Art Deco Bookplates

Some of the plates shown are probably "universal" The one for David Sarvis was done by The Antioch Bookplate company

Book Cover designed by Mac Harshberger from a book about art deco dust jackets.

It is scheduled for publication in 2012.

For further details contact the author Tom Boss 

 TGBoss@Gmail.com

 Justice Potter Stewart said something like I don't know how to define pornography but I know it when I see it..That's my feeling about art deco.I can't quite define it but I can recognize it (sort of).

Rebecca Eschliman said..

The Sarvis bookplate was actually designed by him. David Sarvis was an Antioch College student who designed about a dozen universal bookplates for the Antioch Bookplate Company in the 1940s.

It was quite common for names of employees to show up on universal bookplates in the sample catalogs in order to demonstrate type styles available for personalization.

The "Alfred Gordon" bookplate was also a universal sold by Antioch Bookplate a few times in the early 1930s (and once for some reason in 1950), but there are no notes about who designed it.

Thank you Rebecca

I believe Carlton Noyes was a writer.

 The artist who did the Wickliffe and Betty Rose plate shown below used a cipher that looks like MFW
Does anyone out there recognize it?

 John Vassos did the plates shown below when he worked at R.C.A.  Here is a link with some biographical information about him:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Vassos

 The Leonard Edwards plate was done by Sidney Hunt

About two years ago I wrote about Mac Harshberger.Here is a link to that posting:
http://bookplatejunkie.blogspot.com/2009/04/mac-harshbergervisiting-twilight-zone.html

Photo from Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Mac Harshberger  Exhibit Catalog
written by Karin Breuer

Good fortune smiled upon me this week.I obtained another plate by him . It is on rice paper and was designed for his sister Kay around 1916.If any of you have art deco bookplates in your collection and want them added to this posting send me  a scan(s) and I will try to include include them..See you next Sunday.
Bookplatemaven@hotmail.com

Let The Buyer Beware

I have listed a very important and scarce bookplate from the library of Frederic Remington on Ebay.
Here is a link:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Bookplate-Exlibris-Frederic-Remington-/310359177908?pt=Art_Prints&hash=item4842d93ab4

A word of caution- There are at least two dealers on Ebay who are selling scans of  bookplates on a buy it now basis .You have to scroll down quite a bit before you are told these are reproductions.I suspect many buyers are so anxious to buy what seems to be a fantastic bargain that they never scroll down far enough to see the tricky wordcraft..Here is an example of what I mean:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Bookplate-Frederic-Sackrider-Remington-/300620704708?pt=Art_Photo_Images&hash=item45fe63ebc4

Like I say , let the buyer beware.

Flying Blind In Boston

 Paste paper design

 Gilded Leather Bookplate dated 1763

 6th edition of Palm Garden with gilded gauffred edges

I spent two frantic days in Boston attending two shows and have several purchases to show you.
The most interesting item was bought on instinct.  I am a babe in the woods when it comes to 18th century German  books.When I got home I did find a copy on the German Ebay site .which recently sold for 13 Euros;
http://www.ebay.de/itm/Himmlisch-Palm-Gaertlein-1762-JB-/350421101034
The listing did not mention any of the extra touches which I sensed were unique. Fortunately, fellow collector Richard Schimmelpfeng is very knowledgeable and was very helpful in explaining some of the finer points about the extra touches which were added to the book.
.The design .on the end papers is called paste paper Think of finger painting.
Here is a more detailed explanation :
http://cool.conservation-us.org/don/dt/dt2505.html
The edges are gilded gauffered. Here is a detailed explanation of the process.
http://cool.conservation-us.org/don/dt/dt1504.html


My original intent was to do some research and ultimately sell the book .Now that I have examined it more carefully my inclination is  to have it restored by an expert and keep it.
If you have some useful information about the book  please send it to me.
Bookplatemaven@hotmail.com

 I have a few golf themed bookplates and this one came with the following dealer notation:
T.S. Adams went to Yale, Johns Hopkins but mostly. played golf.
The calling card shown below came  from Tom Boss. I am assuming Mr Waterhouse was an engineer for the Grand Trunk Railroad,
http://www.sullboat.com/GT.htm

American Indian themed bookplates are always of interest and this one for Charles H. Glidden has lots of clues in the design  about the owner . He was a Mason, a Republican and was involved with product which is trade marked "fasteners that fasten".

Many years ago I purchased a glass eye at the Maryland Microscope show. It sits in a drawer and every once in a while I look at it and it looks back at me.Fellow collector/dealer Tom Boss brought some ephemera to the show and you guessed it one of the items related to glass eyes.How could I not purchase it ?

That's about all for now. See you soon.

This Week in Bookplates 11/6/2011

Here is a link to an excellent new blog about book collecting:
http://www.bookcollectinghistory.com/ 

I purchased Forgotten Bookmarks  by Michael Popek earlier this week. The author has worked in his family's bookstore for over twenty years and has chronicled in a very orderly fashion much of  the ephemera 
 (no bookplates mentioned) he found hidden in books.
I would call this a whipped cream book. It is light , frothy and easy to digest .It would be a nice gift for a bookseller or a lover of old book stores.
You can get more details by following this link:

http://www.forgottenbookmarks.com/

Speaking of old bookstores I was in New Paltz, New York yesterday for a family get together and much to my delight and surprise I found an old fashioned (in the best sense of the words) bookstore The stock was well organized, affordable and the owner was very helpful..
Yes, I came home with some nice bookplates and interesting ephemera.

I also received a book  from the Bookplate Society this week It is, as with all of their publications very well written  and reasonably priced.

 The price is £14/$22.50 or £9/$14.50 if you join The Bookplate Society (plus postage.)

 Payment by PayPal or dollar check. 

Copies may be ordered by email to   editor (AT )bookplatesociety.org 

Here is some further information about the book :

Gleeson White (1851-1898) – Bookplate Artist and Luminary

The Ex Libris Society flourished in Britain between 1891 and 1908. About halfway through its life, Gleeson White, who had been a member but not much involved for reasons of artistic preference,  prepared a Special Winter Number of The Studio for 1898-9.. It included a section on Modern British Bookplates and their Designers. White had founded The Studio in 1893, edited it for about a year, and remained a contributor of many articles on bookplates, also writing articles on art nouveau artist Robert Anning Bell and on etcher George W. Eve for the Ex Libris Journal. The British part of the now scarce 1898-9 Winter Number has  been reprinted by The Bookplate Society, providing us with additional material – a biography of White, a short introduction, details of bookplates designed by and for White, and indexes to both the Winter Number and to other articles about bookplates in The Studio.

Born Joseph William White at Christchurch in the county of Hampshire, he went straight from grammar school to the Art Workers Guild in London, but by the age of 30 was back in Christchurch working as bookseller, stationer and organist. By 1890 he had adopted his mother Lydia’s maiden name Gleeson in place of his first names (which were also those of his father). He moved to New York City, where he conducted the Art Amateur for 1891 and 1892, then returned to England, founding in 1893 The Studio, An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art. His editorship lasted for less than a year, but he continued to write for it for the rest of his short life. Joining Messrs George Bell & Sons, he edited the Ex Libris Series, the Connoisseur Series, the Pageant and, with E.T. Strange, Bell’s Cathedral Series. He also published three editions of Practical Designing (1893-7), English Illustrations in the [Eighteen-] Sixties (1897) and four volumes of Master Painters of Great Britain (1897-8).  In November 1898, while enjoying a short holiday in Italy, he contracted typhoid fever, which proved fatal. Gleeson White died at the age of only 47. Fortunately for us, his major essay for the Special Winter Number was already in course of publication. We learn from a tribute in the Ex Libris Journal that he was an industrious worker, always genial, affable and helpful, full of art and art lore, well known as foremost in the decorative movement, and knew its history, development and occasional shams better than anyone of his day.

Quite unlike the Ex Libris Journal, which carried much heraldic and historical material, The StudioSpecial Winter Number was a comprehensive, well written and well illustrated overview of what was modern, with keen and exclusive focus on artists of the 1890s – Charles Ricketts, Cyril Goldie, Paul Woodroffe, Charles Robinson, D.Y. Cameron, John Williams, J.W. Simpson, Edmund New, J.J. Guthrie, Laurence Housman, William Nicholson, Robert Anning Bell, Gordon Craig, C.F.A. Voysey, E. Bengough Ricketts, Harold Nelson, Henry Ospovat, and sixty more. This publication illuminates our understanding of the art nouveau and other bookplate work of book illustrators and exlibris designers at the end of the nineteenth century.

The Studio Special Winter Number 1898-9, Modern British Bookplates and their Designers is reproduced at 92.5% original size in The Bookplate Journal, Vol.7 #1 (cover date March 2009 but only published in 2011). 

Gleeson White

 By Friday 11/11 I will be in Boston attending  two excellent shows:
If you are in the area and have bookplates for sale or trade please contact me
Bookplatemaven@hotmail.com

See you again next Sunday or Monday .

Collector Profile Luigi Bergomi

Luigi Bergomi

By Lev Alimov

By Walter Valentini

By Toni Pecoraro

By Yuri Borovitsky





By Viola Tycz

As a child, I remember I was an active, though quite disorganized, collector: football players cards primarily but also coins, a herbarium and so on. As I grew older, I started reading a lot of books: collecting them became a natural extension. At a certain point in my life I thought I had read “all the books ever being written”; a friend of mine showed me some reproductions of graphic works by a German artist member of the Wandervogel. The subject of the wayfarer intrigued me a lot and that time and still does it now. I suddenly decided to utilize one of Sluyterman’s images as my first ex libris, which I had printed in offset in 1985.

I then inundated the mailboxes of all the collectors to whom I proudly sent several copies of my first ex libris. The response was overwhelming and, as the story goes, the rest is history…

I consider the contemporary ex libris a way to commission high-end “personal” art from an artist. One of the things I find fascinating about ex libris is the fact that their size and “canon” often force the artist to make an extra effort in compressing, within a somewhat defined and generally small range, a shared story and inspiration, creativity, great technique and calligraphy: defying the general perception present on the marketplace, this unique aspect (that is, the intimate shared introspection between artist and patron), if anything, makes an ex libris even more valuable than a corresponding free graphic, at least to my eyes.
Commissioning a new edition in my name is often a long process: I rarely attend meetings and congresses and as a result correspond with the artists and patiently wait for their creation. I normally request and receive a first proof or a sketch without name engraved on the plate; upon my approval the final edition gets shipped to me. Sometimes I find this process too impersonal because it does not let me meet directly with the artist but living in the U.S., a place  distant from the ex libris artists more in demand, does not facilitate the direct interaction I used to have with them while living in Europe.

I have been collecting for over twenty five years and keep accumulating new prints in a disorderly fashion. In addition to a well represented panorama of the work by contemporary artists, I also have an equally important group of “Golden Age” ex libris and Heraldic ones, purchased on the antiquarian markets or exchanged.
Unlike other forms of collecting, with a limited and clear goal (that is, the coins or stamps issued from a country or during a limited period of time), ex libris collecting is by definition “infinite”: color variants, plates with or without remarques, names added after the first run of prints and so on make the overall activity of collecting them essentially unlimited.

Throughout my twenty five years of collecting I had the fortune of meeting in person and getting to know many fabulous artists, some unfortunately no longer with us and most still active and in their prime; It’s virtually impossible, and unfair, to single out THE print maker who struck me the most; what I admire the most in any given artist opus list is continuity, solidity. I don’t particularly care for artists with “mountains” and “valleys”(that is, artists who might excel every now and then but who often produce too many editions and cannot keep up with the quality): less is better, in most cases.
When I was living in Italy I attended pretty regularly regional meetings; since 1990, after moving to the US, my attendance has dropped considerably. Each meeting attended, with the exception of the Boston congress in 2000 where somehow I played “at home”, is a luxury which I try to deserve by maximizing my exchanges and meetings with friends, artists and collectors.

I am always interested in exchanging ex libris, old and new, and can be reached at
lbergomi(at)gmail.com

An Anglo-American Bookplate & A Mystery Plate

Does anyone out there recognize this mystery plate?

 I got this theatrical plate recently but it is a mystery. Your help with identification would be appreciated.
Lew Jaffe
Bookplatemaven@hotmail.com

Artist's Initials on The Mystery Plate

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I purchased this Anglo-American bookplate and  to my delight Stephen Marsh had already done a good deal of research about the owner, Stephen Peach Peach.(No,this is not a typo)

 Mr.Marsh's silver crest database is also well worth a visit.
http://www.myfamilysilver.com/

The Article Below Was Written By Stephen Marsh

"In the course of building our database of family crests 
 I came across a delightful bookplate for a man by the name of Samuel Peach Peach. Initially interested because the crest was not one I could find in the main published directories, I became increasingly intrigued by his repeated surname.
A little research revealed a story that, with shades of Jane Austen, indicated some of the difficulties facing a prominent New York family in the run up to and during the War of Independence. Antique Silver is frequently engraved with armorials and these, often ignored, engravings are the key to unlocking the personal history of the item; which I find more interesting than the mere date and name of the maker.

Biography

He had been born Samuel Peach Cruger in 1767, the son of Henry Cruger Jr; who had the probably unique and certainly unrepeatable distinction of having been a Member of both the British Parliament and the New York Senate.

Henry Cruger Jr was born in New York in 1739 within months of his grandfather, John Cruger, taking office as Mayor of the city; a post in which he was to die in 1744. John Cruger had arrived from Northern Europe, possibly Denmark, in 1696 to join a trading firm part owned by a kinsman, becoming a partner in the firm in 1702. Co-incidentally a kinsman of my own, Viscount Cornbury (who had a penchant for cross dressing), was Governor of New York from 1701-08 and allegedly scandalised the colony by opening the New York legislature wearing a dress, with the words “I represent the Queen and in all respects I ought to represent her as faithfully as I can”. Was Mr Cruger one of my kinsman’s detractors?

Mercantile family

John Cruger’s business prospered and in 1712 he was elected Alderman for the Dock ward, an undoubtedly useful post for a ship owner, and one that he was to hold until becoming assistant Mayor in 1735. As was common with mercantile families, he despatched his sons to major trading locations; his son Henry (Sr) to the British trading port of Bristol, another son was sent to the West Indies whilst a third, John Cruger Jr, remained in New York (subsequently becoming Mayor of New York and Speaker of the Province of New York Assembly from 1767-1775, before, as a prominent British sympathiser, being proscribed as a “suspect person”).
In due course Henry Cruger Sr was to send his son Henry Cruger Jr to represent the firm in Bristol, where he married in 1765 the daughter of a successful linen merchant and banker, Samuel Peach. She died in 1767 and I wonder if that was in childbirth with Samuel Peach Cruger? Henry Jr soon became a member of the Bristol Council and Sheriff of Bristol before being elected in 1774 as the Whig member of Parliament for the city along with the noted political philosopher, Edmund Burke (who was also the agent for the Province of New York).

From Crugar to Peach

As a New Yorker by birth and a merchant involved in the transatlantic trade, Henry Jr was inevitably pre-occupied by one of the major political topics of the day: relations with the American Colonies. In his maiden speech he criticised the Tory administration of Lord North for worsening relations with the colonies and regularly complained that not enough was being done to support the more patriotic New York colonists, including his own family. But by the time he lost his seat in 1780 he had become a supporter of American independence. He served a year as Mayor of Bristol before being re-elected to the commons as an ally of William Pitt in 1784 where he continually urged reconciliation with the former American colonies. He left the commons in 1789 and returned to America in 1790 where he was elected to the New York Senate for a single, four year term, during which he urged reconciliation with Great Britain.
His son Samuel remained in England, having inherited his maternal grandfather’s considerable estate (including Tockington) in 1788 and, in accordance with his grandfathers wishes, changed his surname from Cruger to Peach. He married Clarissa Partridge the same year and the arms on the bookplate are those of Partridge impaling Peach. Thus we have an example of a Partridge in a Peach (family) tree."

Stephen Marsh
http://www.myfamilysilver.com/

I Learned A New Word Today--Phaleristics

From time to time I check  Google's Blog Search  and more often than not I find nothing of interest.
This morning I found two postings on bookplates and Phaleristics in Portugal..
Here is a link to satisfy your curiosity.

http://www.faleristica.org/?s=bookplate

I will be attending a library book sale in Princeton, New Jersey on Friday .
Here is a link:
http://www.princetonlibrary.org/yoursupport/friends/AnnualBookSale.html

Speaking of library book sales, I attended one on Saturday in Media Pennsylvania., a Republican stronghold.
.I arrived about one hour after the opening and by that time many of  the dealers with scanners had come and gone.Much to my surprise , in plain sight there were eight signed copies of a book by Mitt Romney at two dollars each..No one seemed to be interested in them.Could this be some sort of leading indicator?

On Sunday I will be in Albany , New York visiting  the 37th annual antiquarian book and ephemera fair.
Here is a link to that show.
http://www.albanybookfair.com/

If you  are near Princeton or Albany and have bookplates for sale or exchange
I would like to hear from you.
 Bookplatemaven@hotmail.com

I won't be back home until Tuesday October 25th so my next posting will be on Thursday October 27th

Ernest W. Oldham Part Three

 Click on any image to enlarge.
Many of the colored wood cuts ( my favorites) are not signed.

The following biographical information about Ernest and Mary Oldham was obtained from The Cornwall Artists website
http://www.cornwallartists.org/
"At the NAG Exhibition of 1937, Ernest Oldham exhibited Ghosting Home and Departing Shower, Manaccan Cross, two paintings in addition to displays within the Craft section (probably bookplates: not specified). Their bookplates are numerous and designed for many of their fellow artists.
He was married to the painter and bookplate designer Mary OLDHAM, and from family correspondence it seems that the Oldhams lived at the Helford, Helston, Cornwall. A recent image has been shared by Ernest's descendants of a watercolour of Wheal Trewavas and The Lizard (nd). The couple began to exhibit at Newlyn in the 1920s, and remained active until the mid-1950s, when Mrs Oldham was chosen by the Committee to serve the teas at Newlyn Opening Show Days. They are not listed in standard artist indices."


When I originally wrote to Mr Bernard Maker for additional biographical information his response was as follows:
"The reason for the scarcity of information may be that the Oldhams preferred to live and work away from the commercial world of art.
  They lived at Helford village and had a studio there for most of their lives.
Helford, in case you are not familiar with it, is a small sleepy village in a remote part of a county itself quite remote from the more populated parts of Britain.
It is a charming place, once a fishing village, but for the most part of the twentieth century a place for the wealthy , the retired and day visitors.Their customers , I imagine came mostly from these sources."

Well , the Oldham  project is just about completed. If you find any other examples please send scans to
Bookplatemaven@hotmail.com  and they will be added to this posting.
On my next posting I will be writing about some unusual bookplates I recently purchased.
See you soon.