Maryanne O’Hara

IF I CAN’T SIGN YOUR BOOK IN PERSON…….I can sign and send you one of these: the beautiful bookplate my brother, the ever talented Michael Bavaro, designed for me. Postcards play a part in Cascade, so a postcard bookplate was the perfect design choice.

Ex-libris means “from the books,” a loose identification of a book as belonging to an individual’s collection. To see some more beautiful bookplates, check out The Stanford University Libraries–Bookplate Exhibit. A little history from their site: “The earliest known use of bookplates took place in fifteenth-century Germany. The Latin phrase “ex libris” was common in early bookplates, which typically featured monochromatic shields of arms of the individual or institutional owners and sometimes contained warnings of the fate that would befall book thieves.”

Another bookplate I’ve admired since I was a child is the Rockwell Kent bookplate my uncle used for his Arctic collection of books. Rockwell Kent also designed the Viking Press logo. Synchronicity! It was a bit startling, like finding a piece of the past, to discover that the correspondence between Uncle Pete and Rockwell Kent is archived at the Archives of American Art.

I ordered my bookplates from www.bookplateink.com. In addition to doing custom work like mine, they have a gorgeous selection of existing designs that they can customize with your name. Hard to choose!