Drool over the personal bookplates of 18 famous writers.
One of the best things about having an extensive personal library is the ability to lend books to my loved ones. Of course, “lend” is a stretch—they very rarely come back, probably because I have neglected to invest in a set of fancy personalized bookplate with which to identify them. (Or because my loved ones are wanton thieves.) It seems a little indulgent now, but the use of bookplates used to be much more common among serious readers, many of whom were—you guessed it—writers themselves, and therefore of particular interest to us here at the Literary Hub. So below you’ll find a few personalized bookplates used by famous writers, sourced from around the internet—may they inspire you to create your own, or at least to return that book you borrowed from me.
William Butler Yeats by Thomas Sturge Moore (via Currier Museum of Art)
Rudyard Kipling (via National Library of New Zealand)
Robert Frost (art by J. J. Lankes, 1923, via National Gallery of Art)
Jack London (via Library of Congress)
Edgar Rice Burroughs (via Library of Congress)
Ernest Hemingway (via Heritage Auctions)
Lord Byron (via Center for Brooklyn History)
Charles Dickens (via University of Glasgow Library)
Sylvia Plath (via Sylvia Plath Info)
Another Sylvia Plath (via The Conversation)
Lewis Carroll (via Melville House)
Maya Angelou (via Max Rambod Rare Books)
H.G. Wells (via Melville House)
H.P. Lovecraft, 1929 (via Brown University)
Maurice Sendak (via Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (via AbeBooks)
Edith Wharton, by Daniel Updike, 1919 (via Hippostcard)
Aldous Huxley (via Literary Hub)
Hart Crane (via Literary Hub)
