Bookplates and Booksellers' Labels
The bookplate collection is arranged in two segments. One is
arranged alphabetically by the last name of the owner; the other
collection, institutional plates, is arranged alphabetically by the
name of the city in which the institution is located. The
collection was started by the Reverend Herbert E. Lombard in 1915,
and substantial acquisitions occurred within the following
decade. Additions to the collection are made quite frequently.
When a book with a new bookplate is acquired, a photocopy is made
and inserted into the collection with the provenance of the
bookplate. When the Society acquires duplicate volumes, any
bookplates are lifted from the duplicate volume and added to the
collection. There is no index to the collection by designer,
engraver, or printer, although Charles Dexter Allen's American
Bookplates (New York and London, 1894) does have a listing of
eighteenth-century bookplates that are signed by the engraver.
There is an annotated copy of this study housed with the collection
of bookplate literature. An article on the collection by Georgia
B. Barnhill appeared in the July 1989 issue of Bookplates in the
News, a publication of the American Society of Bookplate Designers
and Collectors.
A recent addition to the bookplate collection was the gift of
Dorothy Sturgis Harding, consisting of preliminary drawings,
proofs, miscellaneous sketches, and some printing blocks for the
plates that she herself had designed. Her collection joins similar
ones of Edwin D. French and Sidney Smith and others that were
described by Clarence Brigham. Although Brigham suggested that AAS
would continue to collect twentieth-century plates, this has not
been the case.
Another collection that grows in the same manner as the
bookplate collection is the group of booksellers' labels. Arranged
alphabetically on index cards, these labels (over 1,500 of them)
have been acquired from collectors and book dealers over the years.
In recent years, it has become routine to photocopy any labels or
binders' tickets in volumes and add these to the file, along with
information on the provenance of the label. This small but
expanding collection provides a source for the names of binders in
major urban and rural centers and serves as an index, albeit a very
partial one, to signed bindings in the Society's collection. It
also includes references to trade cards. A number of these labels
were reproduced in volume 82 of the Proceedings (1972) with a brief
introductory note by Marcus A. McCorison.
- Georgia B. Barnhill, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts
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Farminton Village Library bookplate
Bookplate of Sylvester D. Russell
For current information on the cataloging status of this and
other AAS collections, choose "Collection Access" below.
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