What I Learned From Bookplates About Claiming Your Stuff (Without Being a Jerk)
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Bookplates, beetles, and a third-grade claim on a nature book. What they taught me about writing, legacy, and why we mark what matters. Welcome to What I Learned From… “Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.” ― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind What I Learned From …I found the offense in looping cursive, inside the front cover like a contract: Property of Elisabeth Doucette. A-3. I don’t remember writing it, but it’s my handwriting, and it’s definitely my name. A-3 might be a classroom code, a library grid, some system I’ve long forgotten. But the specificity of it makes me chuckle. Even then, I understood…books belong to systems, but they also belong to people. At some point, I apparently laid claim to North American Wildlife, a thick Reader’s Digest volume filled with illustrations of raccoons, deer, and various ducks I couldn’t identify if I tried. The letters are slightly slanted and confident. It wasn’t a particularly rare or expensive edition. But I was nose-deep in that book for at least three to six months of my childhood existence. I was obsessed with what I could observe from our back deck, and here was a book that told me everything about every creepy-crawly creature or adorable, cuddly furball. Do you see how magical that is?! A book that will explain the world around you. I loved it enough to stake some kind of pre-adolescent literary flag. That’s the thing about bookplates. Or, in this case, name scrawls. They aren’t always about ego. Sometimes they’re about protection and pride. Of course, bookplates haven’t always been so soft around the edges. Long before they showed up in sticker packs on Etsy, bookplates (ex libris, Latin for “from the books [library] of”) were signals of power. In the early 14th century BCE, the pharaoh Amenhotep III cataloged his scrolls with individualized ceramic tags to signal royal ownership. Knowledge was power, and power was best not shared without reminding people who had the power. By the time we got around to medieval Europe, books were rare and ruinously expensive. So folks who could afford to own collections wanted everyone to know it. The earliest known European bookplates emerged in 15th-century Germany, not long after the printing press started spreading words like wildfire. Wealthy families affixed ornate copperplate engravings to the inside covers of their books, most featuring family crests or coats of arms. These weren’t just labels, they were declarations edged in heraldic passive-aggression: “Yes, you may borrow this, but also, never forget whose ancestor sacked whose village to afford it.” You didn’t loan out a book like that. You “lent it down.” But the tone began to shift in the 18th and 19th centuries, as book ownership became more common and literacy spread through the rising middle class. People without family crests started commissioning bookplates anyway. Instead of lions or shields, they chose illustrations of beloved hobbies, portraits of pets, landscapes of home. They were little love notes to the lives of the people who built their bookshelves. That’s the version I like best. Not the performance of having books, but the intimacy of loving them. Not to control, but to actually care about the stories and knowledge you hold. For a while, we etched our souls onto paper. Then we got lazy. The world learned to print faster, then to scroll, then to forget. We stopped plating and we started bookmarking. These days, bookplates are mostly nostalgic nods. Today’s bookplates are less ‘Ex Libris’ and more ‘From the Overstock Cart of Kate, Who Likes Whales.’ Think playful rubber stamps or mass-produced sticker templates. Charming, but a far cry from commissioning an artist to etch your soul onto paper: This is mine, and I am someone who has as much value as the stories contained within this collection of pages and binding. I’m not here to argue that everyone needs to start embossing their paperbacks or scrawling their names in Sharpie across every Kindle. And I definitely don’t want to gatekeep who gets to own books, or write them, or share them. But I do wonder what it would look like if we treated stories—and the people who write them—with that same kind of reverence. Not perfection or polish. Just presence and a personal investment. It’s easier than ever to read something and forget it. We write posts and online essays and don’t really stand behind them. The attention economy scrolls past Ex Libris without a pause. But some part of us still longs to carve our name into what matters. Not so we can claim territory, but to say: I was here. And you should know that this changed me. We need to write more things we’d be proud to stamp with our name. It’s not about the status, it’s the reminder that this work, this idea, this page...it mattered to us. Enough to mark it. Enough to not want to lose it in the shuffle. Previously in This Writing Life …All the good stuff you were meant to see but probably didn’t.
Worth Reading …The pieces that made me pause last week.
Notes from the Masters …Craft advice that holds up, straight from the ones who lived it. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” ― Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit Prompted: Your Move …A spark from this week’s essay. Use it to write your own. If someone made a bookplate to represent you (not your brand, but your obsessions)...what would be on it? Glossary of The Forgotten …Because life’s too chaotic for bland words. Eximious [eg-SIM-ee-us] (adj.) From Latin eximius (“selected, exceptional”), from eximere (“to free or remove”), it means something that is plucked from the ordinary. Once a high compliment in Renaissance English, it was used to praise the rarest minds, the finest craftsmanship, or the most delicious cheese. Think gilded crests, velvet ropes, and the flair of someone who definitely had a coat of arms on their bookplate. Sorta synonyms: Illustrious, elite, fancy-pants Use it for: A first-edition hardcover you display, but never crack open. The antique dictionary you bought to press flowers in. That piece of writing you’re proud to put your name on, because it’s not just good, it’s eximious. Also: Now I want to design an eximious nameplate for my cheese collection. Want to read more in-depth Glossary entries? Catch up on the archives and find this week’s newest one. Try This …No promises. Just a potentially brilliant shortcut or two. Raindrop — I switched after Pocket’s shutdown and have zero regrets. It’s a clean, intuitive bookmarking tool that lets you save, organize, and even annotate web content with tagging, nested folders, and lightning-fast search. Bonus: It’s fully customizable and plays nice with apps like Notion and Slack. The Final Chuckle …Serious writing deserves unserious endings. Again I say…the most important wisdom I can share with you. ‘Til next time ~ Elisa PS: I’m not building a funnel, just better tools for writers. Got 90 seconds to tell me what you actually need? |