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Libraries & Culture 37.3 (2002) 281-282



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Book Review

Bookplates by Beilby & Bewick:
A Biographical Dictionary of Bookplates from the Workshop of Ralph Beilby, Thomas Bewick & Robert Bewick, 1760-1849


Bookplates by Beilby & Bewick: A Biographical Dictionary of Bookplates from the Workshop of Ralph Beilby, Thomas Bewick & Robert Bewick, 1760-1849. By Nigel Tattersfield. London: British Library, and New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 1999. xii, 353 pp. $95.00. ISBN 0-7123-4508-6 (U.K.) and 1-884718-91-4 (U.S.A.).

Readers of Libraries & Culture who appreciate the varied bookplates that grace the covers of the periodical and the accompanying explanations will find this [End Page 281] book of especial interest. It is centered on the work of three generations of artists in Newcastle (roughly from the mid-eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth), the most famous being Thomas Bewick, who began as Beilby's apprentice. Thomas Bewick is well known as an engraver on wood and as an illustrator of wonderful books. (Those interested in a fine technical explanation of the considerable difficulties centered on printing with woodblocks combined with letterpress work should read Iain Bain's "Thomas Bewick and His Contemporaries: The Printing of Wood Engravings on the Hand Press," in Maps and Prints: Aspects of the English Booktrade, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris [Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1984], 67-80.) Tattersfield does not intend to present a history of Beilby and the Bewicks in its totality but instead concentrates on one facet of their activities: bookplates.

The book is divided into two main sections: a succinct introduction (in five chapters) followed by "The Main List," the names of the bookplate customers in alphabetical order. Six appendixes add an exclamation point to Bookplates. These are centered on unidentified bookplates, unascribed ones, blanks (designs without lettering), the Hallgrath cyphers, bookplates by John Bewick, and spurious Bewick bookplates. The introductory first five chapters are entitled "Background," "Identification and Terminology," "Ghost Bookplates," "An Introduction to the Main List," and "An Explanatory Note on the Beilby-Bewick Archive."

The author points out that "of all the ephemeral productions on paper of the engraving workshop started in 1760 by Ralph Beilby, continued by his erstwhile apprentice Thomas Bewick to 1825 (and then by his son Robert Elliot Bewick until 1849), bookplates have survived the best" (1). By "ephemeral productions," Tattersfield means letterhead stationery, shop advertisement cards, and all the bits and pieces of engraved paper that were so much a part of every business enterprise until recent times, when commercial engraving has been more or less supplanted by computers and cheap machines, which can mass-produce most graphics.

Readers interested in the topic will find the chapter on "Identification and Terminology" most useful. "Ghost Bookplates" leads us into the realm of ornaments and the like being passed off as bookplates. Numerous illustrations help clarify the text.

Even the short appendix dealing with the Hallgarth cyphers (no. 4, p. 264) is fascinating. We learn that Thomas Bewick mostly used cyphers (entwined initials) in his engravings of printers' and publishers' devices, but a few were also used in bookplates. William Hallgarth, largely unknown to "virtually all historians of printing and publishing in the northeast" during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, ordered a number of cyphered engravings, possibly as bookplates.

Indeed, not only is this thorough book a good read, it is also a reference source that any library would want to have on its open shelves. Its utility is greatly enhanced by being profusely illustrated, which will help library catalogers identify the provenances of books in their collections. Morever, from the point of view of an art historian, these small squares of engraved pictures (copperplate and woodblock)—and there are hundreds of them—tell an interesting story about the relationship of artistic currents and how styles were absorbed and exploited by a class of people—middle-class to wealthy—from the later rococo, through neoclassicism, and into the romantic age. Bookplates does credit...

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