Calling all Mathey and Rocky Designers and Bibliophiles!
Announcing the 2012 Peter S. Firestone Society Bookplate Design Competition
Mathey and Rockefeller Colleges have recently announced the founding of the Peter S. Firestone ’62 Society, which will considerably expand the mission and activities of the current Mathey-Rockefeller Library. The Society will be supported by the Firestone Fund, a generous gift from Julie S. Firestone in memory of her husband Peter S. Firestone '62. As part of this initiative, a space near the Mathey Private Dining Room has recently been renovated and will serve as the Peter S. Firestone Room for the Society's activities. An important part of the Society's mission is to develop and refine the book collection of the existing Mathey-Rockefeller Library to better serve students.
As part of the library's expansion and the revision of its collection, the Society is announcing a design competition, open to all Mathey and Rocky students, for a new bookplate that will be placed inside of all existing volumes in the Mathey-Rockefeller Library, as well as those that will be acquired henceforth.
The winning design will be chosen by a panel of judges that will include Oliver Avens, Dean of Rockefeller College; Christina Corsiglia, Consulting Curator, Art Gallery of Ontario and Mathey Community Fellow; Kathleen Crown, Director of Studies, Mathey College; Isabel Flower 13; Maria Lindenfeldar, Book designer and Art Director of Princeton University Press; Julie Mellby, Graphic Arts Curator, Rare Books and Special Collections, Firestone Library; Emily Rutherford ’12 and Sandra Brooke, Librarian, Marquand Art and Archaeology Library. The prize for the designer of the winning bookplate will be either a Kindle Fire or a set of Bose noise-cancelling headphones (you pick!).
The rules of the competition are:
- The competition is open to all current students of Mathey and Rocky Colleges.
- Students may submit three designs. All submissions should be made as digital files.
- Designs should be in black and white and may incorporate a wide variety of media, including but not limited to: pen and ink, pencil, charcoal, watercolor and oil as well as etching, engraving, lithography, monotype, serigraphy, woodcut computer graphics and photography.
- While the final size of the bookplate has yet to be determined, designs should be scaled for small-scale reproduction, about 3 ¼” wide by 5” high. A link to a vector file will be provided for final submissions, so that students are able to adjust their designs without losing resolution. We recommend that students print copies of their designs before submission to correct for scale and legibility.
- The bookplate design must include the following text:
Gift of the family of
Peter S. Firestone ‘62
Mathey-Rockefeller Library
Princeton University
Submissions should be sent to: christinacorsiglia@gmail.com
The deadline for submissions is Friday, April 6, 2012.
And now a word about bookplates. Also known as ex libris (from the Latin “from the books of…” or “from the library of…”), bookplates have traditionally taken the form of small prints that are affixed to the inside front cover of a book to indicate ownership. Bookplate designs have taken many forms since the 15th century. Early examples often incorporated heraldic emblems such as coats-of-arms, or family crests, and most, though by no means all, include the full name of the owner. Compositions of historical as well as contemporary bookplates often include imagery relating to an owner’s profession or the specific subject matter of a collector’s library.
Like books, bookplates declaring ownership have long been symbols of prestige and status, thus prominent artists have frequently been commissioned to design them. Since the 19th century, the collecting of bookplates as an art form unto itself has resulted in the formation of numerous ex-libris societies throughout the world, leading many artists to create bookplates specifically for this market.
Institutional bookplates such as the subject of this competition often make reference to an organization’s goals and activities through the use of appropriate quotations or specific emblems.
For bibliophilic groups such as the Peter S. Firestone Society, the book motif has long been an obvious choice for designers (see http://www.karaartservers.ch/prints/ex-libris/4b.html).
For bibliophilic groups such as the Peter S. Firestone Society, the book motif has long been an obvious choice for designers (see http://www.karaartservers.ch/prints/ex-libris/4b.html).
The Princeton University library system owns a large collection of bookplates, which students may view by contacting Rare Books and Special Collections (http://www.princeton.edu/~rbsc/research/).
The online guide to selected special collections of printed books and other materials in the PUL includes the following description of bookplate holdings:
About 243 catalogued volumes, 130 uncatalogued volumes concerning bookplates. The collection is supplemented by 12,000 individual bookplates. Additions are being made. A large part of the collection was the gift of Mrs. Gilbert Troxell. The entire bookplate collection is now housed within the Graphic Arts Collection. Also, among the special files for the General Rare Books Collection, there is a multi-drawer file of cards for bookplates in books in the General Rare Books Collection. See also the Clifford Nickles Carver mss. collection: Clifford Nickles Carver papers, 1897-1965, [(MUDD) MC010), for his bookplates and publications concerning them.
Students might also be interested in the following posts by Julie Mellby, Graphic Arts Curator, PUL, at http://blogs.princeton.edu/graphicarts:
August 15, 2009: “From the box marked ‘Celebrity Bookplates’” (including those of John Barrymore, Houdini, Charles Dickens and Charles Chaplin)
December 16, 2010: “Bookplate collection of C.N.Carver, Class of 1913”
February 3, 2012: “Bookplates in Japan”
Among the numerous online sites concerning bookplates, a few recommendations:
http://www.karaartservers.ch/prints/ex-libris/4a.html - Society and institutional (as opposed to personal) bookplates
http://www.davidsongalleries.com/subjects/exlibris/exlibris-contemporary.php - worthwhile exhibition of recent bookplate design
http://fletcher.lib.udel.edu/collections/wab/index.htm - William Augustus Brewer Collection of Bookplates at University of Delaware library
http://www.flickr.com/photos/34900073@N07/sets/72157613160345964/ - Pratt Libraries Ex Libris Collection
http://lib.stanford.edu/bookplates-exhibit/home - online exhibition of Stanford University’s bookplate collection
http://www.bookplatesociety.org/artists.html - features the work of some contemporary British bookplate designers
http://butdoesitfloat.com/Ex-Libris - a small but good selection, including the famous Mussolini bookplate, and, this being Princeton, Albert Einstein’s bookplate, designed by Erich Buttner in Berlin in 1917.
