The Latin expression means ‘from among the books of’, and since the fifteenth century the word has denoted the mark by which an owner records a volume as part of his library. The earliest known ex-libris are German woodcut vignettes from the late fifteenth century; in France, the use of the engraved label spread in the seventeenth century with coats of arms, then in the eighteenth with rocaille cartouches and mottoes. In the nineteenth century, the ex-libris became a minor artistic genre in its own right, and engravers such as Félicien Rops or Henry-André designed compositions for bibliophiles that are collected today in their own right.
For the bookseller, the ex-libris is above all evidence of provenance: it names an owner, sometimes a date and a motto, and allows the copy to be linked to a known library whose sale catalogues can be consulted. An ex-libris of a celebrated collector, or of a library whose holdings have been studied, adds to the copy a history that can be documented. Its usual position is the paste-down; its engraving, paper and glue can be read like the rest of the object.
The ex-libris is often confused with the supra-libris, which denotes the mark stamped on the binding itself, most often arms on the boards. An old vignette added well after the fact, detached from another volume, or a modern ex-libris pasted into an old book, is also sometimes mistaken for an early ex-libris; the consistency between the date of the label, that of the binding, and the other marks on the copy settles the matter. Finally, a removed ex-libris almost always leaves a trace, and a renewed paste-down deserves to be noted.
