Though 'J. Skinner'[16] (see pp. 81-86), an engraver who worked at Bath, does not find mention in any dictionary of engravers, yet he deserves notice from the student of book-plates for the great quantity of his work in that field--nearly all dated, and some really very excellent. Of Skinner, Lord De Tabley writes:--'I would gladly learn some biographical details'; but he failed to find any, and I have been equally unfortunate. At the British Museum there is no Bath newspaper or directory sufficiently early to contain either an advertisement by Skinner or a mention of his place of residence; in the _Bath Directory_ of 1812 the name is represented by two grocers, a publican, a gardener, and one private resident--a Miss Skinner who lived at 3 St. James's Parade. Sir Wollaston Franks tells me that, amongst the engravers who vouched for the perfection of _Sympson's New Book of Cypher_--'the most perfect and neatest drawn of any performance of the kind hitherto extant'--was one Jacob Skinner, and it is very likely this was our friend the engraver of book-plates, who laboured at Bath from 1739 to 1753. He worked in three successive styles of English book-plate engraving--the Armorial, the Jacobean, and the Chippendale; a fact which renders his plates of special interest to collectors, since it enables them to see how the same hand treats the succeeding styles when fully developed, and during their gradual change from one style into the other. His earliest dated book-plate that we know is that for the library of Sir Christopher Musgrave (figured opposite), and the next, five years later, that of 'John Conyers of Walthamstow in Essex, Esq.' Here the ornamentation is quite Jacobean; the shield is oval, with wing-like excrescences at the top and on either side--that at the top forming a background to the helmet which supports the crest. Next year (1738) Skinner produced the book-plate of 'Francis Carington, Esq., of Wotton, Warwickshire'--in appearance even earlier than that of Musgrave. Some of this early appearance is perhaps due to an absence of indication of the tinctures on the shield--a habit which, as we shall presently see, Skinner followed in one or two other instances. A slight mantling falls from an esquire's helmet and descends a little way down the shield till it joins the Jacobean scroll-work, and the owner's name and description are upon a fringed cloth. But the feature to note in this book-plate is the monogrammatic form of the engraver's signature: '[Illustration: JS symbol].' It is the first time he uses it, and in his subsequent dated work he appears always to have adopted some similar form, this being the most frequent:--'[Illustration: JS symbol]kin^{r}.' [Illustration]