The World of Fine Wine issue 23, 2003 brought a review, Bookplates with wine motifs, with a set of rules on how to commission a bookplate, how to collect bookplates of artistic quality as a short cut to a fine collection of graphic art and how to love bookplates. When the collector-spirits portrayed in Marvin Bolotsky’s bookplate, an etching by the Ukranian artist Konstantin Kalinovych, have been let out of the bottle, you may already be lost to an incurable infection of bookplate-virus.
A bookplate 8-10 cm tall and 6-7 cm wide would be handy for most modern books. It is all a question of size as observed by Moses’ spies in the land of Canaan when they came to the valley of Eshcol, and cut down from there a branch with one cluster of grapes, and they bore it on a staff between two of them. The motif was cut in lino by the Polish artist Zb. Dolatowski.
