Why do we write our names inside books? Such marks of possession are utterly redundant while a volume remains on our own shelves. Granted that some mistrustful individuals probably tag all their property in fear of its being stolen, I suspect the principal impulse is a kind of cheerful morbidity. The act implicitly acknowledges that ownership is a temporary thing: one day, when I am dead and gone, all these books will be dispersed and some future owner will discover that the volume they now hold used to belong to me. Anyone who regularly prowls second-hand bookshops will know the moment of magic that I am describing, when a scribbled name on a front endpaper can transform an ugly-duckling paperback into a swan. 

Among serious collectors, the standard way of stamping ownership on a book has long been with a printed bookplate. These range from austere armorials to offbeat compositions that try to capture something of the owner’s personality. Rudyard Kipling’s bookplate, for instance, which I came upon recently while curating an exhibition on provenance, is precisely what one would expect: three turbaned men ride atop an elephant; the moustachioed figure in the middle reclines under a canopy, smoking a hookah and reading a large book. Is it Kipling? Other bookplates are humble things. Another exhibit featured the plate of Edward Burne-Jones: about the size of a large-letter postage stamp and printed in the famous Doves Type, which, curiously, wasn’t designed until the year after Burne-Jones died. Figure that one out. ‘The size of a bookplate’, wrote William M Ivins, longstanding curator of prints at the Met, ‘is usually in inverse proportion to the owner’s interest in books.’ It is a good rule of thumb.

Unquestionably the most accomplished and sought-after designer of bookplates in the 20th century was Reynolds Stone. Having absorbed the techniques of end-grain wood engraving during an intensive fortnight with Eric Gill, Stone quickly made a name for himself as an artist of rare talent and energy. He was immensely prolific,