A lot on their plate

HAVE you ever asked yourself ‘I wonder where I put that book, did I lend it to someone?’ Books are valuable to us, emotionally, financially and as a source of information. They may have an appealing content, they may be rare, they may be expensively produced—or all three. Even in the age of e-reading via tablets, real books mean something to us and we do not like losing them. The bookplate is an artistic way of solving a practical problem. It allows the marking of a book as someone’s property by means of a printed piece of paper stuck in the front of the volume.

Bookplates range, meaning ‘from the books of’, which is what they are called in Continental Europe.