Saturday, June 24, 2017

Judith Eleanor Sublett's bookplate


Here is the simple bookplate for Judith Eleanor Sublett's library. It appears on the inside front cover of 1910's The Wide-Awake Girls at College, which was the final book in a three-book series by Katharine Ruth Ellis. (Today, they would probably be called The Woke Girls.)

The phrase on the bookplate — "Go ye rather to them that sell, and buy for yourselves" — is an excerpt from the King James version of Matthew 25:9. The full King James verse states:
"But the wise answered, saying, Not so; lest there be not enough for us and you: but go ye rather to them that sell, and buy for yourselves."
I will not even begin to delve into the message of that verse, how and if it might apply to book ownership and what it might have meant personally to Judith. I'll leave the first part of that wondering to the Bible scholars.

I do know that Judith had at least 28 books, though.

Judith Eleanor Sublett lived from 1900 to 1962, according to her Find A Grave page. She was born in Harrisonburg, Virginia. She was a graduate of the Class of 1920 at Saint Mary's School in Raleigh, North Carolina. She married John E. Catlin and had a son, John England Catlin Jr., who lived from 1926 to 1999 and was a brigadier general in the U.S. Air Force. Judith died in Bergen County, New Jersey. She is buried at Woodbine Cemetery in Harrisonburg.

And she liked to read.

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