While trying to recover from the walking the bourse floor at the ANA Thursday night, David Fanning and I were looking over some old books (who'd'a thunkit!?). We were trying to figure out why the name of a bookseller on a label in a 19th century book sounded familiar. The search for the answer also serendipitously led to a web site that may be of interest to E-Sylum readers. Here's a nice illustrated collection of labels of the book trade (binders booksellers, etc.)

Anyone who handles old books will have come across these small and sometimes beautiful labels pasted more or less discreetly into the endpapers. Publishers, printers, binders, importers, distributors and sellers of books -- new, second-hand and antiquarian -- used to advertise in this way their contribution to bringing the book to market. Most of the earliest examples shown here belong to binders (e.g., the Marcus Ward ticket, ca.1841); this is a continuation of binders' earlier practice of sewing into the binding a small ticket with their signature.

This collection began with labels found in our own books, but now it is mainly a virtual collection -- each entry is digitally scanned from books found in the excellent research library to which we repair in our spare time. We must admit to having gone from "coming across" the labels in our book-browsing to actually searching for them.