Book Plates

SOME people have an instinctive aversion to anything plated; I dislike plated books. Can there be any apology for the person who is addicted to the substitution of a book plate for his genuine signature ? No! His defects of character are revealed with tragic clearness by every fly-leaf in his library.

No man with any poetry in his soul will use a plate to record his ownership of a volume. To establish that immortal communication between author and reader, that sense of intimate personal relation, the reader must not refuse the author his hand, and try to meet him, as it were, by proxy. The name of the owner of a book on the prefatory page is a symbolic monument, since it marks the meeting of two spiritual forces; it is the reader’s sign of surrender, his acknowledgment that he is ready to welcome the mysteries which the book may hold in store for him. Therefore the inscribing of his name is a solemn act, to be done, without intrusion of such an intermediary as a book plate, pensively.

I do not feel that a person who can willingly forego the pleasure of writing his name in a new purchase is really capable of loving a book. His is only Platonic affection, cool, dispassionate, remote.

A book plate indicates a certain love of ostentation. Is it fitting that an individual should suggest that his library is so voluminous that he cannot undertake the physical fatigue of writing his name in each book he possesses ? Public libraries, large and abstract collections, may make use of this mechanical means of identifying property, but the private library should be more modest, more personal.

To the critical observer a book plate seems to cast suspicion upon the owner’s educational attainments. One wonders if, after all, he can really read and write, if his books are any more to him than Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding was to Leonora, who treasured therein her party patches. May there not be reasonable doubt of his ability to read, who thus, in place of signing his name, resorts to the illiterate practice of making his mark ?

It is an obvious and regrettable fact that this same man is a devotee of platitudes. Otherwise he would not permit the monotonous recurrence of the same “quaint device” in each volume. He loves, above all things, order, symmetry, convention, and prefers in a book nicely adjusted intellectual formalities; he cannot endure anything not stereotyped.

Finally, this defacer of books is cruel, for he strikes a mortal blow at one of the most innocent sources of pride in the lives of bibliophiles. No more will books command a high price because some great man had written his name there. No more will the imagination see in a volume the absolute proof of the famous ownership, and delight in dreaming of the days when hands that now are dust turned those very pages. What would have been the course of human letters if William Shakespeare had placed his book plate in that copy of Florio’s Montaigne ?