Author Archives: Laura Aydelotte

The posts on this blog bring attention to the interesting stories that provenance marks in historical books have to tell about books and their owners.  The current exhibit, “The Art of Ownership: Bookplates and Book Collectors from 1480 to the … Continue reading →

The image shown above is one of 134 new images of provenance marks from the Special Collections Library at Bryn Mawr College that were recently added to POP.  All the images show marks of ownership from Bryn Mawr’s collection of … Continue reading →

Today’s mystery provenance mark comes from a book called “Il Pastor Fido” the “Faithful Shephard”, a tragicomedy from the late 16th century (Penn Libraries: IC55 G9315 590p 1591).  The monogram bookplate shown above appears in the upper left corner of … Continue reading →

    The image above shows the signature of Isaac Newton (1643-1727) in a copy of Robert Boyle’s Experimentorum novorum physico-mechanicorum at the Huntington Library in California (Huntington: 70087).  As Newton notes here under his name, the book was given to … Continue reading →

When most people think of Renaissance portraits they picture a painting like Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa hanging in a frame on the wall of a museum.  We might expect to encounter the faces of people from the 15th and … Continue reading →

A few weeks ago I posted about a mystery inscription in a copy of Penn Libraries’ copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio, the first edition of Shakespeare’s works published in 1623.  Today’s Monday mystery comes from the title page of the … Continue reading →

Often figuring out who owned a book before begins with researching the marks we can see on its pages.  However, in some cases the first challenge is to be able to see those marks at all.  As I wrote in … Continue reading →