Book-Plates

by William John Hardy

There is a curious advertisement, quoted by Thomas Moule in his Bibliotheca Heraldica, of a certain Joseph Barber, a Newcastle-on-Tyne 'bookseller, music and copper-plate publisher,' who, in 1742, resided in 'Humble's Buildings.' In that year he engraved the 'Equestrian Statue of King James [II.],' which once stood in the Sandhill Market. If a moment's digression be allowed, the history of this statue is worth telling. On 16th March 1685, the Town Council voted £800 for the erection of 'a figure of His Majesty in a Roman habit, on a capering horse, in copper, as big as the figure of His Majesty, King Charles I., at Charing Crosse, on a pedestal of black marble.' A certain Mr. William Larson executed it; Sir Christopher Wren expressed his approval, and everybody was very pleased, for a year or two. But popular feeling soon changed in Newcastle, as elsewhere, and the prevalence of sentiments which threw the king off his throne threw his metal representation into the Tyne, where it rested till fished out to be melted down and used to make a set of church bells. The drawing of the luckless statue was safe in the keeping of Sir Hans Sloane; and from this, Barber made his engraving, which he sold for 5s. The fact that in 1742, three years before the second Scotch rebellion, this Newcastle printseller found it worth while to issue the engraving at all, is not without political significance. With his engraving, Barber issued two large plates of the arms of all the subscribers to it, each coat of arms being 1¾ inches in length, and 1¼ inches in breadth; and a few years later, it seems to have occurred to him that he might turn an honest penny by cutting up these large sheets of the subscribers' arms, so that each coat of arms became a separate plate. Having done this, he issued an advertisement to the subscribers, in which he sets forth that he is 'the sole proprietor of each of their plates,' and is willing to part with it, to the lady or gentleman whose arms are engraved thereon, 'together with one hundred prints of it on a good paper,' for the modest sum of half-a-crown. These plates, suggests Mr. Barber, might be advantageously used as what we now call book-plates, and he continues: 'The design of this proposal is a useful and necessary embellishment, and a remedy against losing books by lending, or having them stolen; by pasting one print on the inside of the cover of each book, you have the owner's name, coat of arms, and place of abode; a thing so useful and the charge so easy, 'tis hoped will meet with encouragement. To have a plate engraved will cost 10s. 6d.'

From all which it may be inferred that Mr. Joseph Barber thought—or wanted other people to think—that the idea of using a book-plate was his own. Newcastle people, in 1743, must have been very unobservant of the habits of their neighbours if they believed Mr. Barber; for the fashion of using a book-plate—which in England came in some forty years before—was by that time general throughout the country. That some of the subscribers accepted the offer, and got their 'hundred plates on a good paper' for half-a-crown, is demonstrated by the existence of copies of the plates published with the 'equestrian statue,' being still found in books, doing duty as book-plates. Very poor productions they are, reflecting but slight credit on the designer or engraver. But what Joseph lacked in art, he atoned for in enterprise; we see this in his ingenious way of getting rid of his old copper-plates, and the postscript to his advertisement demonstrates the fact even more plainly, for on a day near at hand, the advertisement tells us, was to be fought, at a neighbouring cock-pit, 'a Welsh main,' and the prize was to be nothing less than one of the advertiser's engravings, 'a pretty piece of work, worthy the observation of the curious.' If the term book-plate had been known in Barber's day, it would probably have found its way into his advertisement, which is clumsy from the want of a word to express the very thing he is advertising.

William Stephens, who engraved a good many book-plates in his time, could find no better expression than 'print of your arms' to describe the 800 book-plates which, for half-a-guinea, he sent to Dr. Samuel Kerrich, the Shakespearian student, in 1754.

Horace Walpole, again, would, I think, have used the phrase 'book-plate' had he known it. In his Catalogue of Engravers—the edition of 1771—he speaks of George Vertue having engraved 'a plate to put in Lady Oxford's books'; and in his Anecdotes of Painting, he refers to the 'plate' which Hogarth 'used for his books.' One of his own book-plates—that engraved soon after 1791—Walpole describes as his 'seal': Sigillum Horatii Comitis de Orford; but this phrase is, I think, used simply because the book-plate itself is the representation of a mediæval seal. Bartolozzi—giving, in 1796, a receipt for a book-plate which he had just completed—refers to it as a 'ticket-plate' (see [p. 94]); but he was a foreigner, and may not have known the English name for such things, for we have seen that, some five years before, Ireland refers to Hogarth's 'book-plate.' Charles James Fox, in a note, dated at Leicester on 2nd August 1801, speaks of the 'book-plate' of his great-great-grandfather, Sir Stephen Fox.

But, though the phrase 'book-plate' may have been occasionally used at the close of the last century and the beginning of the present, it was then by no means widely used; and although the writer quoted on page 6 refers in 1823 to what are 'generally called' book-plates, William Wadd, in 1827, can find no direct term by which to refer to these marks of ownership. Speaking in Mems., Maxims, and Memoirs, he says: 'In the Library of the Royal College of Surgeons, there are many volumes, formerly the property of the celebrated Douglas, having his arms embellished with various kinds of surgical instruments, which was by no means an uncommon practice, as in the Library of the College of Physicians there are many examples of volumes where the former possessor has not only blazoned his own arms, but borrowed the arms of the college and super-added supporters, as Apollo, Mercury, Æsculapius, and his daughter Hygeia.'

Lord Byron, too, did not, I fancy, know the word 'book-plate' in its now-used sense; writing to a fair admirer, who had apparently designed one of these for him, he says: 'I received the arms, my dear Miss ——, and am very much obliged to you for the trouble you have taken. It is impossible I should have any fault to find with them. The sight of the drawing gives me great pleasure for a double reason: in the first place they will ornament my books, and in the next they convince me that you have not entirely forgot me.'[3]

So the term book-plate is only a century old, and the fashion of collecting book-plates much more modern still; but the use of book-plates is really of respectable antiquity, and is a matter on which we may now appropriately speak. Whether, in the first instance, the use of book-plates was suggested by a desire to commemorate a gift, or as a mark of ownership, seems to be a matter on which a variety of opinions exist. Some of the earliest mechanically produced book-plates are certainly commemorative of gifts (see [p. 114]); but I think we must accept as book-plates, to all intents and purposes, the six fourteenth century examples mentioned by Herr Warnecke in his Die Deutschen Bücherzeichen, an excellent work on German book-plates. These are heraldic coloured drawings on the parchment leaves of Italian manuscripts, which also bear an inscription of possession by the particular individuals whose arms are represented.

But, of course, the real necessity for book-plates, whatever may have been their original use, began when the printing-press gave to the world not two nor three, but a hundred or more copies of a particular book. Then it was that the different owners needed to distinguish their respective copies of a work; for the professional book-borrower, who would gladly have retained the manuscript volume lent to him by an unsuspecting friend, could he have done so without his crime being detected, doubtless saw in the multitude of copies a greater opportunity of carrying out his nefarious designs. The existence of book-plates is, therefore, largely due to the literary enthusiast who amasses a library by retaining volumes received on loan; the inscriptions on some of the earlier book-plates prove this to be so.

The earliest printed book-plates are certainly German, and there is little doubt that some of these are nearly contemporary with the very early printed books on the oak covers of which they may still be found pasted. By the commencement of the sixteenth century book-plates were frequently fine examples of the wood-engraver's art. Albert Dürer himself designed book-plates; and of these, one of the most elaborate and the best known is that of his friend Bilibald Pirckheimer, the Nuremberg jurist, whose portrait he engraved on copper in 1524. The book-plate is still earlier.