You are here
قراءة كتاب Book-Plates
تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"
href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@41142@[email protected]#SALES" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">139
BOOK-PLATES
CHAPTER I
One of the most useful works which has yet appeared in the journal of the Ex Libris Society—a society intended to promote the study of book-plates—is a compilation by Mr. H. W. Fincham and Mr. J. Roberts Brown, A Bibliography of Book-Plates, arranged chronologically. A glance at this compilation emphasises the truth of the statement, just made, as to the scantiness of recorded information on book-plates prior to the year 1880; it also shows what a great deal about them has been written since.
Writing to Notes and Queries in 1877, Dr. Jackson Howard, whose collection is now one of the largest in England, says that he began collecting forty years before that date, and that the nucleus of his own collection was one made by a Miss Jenkins at Bath in 1820. It is probably, therefore, to this lady that we should attribute the honour of being the first collector of book-plates, for their own sake. No doubt the collector of engravings admitted into his portfolios book-plates worthy a place there as interesting engravings, for stray examples are often found in such collections as that formed in the seventeenth century by John Bagford, the biblioclast, which is now in the British Museum. No doubt, too, heraldic painters or plate engravers collected book-plates as specimens of heraldry, but this was not collecting them as book-plates—viz. as illustrations of the custom of placing marks of ownership in books, which, I take it, was evidently Miss Jenkins's object.[1]
Still, though little was written on the subject of book-plates prior to 1880, it by no means follows that for some years before that date there had not been a considerable number of persons who took an interest in the subject. The fact is, that the book-plate collector of earlier days was wiser in his generation than are those of his kind to-day. He kept his 'hobby' to himself, and was thus enabled to indulge it economically. My father had a small collection; and I


