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Weems has described Washington's bookplate thus: "Argent, two bar gules in chief, three mullets of the second. Crest, a raven with wings, indorsed proper, issuing out of a ducal coronet, or." Mary Ball was the second wife of Augustine Washington. In his will the good man describes this marriage, evidently with a wink, as "my second Venture."
It proved a very old copy of the Psalms, a book that some one had once read often, for its pages were worn not only by time but by constant turning. Opening to the front, Win searched for a bookplate. As Win replaced the volume a paper slipped from its pages.
The collector of bookplates searches for his treasures. Some talk of the vandalism of the collector of ex-libris, but they must remember that it is quite easy to remove a bookplate without injuring the volume, and there are many worthless books. The name labels or bookplates found in English libraries range from the early dated plates of the close of the seventeenth century to the present day.
Whenever I see a book that bears its owner's plate I feel myself obligated to treat that book with special consideration. It carries with it a certificate of its master's love; the bookplate gives the volume a certain status it would not otherwise have.
Back home books as well bound as these would have carried a personal bookplate or at least the written name of the owner, but the fly leaf was bare. They had the look of well-read, cherished volumes but no mark of possession. "You have perhaps read these?" Stein asked. Drew picked up The Three Musketeers. "Not likely to forget this one," he said, grinning.
The serpent is in the garden. Time will do the work." The allusion was to Cooper's bookplate, a red serpent about a golden staff. "Not that I leave it altogether to time," says Cooper. "Once I have handed over the book to Hobson, I make it a point to call on him at least once a week. Do you see why? Left to himself, Hobson might soon outlive the first flush of his enthusiasm for that book.
'Od's bodkins' is a ladylike form, and 'Od's possles' a variety I met in the British Museum. Every gentleman once upon a time aspired to have his own particular grace curse, just as he liked to have his crest, and his bookplate, and his characteristic signature. It fluttered pleasantly into his conversation, as Mr. Whistler's butterfly comes into his pictures a signature and a delight.
Sentiment is seldom in place, but on a bookplate it is peculiarly odious. To paste in each book an invitation to steal it, as Grolier seems to have done, is foolish; but so also is it to invoke, as some book-plates do, curses upon the heads of all subsequent possessors as if any man who wanted to add a volume to his collection would be deterred by such braggadocio. But this is a digression.
Alas! he will do nothing of the kind, not, at least, if he is one of those in whom the old Adam of the bookstalls still breathes. A public library must always be an abomination. To enjoy a book, you must own it. 'John Jones his book, that is the best bookplate. I have never admired the much-talked-of bookplate of Grolier, which, in addition to his own name, bore the ridiculous advice Et Amicorum.
But Burke's "Peerage" lends no light, and the careful, unprejudiced, patient search of recent years finds only the blood of the common people. Washington himself said that in his opinion the history of his ancestors "was of small moment and a subject to which, I confess, I have paid little attention." He had a bookplate and he had also a coat of arms on his carriage-door. The Reverend Mr.
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