Ex Libris
We continue a week devoted to the arts of book making and book ownership with a selection of bookplates. Ex libris = From the books (library).
The first is a visual pun on the name of Alfred Church Lane, Pearson Professor of Geology & Minerology, 1909-1936, after whom Lane Hall is named.
The second is from a collection of French author George Sand's early editions, from the library of the great Sand scholar, Georges Lubin (1904-2000). When Tufts professor Isabelle Naginski received a transatlantic phone call from her daughter, reporting that the books of Professor Naginski's late colleague were on sale in a Paris antiquarian bookshop, further hasty phone calls snared some of these historically and editorially valuable books for Tufts. Prof. Naginski's research on the novel, Lelia, is based on the early copy in our Lubin collection.
The bookplates of Bloomsbury figures Lytton Strachey and Roger Senhouse grace their copy of Boccaccio's Decameron, published in Amsterdam, 1665.
While other readers in this collection of plates are less well known to us, their artistic or whimsical sensibilities live on to inspire new readers.
