X Ex Libris

Ex Libris

Books are often cherished possessions, and down through time owners have marked them with their signature or by a specially commissioned label called an ex libris.

Ex libris (the same term applies in the plural) are small, printed labels pasted into the inside front boards of books; they are also known as bookplates. Although occasionally found in the 15th century, such plates only came into wider usage in the late 1600s. The College has two such early ex libris. The first bears the name of Robert Hodges, a student at Pembroke College, Cambridge, between 1696 and 1704. His ex libris is in the ‘Old Armorial’ style, a family coat of arms rendered with Baroque exuberance. The other is more inventive, showing a florid monogram inscribed on a scroll hanging from a tabernacle made of books. Dated 1699, it belonged to William Hewer, Samuel Pepys’s close friend and amanuensis on the Navy Board. During the 18th century, designs for bookplates proliferated. A mid-century ex libris belonging to John Peyto Verney, 14th Baron Willoughby de Broke, shows French influence; but the 17th Baron, Robert John, preferred the style known as ‘Plain Armorial’. Dating from the 1770s is an example of a ‘spade shield with festoon and beaded teatray’, the ex libris of Richard Bendy, a sea captain. From the 1780s comes the bookplate of Sir Alexander Cumming-Gordon of Altyr, whose great house would later provide the premises for Gordonstoun School. The style of the ex libris belonging to Frances Mary Richardson Currer dates from the 1820s and takes the unusual form of a counter-curved lozenge. Frances was renowned as the greatest female bibliophile of her time with a library of 20,000 books. She was, moreover, a noted philanthropist who funded many charitable concerns, including the school for daughters of clergy in Lancashire attended by the Brontës. She also gifted much-needed money to the girls’ father Patrick after the death of his wife. It was for these reasons that Charlotte published Jane Eyre in 1847 under the nom de plume ‘Currer Bell’.

Another plate with literary connections belonged to Richard Brinsley Sheridan, celebrated author of The School for Scandal and The Rivals. The College has no fewer than 70 examples, one pasted into each volume of his splendid Oeuvres Complètes of Voltaire. Another Irishman, William Horatio Crawford, presented his arms in a bevelled shield. Crawford, a brewer from Cork, collected art and books, and endowed an art college bearing his name. His finer books were auctioned off by Sotheby’s in 1891, and one lot was the College’s copy of the Aldine edition of Pliny’s letters from 1508, the oldest printed book in the collection.

With the onset of the Gothic Revival, ex libris took on a medieval appearance, such as the ‘Seal Armorial’ of Frederick Warburton Dunston. There followed the ‘Golden Age’ of the late-Victorian and Edwardian period, represented by the bookplates of Robert Heriot Glen and Reginald Huth. Other bookplates went down the pictorial route, with images like the melancholy fool shown in the ex libris of Frederick Locker. Locker, who married the daughter of Lord Elgin, acquirer of the Parthenon Marbles, was a poet, wit and raconteur, and an intimate of Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, Kate Greenaway and other literary figures; he was, moreover, renowned for his book collection. Also happiest amongst books was ‘A. K.’, recently discovered to be the cipher of Arthur Kay, a Glaswegian businessman and friend of James McNeill Whistler. His Arts and Crafts-influenced bookplate was engraved by his wife, Katherine Cameron, one of the ‘Glasgow Girls’ group, and a contributor of illustrations to the famous fin de siècle periodical, The Yellow Book. It shows three bees glossed with a maxim from the epicurean philosopher Lucretius: ‘As bees sip at every flower in the meadow, so too will I feed on every one of your golden sayings’. A. K.’s ex libris is laid carefully over that of an earlier owner, James Smith of Jordanhill, a wealthy 18th-century Glasgow merchant and geologist. His bookplate is the only example in the collection of a so-called ‘Chippendale’ ex libris, an asymmetrical Rococo design inspired by the work of Thomas Chippendale, the cabinetmaker.