The Bookplate Designs of Austin Osman Spare.

Robert Ansell.  The Bookplate Society in association with The Keridwen Press, 1988. This edition limited to 500 copies; 330 for the Bookplate Society, and 140 only for private circulation, hand numbered and signed by the author, this being copy No. 31. Cream Pictorial Wrappers. 5⅞" x 8¼". Portrait Frontispiece of Austin Osman Spare ca.1908. 35pp. Includes: Checklist. Footnotes. Illustrated with one illuminated letter ‘A’, one untitled design, and 23 bookplates.

[The Checklist provides the year in which each bookplate was designed, starting in 1904 and ending in 1945. These are most likely not your grandfather’s bookplates. A firm believer in reincarnation, Spare felt that each person’s past lives, in a variety of human and animal forms, were retained in the subconscious. This could be tapped into, allowing one to observe and communicate with the many embodiments of the self that dwelt there. It was such inner journeys that inspired the fantastical menagerie of creatures and semi-human figures visible in so much of his art. So what we see in these bookplates are not static designs that reflect and symbolize the interests of the book collector, rather they are infused with atavistic and macabre images flowing from the mind of Spare.]        

VG with soiling of covers and minute tear at bottom of spine.