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Two new books consider prints with functions distinct from their beauty

Bookplates, the prints affixed to books to designate ownership, began to appear in the later 15th century, about the same time that the invention of moveable type enabled books to proliferate wildly. Until the 19th century the majority of bookplates bore armorials, reflecting the aristocratic view that the library was part of the family legacy to be passed on to successive generations.

The production of bookplates expanded in the 19th century, and imagery became both richer and more personal as artists such Alfonse Legros, Aubrey Beardsley and Paul Nash collaborated with individual bibliophiles to create a sort of personal emblem.  Some of the plates alluded to the owner’s interests, as in the references to oriental ceramics in the plate Henry Stacy Mars designed for Frederick Litchfield, or the sensuous image designed by Franz von Bayros for Stefan Kellner, a publisher who specialized in erotic literature.  The imagery of others referred to the owners themselves, as with the cat dominating the plate designed by Edward Gordon Craig for ‘Kitty’ Downing. 

Martin Hopkinson’s Ex Libris is a petit, attractively designed volume.  Summarizing the history of bookplates in a terse five pages, the introduction is supported by 89 examples drawn from the British Museum’s substantial collection.  Each illustration is accompanied by an entry introducing the artist and the person for whom the plate was intended, plus occasional explanations of the iconography of this very personal art form. As the sampling here suggests, the imagery of these works is extraordinarily varied and invites further exploration in such diverse realms as biography, social history, and literary studies.

Little is said, however, about the vogue for bookplates that matured in the later 1800s and peaked in the first decades of the following century.  Occupying a niche somewhere between conventional print collecting and other serious hobbies such as philately, this period saw the establishment of societies devoted to the study and collecting of bookplates by collectors such as Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks, whose donation of some 36,000 examples contributed to the formation of the massive British Museum collection, sampled in this catalogue, as well as smaller collections such as the 13,000 bookplates donated by Louis J. Bailey to the University of Rochester’s Rush Rhees Library.   Nor does Hopkinson offer guidance regarding the substantial literature on bookplates, some measure of which is suggested by the 600 volumes that accompanied Bailey’s 1959 gift. 

Following a half-century hiatus, interest in bookplates is slowly reviving.  In 1972 the Bookplate Society was established to promote the study of this extraordinary body of material, which remains largely unexplored by modern scholars.  It hoped that Hopkinson’s charming little catalogue may further this effort by introducing this sadly neglected material to a larger audience.

Much more ambitious, Altered and Adorned ‘investigates the ways woodcuts, engravings, and etchings functioned in European society from the late fifteenth through early seventeenth century, and how they were consumed’.  The goal, according to the principle author Suzanne Karr Schmidt (who curated the associated exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago), is to restore the notion of ‘function’ to objects that are today painstakingly preserved in aesthetic isolation but that originally were cut, pasted, coloured, and otherwise manipulated to serve purposes ranging from devotional aids to playing cards, from book illustrations to pattern books for craftsmen.  She extends the ‘utility’ of these prints to encompass their appeal to collectors as distinct as Archduke Ferdinand of Tyrol, who sought the masterworks Albrecht Dürer, and the 18th-century librarian Placidus Sprenger, who salvaged commonplace prints because otherwise ‘such little things…go missing, because nobody believes them worth saving’.

The variety of practical, frivolous, and pious functions to which prints were put is outlined in five chapters.  The first is devoted to single-sheet and multi-sheet images that are today most easily understood as the aestheticized objects cherished by collectors and museums.   The high end of this market is represented by the gold-embellished chiaroscuro woodcut, Equestrian Portrait of the Emperor Maximilian I, which was printed on vellum by Hans Burgkmair the Elder to serve in emperor’s campaign of art diplomacy (and competing extravagance) with Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony.  The lower end of this market is represented by playing cards and by topical broadsheets in which text and image refer to current events or controversies.

The amalgamation of prints and books is the subject of the following chapter.  Prints were used as bookplates, as illustrations integral to and printed with the text, and as independent images bound into a text.  Other uses were found for images printed on paper.  Most striking is a French coffer dated about 1490 that provides evidence for the presumably common practice of using prints to ornament various objects.  A century later, Augostino Carracci produced a sheet with ornaments designed to be cut out and worn while Jacques Callot produced a design intended to ornament a fan.  The ease with which prints could imitate the appearance of other objects and then be replicated inexpensively made religious prints ideal as popular surrogates for miraculous paintings such as the Einsiedeln Altarpiece. Schmidt explains that religious prints could also serve ‘as reminders of pilgrimages…substituted for the consecrated host, or stand in for relics and other cult objects’ in addition to helping believers visualize Christ’s passion and other sacred events.

Such pious didacticism was paralleled by the use of prints for a variety of practical and scientific purposes.  They were fundamental to the first truly portable timepiece, the printed Calendar (1474) designed by mathematician Regiomontanus, and as components in later sundials by George Hartmann and others.   Perhaps most impressive was their use for anatomical studies, for instance Lucas Kilian’s Mirrors of the Microcosm (1613), an extraordinarily elaborate flap print ‘kit’, a sort of two-dimensional ‘invisible man’, from which the intrepid student could create fully rendered male and female figures.

Altered and Adorned concludes with a technical note by Kimberly Nichols on the techniques and supports employed by the printmakers, on the techniques and materials used by those who initially acquired them, and on challenges of preservation.  While the discussion is to some degree limited to the materials belonging to the Art Institute, this extensive collection actually provides ample means to suggest the importance of issues raised in this handsome volume. Because of the magnitude of these questions, however, Altered and Adorned, like Ex Libris, should be viewed as a tantalizing introduction that invites further study rather than as a volume that comprehensively explores a vast subject.

Ex Libris. The Art of Bookplates by Martin Hopkinson is published by the British Museum and distributed by Yale University Press, 2011. 112 pp., 100 colour illus, $15.00. ISBN 978-0-300-17163-1

Altered and Adorned: Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life by Suzanne Karr Schmidt with Kimberly Nichols is published by Art Institute of Chicago and distributed by Yale University Press, 2011. 112 pp., 98 colour illus, $35.00. ISBN 978-0-300-16911-9