William Augustus Brewer Bookplate Collection

I heard today from Gregg Silvis at the University of Delaware Library, who had seen my post about John Stuart Groves' bookplate and Delawareana. He thought their digital bookplate collection, William Augustus Brewer Bookplate Collection, would be of interest to readers on this blog. It certainly was to me. In addition to the bookplate collection, try the University of Delaware Library Digital Collections link and have fun with that visual feast of history.

This also ties in neatly with something else I wrote earlier this year, some thoughts on digital ephemera, after receiving a digital copy of a bookplate.

Quoting from the William Augustus Brewer Bookplate Collection, here' the scoop on William Augustus Brewer and his wonderful collection:
Reverend William Augustus Brewer was an avid bookplate collector. His wife, Augusta LaMotte Brewer, bequeathed his collection to the University of Delaware Library after her husband’s death. The William Augustus Brewer Bookplate Collection comprises 12,680 printed bookplates dating mainly from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The collection includes bookplates from the libraries of John Carter Brown, Lewis Carroll, Samuel L. Clemens, Calvin Coolidge, Charles Dickens, Walt Disney, Edward Gibbon, Alexander Hamilton, Harry Houdini, Samuel Pepys, Howard Pyle, Paul Revere, Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Alfred Stieglitz and William Butler Yeats, as well as many others. The designers of the bookplates include Thomas Bewick, Edward Burne-Jones, Kate Greenaway, William Hogarth, Howard Pyle, Rudolf Ruzicka, and James A. M. Whistler. Subjects illustrated in the bookplates are varied, inclucing birds, death’s heads, medicine, music, rebuses, and portraits of historical and literary figures.

The William Augustus Brewer Digital Bookplate Collection currently contains 3,040 of these bookplates, with the remaining 10,000 to be added in 2011.
Thank you, Gregg!

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