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The early Harvard College library plate was a large and fine piece of engraving by Hurd. The Harvard Library had some few of this fine engraved label printed in red ink, and placed in the rarer books of the library as a reminder that the works containing the rubricated book-plates were not to be drawn out by students.
Some French book-plates aim at humor or caricature. One familiar example represents an old book-worm mounted on a tall ladder in a library, profoundly absorbed in reading, and utterly unconscious that the room beneath him is on fire.
Men have their book-plates and stamp their library volumes, why not a gun design? As many sportsmen scarcely see their guns for three-fourths of the year, it is possible to understand that the gun becomes a killing machine merely to them, to be snatched up and thrown aside the instant its office is over.
There were friendly fellows who heaved big lumps of clay upon huge nail-studded scantlings, and nice little girls who designed book-plates, and more mature ones who painted miniatures, and many earnest, earnest persons of both sexes who were hurrying, hurrying ahead on their wet canvases so that the next exhibition might not be incomplete by reason of lacking a "Smith," a "Jones," a "Robinson."
Those who deal with modern collections or make collections of their own a thing still possible for quite modest purses, in spite of the inflated prices which the great books command are not absolved from the study of sale catalogues; that they will pay attention to book-plates, bindings, and names of owners, I need not repeat.
"Read Slowly Pause Frequently Think Seriously Finger Lightly Keep Cleanly Return Duly with the Corners of the Leaves NOT TURNED DOWN." The fashion of using book-plates was by no means so general among New England Puritans as among rich Virginians and New Yorkers and Pennsylvanian Quakers. Mr.
From this time, during many years, I saw him frequently, although, for a reason which it is not necessary to discuss here, he became seized with a deep dislike of the literary world and its doings, and I am not aware that he saw any literary man save myself and the late W. B. Scott, the bond between whom and himself was “book-plates”! Then he took to residing in the country.
Or Coleridge, who seldom went through the formality of asking leave, but borrowed armfuls of books in the absence of their legitimate owners! How are we to account for the presence of book-plates quite a pretty collection at times on the shelves of men who possess no such toys of their own? These words ate into my innocent soul, and lent a pang to the sweetness of possession.
W. F. Poole, then librarian of the Boston Athenaeum, which possesses most of the library authentically known to have been at Mount Vernon. John Adams and John Quincy Adams used book-plates, and James Monroe and John Tyler each had a plain name-label.
Foreign book-plates are, as a rule, heraldic in design, as are also the early American plates, representing the coat of arms or family crest of the owner of the books, with a motto of some kind. The fashion of collecting these owners' marks, as such, irrespective of the books containing them, is a recent and very possibly a passing mania.
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