Featured Interesting Bookplate...

...I thought any way.

We haven't purchased a bookplate/s since we found an album full of 18th C. French ones a few years back.

Thought this one was cool. Made by the artist (a fellow Jersey native) for the artist and signed by the artist.

 

That's really neat.
A very nice design, well illustrated.

On a personal note.....I have a 4 leaf clover & it doesn't look like those flowers.
The horseshoe is upside down , letting the luck run out .

On a professional note....the acid laden matting is ruining the paper.

 

Beautiful!
~
'Jersey' as in?????

 

Seems to have been a bookplate designer. The signature does look to match the name.

What a ponderous description! "The fantastic lure of the negro"?

I wish whoever typed the description had cleaned the letter "e".

**********

I see I was taking "fantastic lure of the negro" out of context. It is the rabbit's foot that is the fantastic lure of the negro. So much better.

Maybe this was an advertising piece, or a portfolio sample intended to show the depth of his designs.

It's a cool item and I'm sure would be very desirable to a bookplate collector.

 

So who is Arthur?

 

Excellent! I'm from NJ too.
Thank you Skee!

 

You give me an idea.... I have some beautiful old French engravings that may be tweakable for this use then to print but I probably won't use them in my own books.

 

"Psyche has come from the dark forest of mystry ..."

I hope the spelling was done that way on purpose (to mean myst'ry?). Would hate to think that we are looking at a framed item with a typo!

And I do like the bookplate a lot.

 

Whoever wrote that description is beyond parody.....and by a good long way.

 

This is fantastic! Halloween collectors would like this too!

 

@Komo, yeah I know what you mean about the acidity. It's pretty much normal when the piece is housed in its original framing material.

@King, (New) JERSEY baby! All day!

@bob, thanks so much for your thoughts. That's one of the things that caught my eye when first purchasing this piece.....the description/breakdown of the symbolism. We had hundreds of bookplates in the past, but never seen one like this before.

@Silver, bookplate designer/engraver.

@Fig, I wrote that description, can't you tell by the writing style and typos? Only kidding, but thank you!

@AF, DAMMITT! Leave my poor plate alone...geezzz!

@Don, thanks for sharing that story. I know a number of years ago these things brought good money (depending on who and what you had). If I recall correctly, we sold that 18th C. album lot to a local collector for around $5K or $6K. Not too long after that sale, we received a PM through eBay from a European (don't recall if it was England or France) institution interested in purchasing the lot. The dude was some sort of expert in French bookplates and was very excited to get his hands on them. Sadly, we had to tell him we sold them already. He wasn't to pleased about that...

@CX, thank you! That's one of the designs/symbols on the plate that I like the most....witch and bats.

 

WOW!!!

 

Jersey City boy here.
Too late this year but can you do anything about those Devils???

 

Foul Hecate, encirc’d with bats of ignorance and fear,
Astride her broom, would dark the world with superstitious straws
And ever strives to penetrate the densely buoyant fumes
Of modern age enlightenment.

Borne high on robust pillars of most valiant hope
The lamps of inspiration forthly pour this reeking fog
Unceasing into space, to ward from planet Earth
The everlasting malice of insipient night.

And lo! The masques of Comedie and Tragedie,
Those muses of the human animus, bolster these foundations of ambitious promise
Their afflatus consecrated through histories of ethnologic lore,
Recorded, else whiles subsumed, swayed by influence of four leaf clovers.

The wingéd wheel of fortune turns, and having turned wings on,
For good or ill the adumbrations of exigent prognostication
Are read, and fretted, and divined upon by magi of prodigious mien
And underlay the expedition of the supernatant corporeality.

And Psyche, lithe shibboleth of ethereal quintessence, decamps
From darkling wildwood of sibylline myst’ry to gaze
Through penumbrant reflection into the wellspring of clear thinking,
Into the ovate globe of adamantine crystal. She spies predestination.

Sheltered, she, ‘neath cold steel of equine cleat,
Ancestral attribute of fortune, emblazoned with its lesser ilk
Weaned from barb’rous tribes of antediluvian genesis
Tamed now, acquiescent in the radiant glow of civility.

Here see the leporine foot, fantastic lure to dark skinned deepest Africa
Furcula, emblem of eternal hope to all but fated Meleagris
Here also see the aboriginal boomerang, allegoric of altruism recompensed,
And here the swastika, hooked cross charm of primal Amerindian.

 

The poetic scribe,
for neither lucre or adulation
taps on plastic keys
which tickle the ivory of our imagination.

( one good turn of a phrase, deserves another...)