Friday, January 13, 2012

Ex Libris Moi

Being in love with all things old-fashioned, I have developed a particular crush on the ornate "ex libris" bookplates from the days of yore.

What is "ex libris," you ask? Per Wikipedia:

Ex Libris is a Latin phrase, meaning literally, "from the books". It is often used to indicate ownership of a book, as in "from the books of..." or from the library of...

I collect lots of old books, so I've had the good fortune to stumble across some of these antiqued name-bearing bookplates. Further journeying around the web turned up these beauties:


So of course, the next step was to get my own ex libris on.  Lacking the graphic design panache needed to properly do the job, I found Stacey's shop, Asspocket Productions, on Etsy and knew she was just the woman to help me. 

Update (01/ 16/12): Stacey sent me a quick email describing her process for creating the custom stamps you can find in her shop!

"It's actually a really cool photo process where I make a negative on my computer and then expose special photoreactive polymer gel to a strong light through the negative and it hardens when it develops. I then wash away the unexposed polymer, and cut apart the individual stamps and mount them."

After a careful search, I found exactly what I was yearning for, and when the package arrived I couldn't have been more pleased with the end result.  Ta daaaa!

Now for the fun of tackling my personal library, one book at a time, and a-fixing this eerily lovely little tag.  This feels like such a great way to get my reading life a little bit closer to organized.  (One step closer to checking off that New Year's resolution, and it's only January 13!)

Ex Libris the night away!


5 comments:

Kristin said...

This is such a neat idea!

elledoubleyouu said...

These are so cool! I absolutely love the one you came up with.

♥ LW

Bucho said...

must you be so damn fresh all the time? you're making the rest of us look bad...and now i badly want to do this to my books too.

what was the overall cost of getting something like this done?

Jennifer | Mrs Q Book Addict said...

Oh, that is so cool!

Katie*Belle said...

What a cool idea! And I loved learning about the history too.