Sunday, July 6, 2014

The Jolly family's splendid bookplate


Love this! This cool bookplate1 for The Jollys was affixed to the inside front cover of the 1975 paperback edition of The Golden Age of Colonial Culture by Thomas J. Wertenbaker.

Obviously, this was a family with some refined intellectual tastes.

Wertenbaker (1879-1966) was an Ivy League historian who focused on Colonial America. The book's chapters are titled:
  • Crucibles of Culture
  • The Puritan Begins to Play, Boston
  • Father Knickerbocker Becomes Aesthetic, New York
  • Culture with a "Thee and Thou," Philadelphia
  • Intellectual Life Around the Punch Bowl, Annapolis
  • The Mind of the Tobacco Aristocrat, Williamsburg
  • Rice, Indigo, and Elegance, Charleston

More posts featuring bookplates

Footnote
1. While I would LOVE a cozy home library complete with a fireplace, I would say two things about this illustration. First, the painting above the fireplace is awful. Second, some of the bookshelves are clearly too close to the fireplace. That's bad for the books.

OK, another thing. The bowl of fruit on the mantle is tacky, too. But maybe that's part of why I love this bookplate.

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