Antioch Bookplates

I first became aware of Antioch Bookplates in 2009 while researching an envelope addressed to Ernest Morgan, Secretary of the Bookplate Collectors Club, Antioch College Library, Yellow Springs, Ohio. That research resulted in a post on this blog about the envelope. Recently at a local stamp show I came across a 1942 copy of the catalog for Antioch Bookplates. It is a really neat piece of ephemera. The catalog which measures 9 inches by 4 inches is 32 pages in length and has illustrations for hundreds of bookplates.  In addition, two actual bookplates are tipped in to the catalog (one is shown above) and five more bookplates were enclosed loose. The bookplate designs in the catalog represent the work of more than 75 artists. Of special interest was a description of the Bookplate Collectors Club and how it worked on the back cover of the catalog (see scan above).  One of the blogs that I follow is Lew Jaffe's Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie. Although Antioch Bookplates went out of business, its designs have been resurrected by the company Bookplate Ink. In a guest post for Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie in 2010, Karen Gardner, the CEO of Bookplate Ink, provided a history of the Antioch Bookplate Company and Bookplate Ink. I thought Lew's addendum to Karen's post provided a great perspective on the bookplates produced by Antioch Bookplates. Although, I don't consider myself an avid collector of bookplates I've ended up with a nice collection of library bookplates and have become more interested in this collectible category. I was surprised to see how many posts I have written on the topic of library bookplates, and I also have a webpage on library bookplates. One final note about the Antioch Bookplates catalog. One of the categories of bookplates sold by the company was "Card Pocket Bookplates" which came with instructions for setting up your own personal lending library. See the illustration below.