A personal crest for your library: bookplates for professors and authors
The bookplate is the oldest personal mark in a library. How to design a crest for a scholar or author, and where it goes after the bookplate.
Ex libris
For five hundred years, people who love books have pasted a small engraved label inside the front cover: ex libris, from the library of. Bookplates were often heraldic, because a coat of arms was the most personal picture a person owned. A scholar’s or author’s library still deserves one.
A crest drawn from your work
Illustrative scene made from a real Fable design; not a photograph of a delivered order.
The Harcourt arms are quartered with owls on books and stacks of red books, with an owl above the helmet. Pasted inside a marbled cover, the bookplate looks as if it has been in the library for a century.
Choose your symbols
A design made with Fable Heraldry: a decorative emblem, not a grant of arms.
An owl for wisdom, an open book for teaching, a lamp for study, a quill for writing, a star for a subject in the sky. Add something that is only yours: the river of your hometown, the plant you study, the instrument you play.
What goes on the plate
The words Ex libris, your name and the crest. Some bookplates add a motto in Latin or in the language of your field. Keep it small enough to fit inside a paperback as well as a folio.
Beyond the bookplate
The same crest can sit at the head of your letters, on the title slide of a lecture, on a notebook cover, or on a deck of cards for the department’s end-of-year party. The stationery collection includes a bookplate, letterhead, cards and invitations.
Start with a preview
Fable draws a personal crest from your name and a few lines about your life and work. The preview is free. A Fable crest is a decorative emblem, not a grant of arms; our story on the difference between a family crest and a coat of arms explains why.