Surprisingly, I’ve never written a weblog entry about bookplates. I ran across Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie, a weblog about bookplates, which led to a small treasure trove of bookplate sites. The American Society of Bookplate Collectors & Designers features the first known bookplate on their home page. The Bookplate Society boasts a direct lineage from the world’s first bookplate collector group, the Ex Libris Society. Yale’s Arts of the Book Collection has one of the largest bookplate collections in the world, including that of Irene Dwen Andrews Pace which numbers 250,000 items. Stanford has their own library bookplates scanned in for online viewing. Not surprisingly many public collections are housed in universities. There are of course websites where you can order your own custom bookplates. And Wikipedia reveals that before bookplates were used, book owners would write a short poem or rhyme inside a book to discourage theft. I suppose just writing your name inside wasn’t enough.