Bookplate Ink

Bookplates, or ex libris, are decorative labels, or stickers, to identify book ownership and for authors to sign.

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Donating books

GaborKorvinGabor Korvin has been a wonderful and supportive customer of Bookplate Ink’s for many years, during which time he has ordered several thousand bookplates. Like many bookplate customers, he is devoted to one design; in his case, design B208, or “The Bookworm.” This is an adaptation of German Romanticist painter/poet Carl Spitzweg’s famous satirical painting, which was originally published as a bookplate by the Etchcraft Company, then introduced by the Antioch Bookplate Company in the 1950s. Many people refer to it simply as “the man on the ladder.”Gabor_book

Korvin is a professor at King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals in Saudi Arabia. I wasn’t aware until last year that he is an avid collector of Oriental books and has been donating his collection to The Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, where he was presented with their Teleki Medal in 2010. Korvin has donated more than 2000 volumes to the library and continues to send them rare and important books every week.

I was thrilled to hear that librarians at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences have told Korvin that readers frequently ask “Has any new book arrived with the old man on the ladder”?

Korvin_booksI asked how he goes about obtaining these rare books. He wrote, “There are so many steps of getting a new Oriental book: it starts from months or years of search, then finding it in auction lists, bidding, winning, waiting for weeks for its arrival, picking up the parcel at the Post Office, carefully opening it, reading some pages at random, but it only becomes really mine when I put in my bookplate. It has become such an important habit with me that I never travel without taking a few dozen of them.”

 

Bookplates and real books for Christmas

This time of year is very busy at Bookplate Ink. We receive many, many orders for bookplates to be given as Christmas gifts. Amidst all the Christmas craziness, many customers take the time to write wonderful e-mails and comments in their orders. I’m convinced that bookplate owners are some of the sweetest people in the world.

Recently a customer named Auban placed an order for two sets of bookplates to be given as gifts at Christmas. In the comment section of the order form, she wrote, “For my mother and my daughter. My mom just found a book with a bookplate in it from her father, who passed away when she was 5. It meant so much to her. I wanted to allow her to share that with my girls.”

This is the type of comment that makes everything else worthwhile. When I picture Auban’s mother finding that bookplate from a father she lost at such a young age, it brings tears to my eyes.

I wrote to Auban that when I started printing bookplates, I had no idea that they would mean so much to so many people. Auban wrote back: “My younger sister passed away last year and I have found books of hers with the bookplates we got for Christmas one year. It has been such a tangible connection to family members we’ve lost recently and long ago.” More tears.

I know many Kindles and Nooks will be given as Christmas presents this year. But nothing beats the beauty and intimacy of a physical book (especially with a bookplate inside!) as a present. I was very encouraged to read an article in the New York Times this past Sunday saying that publishers are adding high quality and decorative touches to book covers and endpapers to encourage the pleasure of owning physical books as opposed to e-books. As I know from this business, there are still plenty of people reading and enjoying real books in their personal library.

Some weeks are more rewarding than others. This past weekend, I attended a party for a 90-year-old former neighbor and had an unexpected experience.

As many of you already know, Bookplate Ink primarily prints bookplate designs from the Antioch Bookplate Company, founded in 1926 by Ernest Morgan and Walter Kahoe while they were students at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. The company later became the Antioch Company as they expanded their offerings to calendars, journals, etc.

Bookplate Ink, while still a part of the Yellow Springs News, our local newspaper, worked alongside the Antioch Company for many years, personalizing their bookplates. When the Antioch Company stopped printing bookplates and later, closed, Bookplate Ink, now its own company, acquired most of their designs so they would still be available to customers.

At the party I attended, I met a woman from Yellow Springs named Jan. As we chatted, I told her about my business, Bookplate Ink, and she responded that she worked for the Antioch Bookplate Company years ago. I asked what she did there, to which she replied — sheepishly — that she used to paste bookplates into their catalogs. I told her that my business still has some of these catalogs and I’d love to show them to her. Later, I slipped away from the party and brought back two of the catalogs, both from the 1950s.

This was a magical moment. I was taken aback by how surprised and happy Jan was to see these catalogs. She was looking through them and mentioned that she still remembers the bookplates her mother had. When I asked which design it was, she said it had a tree. I pointed out the design shown on the right page in the photo above, which she recognized it as her mother’s bookplates. Her eyes teared up and she paused while she remembered her mom and the significance of her bookplates.

That bookplate uses artwork created by Robert Whitmore, a Yellow Springs artist who created many wonderful bookplate designs for Antioch Bookplate Company in the early days. We are still printing a version of the bookplate shown here, design B252, one of our most popular. Robert Whitmore’s artwork is special to me as I’m friends with his son, Jon Whitmore, who still lives in Yellow Springs on what had been his dad’s property. And I love having a small part in the history of bookplates and their meaning in people’s lives. Also amazing and fun for me, personally, is recognizing some of the names printed on the bookplates in these catalogs, as many of the descendants still live in our small village.

Two days later, Bookplate Ink received a very special testimonial from a longtime customer, George Pilcher. George has ordered several bookplate designs over the years, beginning in 2012. This is what he wrote after receiving his latest order:
I have used Antioch Bookplates (now printed by Bookplate Ink) for over 65 years, and have received compliments from friends and fellow readers for all of those years. (I have many different styles, but my favorite has always been B253 – BOOKS BY OPEN WINDOW WITH EX LIBRIS TEXT), which I first began using in the mid-1950s.) My personal library (which has spilled, over the years, from the actual library room to the sitting room, the living room, the family room, and the loft, with other volumes scattered among the various bedrooms) comprises several thousand volumes, and they are all “plated by Antioch.” The owners of Bookplate Ink did readers everywhere a great service when they took over the Antioch catalogue, and their products are, if anything, even finer and higher-quality than those from the old Antioch Press, founded in 1926. It is absolutely wonderful that the owners of Bookplate Ink have chosen to make and sell products of the highest quality at an affordable price. In an age of “throwaway,” it is great to know that these splendid bookplates will be in my equally splendid book collection for as long as the books last. My hope is that many future generations will read books from my collection, and will be pleased to see the artistic statement of Antioch and the commitment to excellent workmanship of Bookplate Ink, when they open each volume.

Needless to say, this message made my day. Not only was George very complimentary to Bookplate Ink, but he so aptly describes his love of books and the significance of bookplates. George has ordered several designs, including the one designed for chemists by Dutch woodcut artist, Thijs Mauve chemist, M604, shown at the right. George requested this printed in brown ink. But he says his favorite is still B253, shown above.

https://bookplateink.com/19344-2/

Bookplates have personal meaning

Traditionally, bookplates consist of small, personalized artwork that are pasted into books as marks of ownership. They are usually placed on the endpaper. As stated by the Princeton Architectural Press and shown online at the Literary Hub website, “A bookplate is sometimes called an ex libris in reference to the Latin inscription meaning ‘from the books of’ found on most examples. The earliest known example, dated to 1480, is the bookplate of Hilprand Brandenburg, a Carthusian monk.”

Here at Bookplate Ink, we print many personalized bookplates by adding names to our own designs, most of which originated with Antioch Bookplate Company. But we also print numerous bookplates  with custom artwork that customers submit. These designs often have very personal elements and meaning. We asked a few customers about their bookplate artwork and found the answers very interesting.

Ed Poliakoff, a Columbia, South Carolina, attorney whose hobbies include collecting antique South Carolina maps and stewarding family artifacts, writes about his bookplate as follows: “My bookplate, composed in a few iterations with Karen Gardner’s patient assistance, has several personal design elements, including my home state’s outline and palmetto state tree; a crest that is colored and shaped to invoke my undergraduate college and placed on the area of my hometown; a loblolly pine to represent the trees around my childhood home; a stylized border to invoke some of my favorite 19th century South Carolina maps; and with space above and below the images for placement of labels identifying the maps, books and other objects to which the bookplates are attached.

Dr. Efrain Miranda, the CEO of Clinical Anatomy Associates, Inc. and devoted bibliophile, wrote about his bookplates in the blog “A Moment in History.”: “My bookplate, also known as an Ex-Libris, is a design based on images by Andreas Vesalius. It also contains the portraits of four famous anatomists: William Harvey, Andreas Vesalius, Adrian Van Der Spigelius, and Bernhard Siegfried Albinus, all of them highlighted in our blog “A Moment in History”. The bookplate was printed by Bookplate Ink, a USA-based company. They are self-adhesive, acid-free, and very high quality paper. I strongly support and recommend them.” There are several fascinating posts on the blog about books and bookplates, including https://clinicalanatomy.com/mtd/842-interesting-discovery-in-an-ex-libris.

We have printed the elegant, square-shaped bookplate shown on the left several times over the years to be placed in the books at Bill and Marcia Levy’s library.

Marcia wrote: “The plate was designed by our daughter, the ceramicist Rachel Levy, who was influenced by the feather etched on the sign of our main lodge on our ranch in western Colorado. The sign’s design graphic with hanging feather was done in the 1980s by Nick Zarkades of Seattle, Washington. We LOVE our bookplates.”

 

 

Ryan Lawson, an interior designer, had his custom design printed with us by letterpress. This striking design by German artist David Schmitt, has a lot of personal meaning for Ryan. In his own words: “I’ve always loved falcons and the art of falconry — my grandmother taught me all about birds of prey when I was younger. And, ever since I moved to NYC in 2004, when I visit the Metropolitan Museum, my first stop is this incredible sculpture. And, so I thought it would be a good idea to base my bookplates on that piece.”