I have always liked bookplates, heroes and heroines of provenance, but also works of art by some of the finest illustrators. But I am not just interested in the bookplates themselves. A pile of a hundred bookplates is of little interest to me. Unless they are by an artist or illustrator that I collect, such as Beresford Egan, and I despair of never being able to find them all. But even then, I would rather have one of his bookplates firmly ensconced in a book as it was meant to be, rather that a bookplate sitting in my hand, longing for a home.
A couple of months ago, I did a musing about the bookplates that reside in Fanfrolico Press books.
For this musing, I opened the doors of one of our bookcases and started pulling books out looking for bookplates. It didn’t take long before I had the five subjects that I cover below. Honestly, it has been a long time since I had some of them lifted from the shelves.
Asmodeus, or, The Devil on Two Sticks; by Alain Rene Le Sage; with a biographical notice of the author by Jules Janin; translated by Joseph Thomas; illustrated by Tony Johannot; Joseph Thomas, Finch Lane, Cornhill, London, 1841.
Alain-René Lesage (1668 – 1747) was a French novelist and playwright. Lesage is best known
for his comic novel The Devil upon Two Sticks (1707, Le Diable boiteux), his comedy Turcaret (1709), and his picaresque novel Gil Blas (1715–1735).
Antoine Johannot, known commonly as Tony Johannot (1803 – 1852), was a French engraver, illustrator and painter. He became an illustrator much prized for his elegance, his diversity, and the lively character of his drawings.
John Needels Chester (Groveport, OH 1864–1955 Urbana, IL), graduated from University of Illinois 1891 with a degree in engineering, earned his professional degree in civil engineering in 1909 and his masters from UIUC in 1911. After his career as an engineer, he served as the director of the University of Illinois Foundation. Subsequent to his death he donated papers and items to the university, as well as setting up an endowment to purchase art for University of Illinois. His bookplate features his library as well as buildings significant to his life.
The Death of Abel in five books; attempted from the German of Mr. Gessner; published by T. Heptinstall, Fleet Street, London, 1797.
According to the Book of Genesis (Gen. 1: 4, 3-12), Adam's sons each made offerings to the Lord, who was pleased with Abel's but not with Cain's. Jealous of his brother, Cain slew Abel, suffering the ire of God and banishment. As tradition has it, Abel was beat to death with the jawbone of an ass.
This book is very unusual in that it has two leather bookplates.
Robert Hoe III (1839 – 1909) was an American businessman and producer of printing press equipment. He succeeded Richard March Hoe as head of R. Hoe & Company, which continued its preeminence among printing-press makers. He was one of the organizers and first president of the Grolier Club, the well-known New York organization for the promotion of bookmaking as an art.
Hoe was an extensive collector of rare books and manuscripts as well as silver, miniatures, and other art objects, his collections at the time of his death being valued at several million dollars. The catalogues of his library were unique and valuable from both a typographical and bibliographical standpoint. His collection was sold at auction during 1911 and 1912 with almost half going to Henry E. Huntington including a Gutenberg Bible. This book has Hoe’s signature on the first free endpaper and presumably it was he who spend the money to have the book placed in a custom box.
Adolph Lewisohn (1849 – 1938) was a German Jewish immigrant born in Hamburg who became a New York City investment banker, mining magnate, and philanthropist. He is the namesake of Lewisohn Hall on the Morningside Heights campus of Columbia University, as well as the former Lewisohn Stadium at the City College of New York. Time magazine called him "one of the most intelligent and effective workers on human relationships in the U.S."
Lewisohn was an avid collector of art and items of historical interest, and a deep lover of classical music; in particular opera. He collected paintings, antiquities, decorative arts, manuscripts and rare books.
So, this book went from one wealthy book collector to another and is now in my humble hands. I
guess I will have to commission a leather bookplate!
Jerome Paturot, a la recherche D’une Position Sociale; par Louis Reybaud; edition illustrée par J. J. Grandville; J.J. Dubochet, Le Chevalier et Cie., éditeurs, Paris, 1846.
Marie Roch Louis Reybaud (1799 – 1879) was a French writer, political economist and politician. He was born in Marseille. In 1840 he published Études sur les réformateurs ou socialistes modernes which gained him the Montyon prize (1841) and a place in the Académie des sciences morales et politiques (1850). In 1843 he published Jérôme Paturot à la recherche d'une position sociale, a clever social satire that had a prodigious success (this book).
Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard (1803 – 1847) was a prolific French illustrator and caricaturist who published under the pseudonym of Grandville, and numerous variations (e. g. Jean-Jacques Grandville, Jean Ignace Isidore Grandville) throughout his career. Art historians and critics have called him "the first star of French caricature's great age" and described his illustrations as featuring "elements of the symbolic, dreamlike, and incongruous" while retaining a sense of social commentary, and "the strangest and most pernicious transfigurement of the human shape ever produced by the Romantic imagination". The anthropomorphic vegetables and zoomorphic figures that populated his cartoons anticipated and influenced the work of generations of cartoonists and illustrators from John Tenniel, to Gustave Doré, to Félicien Rops, and Walt Disney.
The attractive bookplate is somewhat unique in that it does not contain the name of the person who has the bookplate. I would assume that it is for internal, family purposes and identifies the family member who owns this book in the family library.
Daphnis and Chloe; from the Greek of Longus; with an introduction by Jules Claretie, member of the French Academy, illustrated by Raphael Collin; Librairie R. Launette et Cie., G. Boudet Successeur 197, Boulevard Saint Germaine, Paris.
Daphnis and Chloe is a Greek pastoral novel written during the Roman Empire, the only known work of second-century Hellenistic romance writer Longus. It is set on the Greek isle of Lesbos, where scholars assume the author to have lived. Its style is rhetorical and pastoral; its shepherds and shepherdesses are wholly conventional, but the author imparts human interest to this idealized world. Daphnis and Chloe resembles a modern novel.
Louis-Joseph-Raphaël Collin (1850 – 1916) was a French painter born and raised in Paris, where he became a prominent academic painter and a teacher. Collin illustrated many books, notably Daphnis and Chloé (1890) and Chansons de Bilitis (1906).
Frederick and Abby Babcock remain unknown to me, but it is obvious that they loved their pet shepherd. Not often that you see a photo used in a bookplate. Also the plates were printed with pre-numbering which would be very useful. You often see inventory numbers in books but not usually in this manner.
The book is handsomely bound in blue Morrocco leather, with a gilt leaf design, and linen endpapers.
Baudelaire: Fleurs du Mal; in pattern and prose; by Beresford Egan and C. Bower Alcock; The Sophistocles Press and T. Werner Laurie Ltd. At Blackfriars, London, 1929.
I found this book, one of my favourites, in Blackwell’s, Oxford, in 1979. I was delighted as I had started my Egan collection and it also had the bookplate of Dennis Wheatley, the prolific occultist novelist, who books I had enjoyed over the previous decade. A homerun!
Charles Pierre Baudelaire (1821 – 1867) was a French poet, essayist, translator and art critic. His poems are described as exhibiting mastery of rhyme and rhythm, containing an exoticism inherited from the Romantics, and are based on observations of real life. His most famous work, a book of lyric poetry titled Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in the rapidly industrialising Paris caused by Haussmann's renovation of Paris during the mid-19th century. Baudelaire's original style of prose-poetry influenced a generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé. He coined the term modernity (modernité) to designate the fleeting experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility of artistic expression to capture that experience. Marshall Berman has credited Baudelaire as being the first Modernist.
Beresford Egan (1905–1984), who works I have been collecting over the past fifty years, was a satirical draughtsman, painter, novelist, actor, costume designer and playwright.
Egan is remembered as one of the few original British exponents of Art Deco. He was one of the most famous people of London's bohemian scene for nearly five decades. He was a prolific writer and book illustrator, beginning with The Sink of Solitude, a satire on the banning of Radclyffe Hall's controversial novel The Well of Loneliness (1928). That book marked the beginning of a prolific phase of around six years during which Egan created numerous illustrations and book covers for works of Aleister Crowley, Pierre Louÿs and Charles Baudelaire. Egan also wrote a couple of novels, which he embellished with his striking illustrations. He also made illustrations for the monographs produced by his wife Catherine Bower Alcock.
Dennis Yates Wheatley (1897 – 1977) was a British writer whose prolific output of thrillers and occult novels made him one of the world's best-selling authors from the 1930s through to the 1960s. His first book, Three Inquisitive People, was not published when completed, but came out later, in 1940. However, his next novel made quite a splash. Called The Forbidden Territory, it was an immediate success when issued by Hutchinson in 1933, being reprinted seven times in seven weeks. After finishing The Fabulous Valley, Wheatley decided to use the theme of black magic for his next book. He wrote: "The fact that I had read extensively about ancient religions gave me some useful background, but I required up-to-date information about occult circles in this country. My friend, Tom Driberg, who then lived in a mews flat just behind us in Queen's Gate, proved most helpful. He introduced me to Aleister Crowley, the Reverend Montague Summers and Rollo Ahmed." The release the next year of his occult story, The Devil Rides Out—hailed by James Hilton as "the best thing of its kind since Dracula"—cemented his reputation as "The Prince of Thriller Writers."
Wheatley’s huge, engraved bookplate is absolutely in character!
And the last character that fits so well with Baudelaire, Egan, and Wheatley is the bookplate designer, Franck C. Papé.
Francis Cheyne Papé (1878 – 1972), was an English artist and illustrator whose career spanned 64 years, from 1898 to 1962. Papé's work included painting using gouache, water colour, and illustration in pen and ink. Papé is best known for his illustrations to the books published in the 1920s by the American writer James Branch Cabell and the French writer Anatole France.
Bookplates designed by Papé have become sought after by collectors. In the 1980s many volumes of author Dennis Wheatley's personal library bearing then unknown Papé bookplates were discovered on the 50p–£1 shelves at the Blackwell's bookstore in Oxford. (I paid much more!) Papé's bookplates are in most instances worth more than the book and are highly prized. One of Papé’s illustrations for the works of François Rabelais was used as a bookplate design by silent film star Louise Brooks.
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