.
The late Karl Emich Count zu Leiningen-Westerburg, the great authority on German ex libris, suggests that either Biberach or Ulm was the birthplace of this bookplate, and in or about the year 1470, which is a year before Albert Dürer was born.
Another bookplate, also armorial, of about the same date, and found in a book given to this same monastery at Buxheim, is that of Wilhelm von Zell. Lastly, there has as yet been found one other which is grouped with these two, as of about the same date. It represents a hedgehog with a flower in its mouth, on grass strewn with flowers. It was engraved for Hans Igler. Igel means a hedgehog, and at the head of the ex libris is cut the inscription: “Hanns Igler das dich ein Igel Küs.”
After this there may be mentioned the following six plates before we turn over the leaf of a new century. The inscribed armorial ex libris of Thomas Wolphius, Pontificii Juris Doctor, and that of Rupprecht Muntzinger, a block of South German origin, and ascribed by some to the hand of M. Wohlgemuth. Two anonymous plates, both armorial, and in saying anonymous it must not be supposed that the owner was not well known in his day, and probably long afterwards. One represents the head of a bull caboshed, with a sickle issuing from it. The other, the fleur-de-lis, is on a shield, and for crest, the half figure of a man with a battle-axe. Then two bookplates, the body of which has been engraved and space left for one or another person to use them.
Passing now into the sixteenth century, and still keeping to chronology as our main guide, we can turn at once to Albrecht Dürer as a designer of ex libris, and we now move on to safer ground, as we begin to find dates, and then soon names or monograms of engravers.