Jonathan Dwight's Bookplate

The "digitization" of so many printed books in recent years has given us easy access to titles we would otherwise never have seen: rare books, weird books, books whose very existence we might never have suspected in those pre-google days of card catalogues. Like most history-minded birders, I use SORA and gallica and Google books and other such online collections every day, and I often find what I'm looking for--and even more often, I find something I wasn't.

Lately I've found myself interested in the history of books about feathers. Sniffing around on the web, I ran into Lacroix-Danliard's La plume des oiseaux, a strange hybrid of a book, published in 1891, covering both the biology and the commercial use of feathers. The copy on line is from the library of none other than Jonathan Dwight, and is still adorned by his bookplate. 

Dwight's bookplate is a classic artifact from an age when collecting--of birds and of books--was the hallmark of the gentleman scientist. The website of the University of Texas's project Libraries and the Cultural Record describes it:

The graphic elements include a rifle and a quill pen, alluding to the primacy of collection and description. The open book pictured on the bookplate reads, "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush," which, together with the number of birds depicted, echoes the eagerness for specimens characteristic of a time when ornithologists were preeminently collectors.

That last point may be a stretch; the abundance of Snow Buntings on the bookplate, aligned head to tail, is probably aesthetically determined by the need to produce a pleasing frame for the central image, a plunging Sterna tern with an open book on its back. The tern dives into the crossed pen and firearm--not, as the UT website would have it, a rifle, but rather a cane gun, recommended by Elliott Coues a generation earlier for discreet Sunday "shooting where the law forbids destruction of small birds ... artfully careless handling of the deceitful implement may prevent arrest and fine."

Personal bookplates have gone most decidedly out of style, but they can still tell us much about the book cultures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when this genre of literary and graphic art was at its peak. Next time you're using a book on line, don't just scroll past the binding and the pastedowns: you never know what, or who, you'll find.