, Walter
Crane, Caldecott, Stacy Marks, Edwin Abbey, Kate Greenaway, Gordon
Browne, Herbert Railton, Aubrey Beardsley, Alfred Parsons, D.Y. Cameron,
Paul Avril--are worth collecting.

[Illustration: PLATE.

BOOK-PLATE OF ROBERT PINKNEY. By Thoma Bewick.

BOOK-PLATE OF FREIHERR V. LIPPERHEIDE. By Karl Rickelt.

BOOK-PLATE OF CHARLES DEXTER ALLEN. By E.D. French.

BOOK-PLATE OF SIR ARTHUR VICARS. By C.W. Sherborn.]

Until the advent of the new taste the devising of book-plates was almost
invariably left to the routine skill of the heraldic stationer. Of late
years the composition of personal book-tokens has become recognized as a
minor branch of a higher art, and there has come into fashion an
entirely new class of designs which, for all their wonderful variety,
bear as unmistakable a character as that of the most definite styles of
bygone days. Broadly speaking, it may be said that the purely heraldic
element tends to become subsidiary and the allegorical or symbolic to
assert itself more strongly. Among modern English artists who have more
specially paid attention to the devising of book-plates, and have
produced admirable designs, may be mentioned C.W. Sherborn, G.W. Eve,
Robert Anning Bell, J.D. Batten, Erat Harrison, J. Forbes Nixon, Charles
Ricketts, John Vinycomb, John Leighton and Warrington Hogg. The
development in various directions of process work, by facilitating and
cheapening the reproduction of beautiful and elaborate designs, has no
doubt helped much to popularize the book-plate--a thing which in older
days was almost invariably restricted to ancestral libraries or to
collections otherwise important. Thus the great majority of modern
plates are reproduced by process. There are, however, a few artists left
who devote to book-plates their skill with the graver. Some of the work
they produce challenges comparison with the finest productions of bygone
engravers. Of these the best-known are C.W. Sherborn (see Plate) and
G.W. Eve in England, and in America J.W. Spenceley of Boston, Mass.,
K.W.F. Hopson of New Haven, Conn., and E.D. French of New York City (see
Plate).

AUTHORITIES.--The curious in the matter of book-plate composition will
find it treated in the various volumes of the Ex-libris Series
(London). See also A. Poulet-Malassis, _Les Ex-libris francais_
(1875); Hon. J. Leicester Warren (Lord de Tabley), _A Guide to the
Study of Book-plates_ (1880); Sir A.W. Franks, _Notes on B