ornamental accessories are symmetrical palms and sprays, wreaths and ribands. The architectural boss is also an important factor. In many plates, indeed, the shield of arms takes quite a subsidiary position by the side of the predominantly architectural urn. From the beginning of the 19th century, until comparatively recent days, no special style of decoration seems to have established itself. The immense majority of examples display a plain shield of arms with motto on a scroll below, and crest on a fillet above. Of late years, however, a rapid impetus appears to have been given to the designing of ex-libris; a new era, in fact, has begun for the book-plate, one of great interest.
Fig. 4.—Book-plate of P. A. Convers, 1762.
Fig. 5.—Book-plate of Francis Gwyn of Lansanor, 1698.
The main styles of decoration (and these, other data being absent, must always in the case of old examples remain the criteria of date) have already been noticed. It is, however, necessary to point out that certain styles of composition were also prevalent at certain periods. Many of the older plates (like the majority of the most modern ones) were essentially pictorial. Of this kind the best-defined English genus may be recalled: the library interior—a term which explains itself—and book-piles, exemplified by the ex-libris (fig. 6) of W. Hewer, Samuel Pepys’s secretary. We have also many portrait-plates, of which, perhaps, the most notable are those of Samuel Pepys himself and of John Gibbs, the architect; allegories, such as were engraved by Hogarth, Bartolozzi, John Pine and George Vertue; landscape-plates, by wood engravers of the Bewick school (see Plate), &c. In most of these the armorial element plays but a secondary part.
The value attached to book-plates, otherwise than as an object of purely personal interest, is comparatively modern. The study of and the taste for collecting these private tokens of book-ownership hardly date farther back than the year 1875. The first real impetus was given by the appearance of the Guide to the Study of Book-Plates, by Lord de Tabley (then the Hon. Leicester Warren) in 1880. This work, highly interesting from many points of view, established what is now accepted as the general classification of styles: early armorial (i.e. previous to Restoration, exemplified by the Nicholas Bacon plate); Jacobean, a somewhat misleading term, but distinctly understood to include the heavy decorative manner of the Restoration, Queen Anne and early Georgian days (the Lansanor plate, fig. 5, is typically Jacobean); Chippendale (the style above described as rococo, tolerably well represented by the French plate of Convers); wreath and ribbon, belonging to the period described as that of the urn, &c. Since then the literature on the subject has grown considerably. Societies of collectors have been founded, first in England, then in Germany and France, and in the United States, most of them issuing a journal or archives: The Journal of the Ex-libris Society (London), the Archives de la société française de collectionneurs d’ex-libris (Paris), both of these monthlies; the Ex-libris Zeitschrift (Berlin), a quarterly.
Fig. 6.—Book-plate of William Hewer, 1699.
Much has been written for and against book-plate collecting. If, on the one hand, the more enthusiastic ex-librists (for such a word has actually been coined) have made the somewhat ridiculous claim of science for “ex-librisme,” the bitter animadversion, on the other, of a certain class of intolerant bibliophiles upon the vandalism of removing book-plates from old books has at times been rather extravagant. Book-plates are undoubtedly very often of high interest (and of a value often far greater than the odd volume in which they are found affixed), either as specimens of bygone decorative fashion or as personal relics of well-known personages. There can be no
