Home >>
A few other bookplates
There is no order or method to my collection of bookplates other than that I prefer pictorial to armorial plates, and I'm not really interested in bookplates designed much before 1900. It's just fun to look inside the front cover of an inexpensive book and find an interesting plate or to come across a bookdealer who has bookplates for sale, which is uncommon. If the bookplate looks interesting and the book isn't too expensive then I buy it, and I still have the book after I have carefully removed the bookplate. However I do have copies of the only bookplate designed by Mervyn Peake, whose books and drawings I collect, and it's nice to have an example of a bookplate designed by the major British designers of the 20th century.
You can click on images to enlarge them a little. Click on the back button of your browser to return to the page.
N. Asherson
Date: 1937
Paper size: 101 x 96 mm
Design size: 86 x 84
Signed: Mervyn Peake
Notes: This bookplate was designed by Mervyn Peake for Dr Nehemiah Asherson, an Ear, Nose and Throat specialist. Asherson had treated the Peake family and the drawing was provided in part payment. The design shows the three bones in the middle ear, the malleus, incus and stapes, or hammer, anvil and stirrup.
Leo Wyatt
Date: unk
Paper size: 130 x 92 mm
Design size: 95 x 63 mm
Notes: This bookplate was designed by engraver and bookplate designer Leo Wyatt (1909-1981) for himself. He was born in South Africa.
Philip Sassoon
Date: unk
Paper size: 97 x 67 mm
Design size: 88 x 57 mm
Signed: PT (lower right corner)
Notes: This bookplate was desgned by Philip Tilden for Philip Sassoon. The book in which I found it had a label for Port Lympne, Sassoon's house.
Maurice Baring
Date: June 1897
Paper size: trimmed 63 x 51 mm
Design size: 52 x 44 mm
Notes: This tiny and rather crudely engraved bookplate was designed and signed to the right by the writer and poet Hillaire Belloc for Maurice Baring. It was found underneath the bookplate of Philip Sassoon, above.
Mary Hunter
Date: unk
Paper size: 114 x 81 mm (trimmed)
Design size: 69 x 105 mm
Notes: Weird: a vampire bat holding onto an inverted heart. Do you think she had a bad experience in love?
Mary Hunter (1856-1933) was described as a 'society hostess'. She was sculpted in white marble by Auguste Rodin and painted by John Singer Sargent, both of which are in the Tate. Her husband died in 1916 leaving her with £270,000, but she got through it and was forced to leave Hill Hall and sell her possessions. The sale is described in the letters of Virginia Woolfe.
H. Clifford Mortimer
Date: 1904
Paper size: 144 x 101 mm (trimmed)
Design size: 124 x 80 mm
Notes: A bookplate designed by Bernard Partridge, a famous cartoonist for Punch magazine, for Clifford Mortimer, the father of John Mortimer.
Walter Dexter
Date: unk
Paper size: 138 x 101 mm
Design size: 115 x 75 mm
Notes: Walter Dexter may have been a literary editor, but I'm not sure. The hook intrigued me. I don't know who designed the plate, which is initialled R.A.M.
Osbert Salvin and Frederick Ducane Godman
Date: unk
Paper size: 149 x 88 mm
Design size: 127 x 67 mm
Designer: unk
Notes: Osbert Salvin (1835-1898) and Frederick Ducane Godman (1834-1919) were both biologists who studied the flora and fauna of South America. They are linked by the Godman-Salvin medal for ornithology which was instituted in 1919 in their memory. This engraving may be associated with that medal. I don't know who the designer was, but it's quite fine.
Bradley Martin, Junr
Date: 1905
Paper size: 131 x 104 mm
Design size: 113 x 90 mm
Designer: H.S.
Notes: Bradley Martin (1841-1913) was an American financier and industrialist who rented Balmacaan House and its estate overlooking Loch Ness for many years from the 1880s. The bookplate shows the ruins of Urquhart Castle on Loch Ness and indicates Mr Martin's past times during his visits to Scotland.
Sara Holmes Grant
Date: 1908
Paper size: 122 x 78 mm
Design size: 63 x 42 mm
Designer: Frederick Spenceley.
Notes: This plate is signed by the American bookplate designer and engraver, Frederick Spenceley (1872-1947)
D.R.H. Williams
Date: 1924
Paper size: 159 x 97 mm
Design size: 131 x 72 mm
Designer: Henry Rushbury.
Notes: This is one of only three bookplates designed by Sir Henry Rushbury (1889-1968), according to his catalogue raisonné. It is stained; someone taped the edge of the dustjacket over the bookplate, which was on the front pastedown.
No 49 in: Henry Rushbury Prints. A catalogue raisonné. (2010). London: The Royal Academy of Arts.
Duff Cooper
Date: 1930s
Paper size: 115 x 85 mm
Design size: 97 x 69 mm
Designer: Rex Whistler
Notes: Duff Cooper (1890-1954) was a Conservative politician, diplomat and historian. In 1919 he married Diana Manners a famously glamorous woman. She is depicted at the top of this bookplate, designed by Rex Whistler (1905-1944), who died during the Normandy invasion.
Kenneth Rae
Date: 1931
Paper size: 109 x 79 mm
Plate size: 95 x 68 mm
Design size: 86 x 63 mm
Designer: Rex Whistler
Notes: Kenneth Rae (1890-1954) was Editor of the Sunday Times and Secretary to the Board of the National Theatre. Rex Whistler (1905-1944) designed this bookplate for him to thank him for lending some skiing equipment. The proof in the Victoria and Albert Museum states that it is a soft ground etching.
Francis Meynell
Date: 1914
Paper size: 112 x 92 mm
Design size: 80 x 64 mm
Designer: Eric Gill
Notes: It is a wood engraving. Francis Meynell (1891-1975) was a poet and printer. The bookplate was designed for him by Eric Gill an artist and designer of type faces. The proof in the British Museum is dated 1914.
June Moore
Date: 1926
Paper size: 187 x 125 mm
Design size: 150 x 113 mm
Designer: William Evelyn Chappel
Notes: This interesting bookplate from the mid-1920s was designed for June Moore (1898-1964), born June Langley, who in 1918 married a man named John Sugden Moore and took the name June Langley Moore. June's younger sister, Doris (1902-1989), married John's brother Robert, and took the name Doris Langley Moore. Doris was a historian of fashion and founded the Fashion Museum in Bath. She also wrote books about Lord Byron and a biography of E. Nesbit. In 1933 Doris and June published a guide for society hostesses called The Pleasure of Your Company (1933). This book (and the bookplate) were illustrated by William Chappel (1907-1994) who was a ballet dancer, designer and director. It must have been fun to be in your 20s in the 1920s.
Charles H. Athill
Date: 1870?
Paper size: 114 x 76 mm
Design size: 100 x 61 mm
Designer: John Soane
Notes: I have included one armorial design by Harry Soane of London W.C., as an example of his work. The design was for Charles Harold Athill who was Richmond Herald at the Royal College of Arms from 1889 to 1919.
Nathan of Churt
Date: 1941
Paper size: 128 x 103 mm
Plate size: 117 x 92 mm (approx)Design size: 101 x 82 mm
Designer: H J F Badeley
Notes: This an example of the work of Henry John Fanshawe Badeley (1874-1951), 1st and only Baron, who was Clerk of Parliament and an amateur engraver. He studied under Sir Frank Short and was Honorary Secretary of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers.
This plate was for Harry Louis Nathan (1889-1963), a lawyer and politician. He served during World War 1 as a Major in the 1st London Regiment and was wounded. He was an MP from 1929 until 1940, when he stepped aside to make way for Ernest Bevin, and was created Baron Nathan of Churt in Surrey. The pineapples on the supporters are in fact stylised hand grenades.
Eric M Fraser
Date: 1930?
Paper size: 103 x 83 mm
Plate size: no plate mark
Design size: 103 x 83 mm
Designer: unknown
Notes: This bookplate was designed for Eric Malcolm Fraser (1896-1960), the youngest of eight sons of Professor Sir Thomas Richard Fraser, a Scottish medical physiologist. He also had three sisters.
When he left Edinburgh Academy in July 1915 he was awarded Dux of the whole school, the Clyde and Millar Greek Prize, a prize for bagpipe playing and 3rd prize in a shooting competition. He joined the Seaforth Highlanders and was immediately appointed as a temporary Second Lieutenant. Fraser was mentioned in despatches in December 1917 as a Lieutenant.
After the war Fraser joined Brunner, Mond & Co. Ltd (later ICI) in 1919. On 8th May 1929 he married Joy Frances Pease (1906-1981) of Darlington at St. Margaret's Church, Westminster (see photograph, below left). She was 23, he was 33. They had no children.
During the Second World War he was appointed Director of Investigations and Statistics at the War Office in 1939; Director-General of Equipment Production in the Ministry of Aircraft Production in 1942; and in 1943 became Director-General of Aircraft Production. He was awarded a CBE in 1946. After the war he worked for Imperial Chemical Industries as a Personnel Manager from 1946 to 1958. He lived at Radnor House, New Street, Henley-on-Thames. He died in 1960, aged 64 y.
I removed the bookplate from a copy of The Gothick North. The Fair-Haired Victory (1930) by Sacheverell Sitwell.
