What is the First English Bookplate?

Abstract

Bookplates constitute one of the most regularly encountered kinds of provenance evidence in books. Their history is traced back to a late fifteenth-century gift label used at Buxheim and standard sources usually identify the earliest British bookplate as a similar kind of woodcut armorial pasted into books given to Cambridge University in 1574. This note describes a number of hand-painted armorial labels used in the middle of the sixteenth century (and certainly before 1574) by Thomas Andrews of Bury St Edmunds, which were clearly used as ownership markings. These, alongside some other similar examples, make it clear that the practice has a longer history in English usage than we have previously thought.