The bookplates of Harvard men
May 29th, 2013 by houghtonmodern
For over five years, student assistants in the Modern Books & Manuscripts department have diligently cataloged and scanned thousands of bookplates from Houghton’s collections. Compiled primarily by collector Daniel Butler Fearing (Harvard 1882), the bookplate collection is organized roughly by subject, which include Fearing’s favorite collecting topics, fish and watercraft. The groups of bookplates that have been uploaded to date can be viewed here, on the Modern department’s Flickr page.
More interesting, perhaps, to Harvard affiliates, is the collection of the bookplates of Harvard graduates (who were, at the time they were collected, solely men). Included are the bookplates of several early graduates of Harvard College, including Elisha Cooke (1657) and Nicholas Lynde (1690):
Some recognizable names are included, such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (honorary degree, 1859), Frederick Law Olmsted (honorary degree, 1864), and Theodore Roosevelt (1880) and his cousin Franklin (1904):
While many of the bookplates are more traditional, displaying a collector’s heraldry or family motto, many are small works of art in their own right, such as the plate of Frank Roy Fraprie (BS 1898) and of John B. Stetson, Jr. (1906):
Also included on Flickr is a group of bookplates used in the Harvard libraries in the 19th and 20th centuries, including this one, which must be rather jarring to discover while browsing in the Widener stacks:
For more information on Houghton’s bookplate collection, contact the Modern Books and Manuscripts department, houghton_modern AT harvard.edu.
Thanks to Caroline Bleeke ’10 for cataloging the Harvard Men section, and to Anna S. Patel ’13 for scanning and uploading them to Flickr.
Thank you for a very interesting article.
[…] “The bookplates of Harvard men”. Modern Books and Manuscripts ;– Houghton Library, Harvard University. […]
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