"Only in books has mankind known perfect truth, love and beauty."

—George Bernard Shaw

At Bookplates.com, we appreciate the importance of doing things well, especially when it comes to books. We still use traditional printing plates and offset lithography with dense black printer's ink (not powdered toner as in copy machines and digital presses). The paper we use is a very bright and opaque white; an archival and acid free stock that is used in fine-art limited-edition books and prints. Each quantity of 250 bookplates is seperately shrink-wrapped and packaged in a box that along with paste, burnisher, and bookplating instructions. Fine bookplates are made to be used with paste, and the tin of acid-free Italian-made Coccoina paste comes with the brush cleverly encased inside the canister as it did in 1921.

In decades and centuries past, knowing who owned which book was a matter of lifting the front cover. Pasted on the inside front cover would be the bookplate: a unique rectangular label bearing the owner's name, perhaps an illustration, and often the Latin words "Ex Libris" — a phrase used all over the world to mean “from the library of.” Today it is still possible to find books adorned with these exquisitely civilized and personal labels. Many of them are in old, inherited collections. Sometimes they can be found in used bookstores, standing on the shelves among the other veterans. And occasionally, they can even be seen in the personal libraries of those modern readers and writers who cherish their collections as booklovers did so long ago.

When you order from Bookplates.com, your bookplate is exclusively yours. The visual elements for each bookplate have been coordinated by a graphic designer around the numerous typesetting possibilities. After you submit you order and it is processed, a new, recyclable aluminum printing plate is made with your custom artwork. Your bookplates are then printed and trimmed to size by an experienced artisan pressman.

Bookplate orders ship as complete kits with all of the necessary accessories. You will receive your bookplates packaged in a storage box along with the paste and brush, a burnisher, and some tips on bookplating. Each additional 250 bookplates is packaged as an additional kit of accessories, so if you order a set of 500 bookplates, you will receive a second canister of paste and other extras; if you order 750, you will receive a third kit. Click about the bookplates to see an example order.

Pressure sensitive (crack-and-peel) sticker paper, while not advisable for use in fine books, is available by special request. Other options include custom ink colors, four color process printing, commissioned illustrations and designs, letterpress printing, and more. Simply contact us with a description of your project, attaching pictures if possible. All bookplate projects are of interest to us. We look forward to hearing from you!

"I find television very educational. Every time someone turns it on, I go in the other room and read a book."

—Groucho Marx

If you do not see the Bookplate Design Interface above, you may need to click your brower's message bar at the top of the page to "Allow Blocked Content."

If you see nothing in the box above after a few seconds, download and install the latest Flash Player at www.macromedia.com.