Book-plates / [William John Hardy].

  • William John Hardy
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Book-plates / [William John Hardy]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    which neither my knowledge nor my enthusiasm would have equalled his. The desire to possess a book-plate of one’s own is in itself commendable enough, for in fixing the first copy into the first book the owner may surely be assumed to have registered a vow that he or she at least will not join the great army of book-perse- cutors—men and women who cannot touch a volume without maltreating it, and who, though they are often ready to describe the removal of a book- plate even from a worthless volume as an act of vandalism, do infinitely more harm to books in general by their ruthless handling of them. No doubt, also, the decay of interest in heraldry, which is mainly responsible for the eccentricities of modern ‘ fancy ’ examples, has taken from us the temptation to commit certain sins which were at one time at- tractive. Our ancestors, for instance, may sometimes have outraged the susceptibilities of the heralds by using as book-plates coats-of-arms to which they had no title. Yet their offence against the College of Arms was trivial when compared with the outrage upon common-sense committed by the mystical young man of to-day, who designs, or has designed for him, an ‘ emblematic ’ book-plate, or a ‘ symbolic ’ book-plate, or a ‘ theoretic ’ book-plate, in which the emblem, or the symbol, or the theory, is far too
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