Bookplate of the week #1: Sir John Alexander Ferguson
May 2nd, 2012 by houghtonmodern
We’ve decided to join the current trend of weekly series in special collections blogs and start one of our own, and so we proudly introduce the “Bookplate of the Week” series!
For nearly five years, student assistants in Modern Books & Manuscripts have been cataloging Houghton’s enormous and previously “hidden” collection of bookplates. Lists of the bookplates in the collection are not yet publicly available, but if you’re a bookplate enthusiast and and would like to examine the collection, send us an email at houghton_modern AT harvard DOT edu, and we can help you.
This week’s entry is the bookplate of Australian Sir John Alexander Ferguson (1881-1969), collector of Australiana and the author of the seven-volume Bibliography of Australia. Ferguson seems to have had a good sense of humor, evidenced by the design of his bookplate:
Ferguson’s bookplate was designed by Australian artist Lionel Lindsay in 1914. More information on Ferguson and his collecting can be found in the Australian Dictionary of Biography; his collection now resides in the National Library of Australia.
This bookplate is part of the Daniel Butler Fearing collection at Houghton Library. Fearing collected several thousand bookplates related to angling, ships, and other related subjects (look for more bookplates from his collection in upcoming posts.)