BOOK-PLATE collecting, at least in this country, is a thing of yesterday. On the Continent, particularly in France, it attracted attention sufficiently serious to induce the publication, in 1874, of a monograph on French book-plates by M. Poulet Malassis, which in the next year obtained the honours of a second edition. In England, prior to 1880, we had no work devoted to the study; but, in that year, the Honourable J. Leicester Warren--afterwards Lord De Tabley--published _A Guide to the Study of Book-Plates (Ex Libris)_. How little was then generally known about these marks of ownership is shown by the allusions to them--very few in number--that find place in the pages of such publications as _The Gentleman's Magazine_ or _Notes and Queries_: for that reason, the skilful handling of the subject by the late Lord De Tabley, and his zeal in compiling the treatise, are all the more conspicuous. One of the most useful works which has yet appeared in the journal of the _Ex Libris_ Society--a society intended to promote the study of book-plates--is a compilation by Mr. H. W. Fincham and Mr. J. Roberts Brown, _A Bibliography of Book-Plates_, arranged chronologically. A glance at this compilation emphasises the truth of the statement, just made, as to the scantiness of recorded information on book-plates prior to the year 1880; it also shows what a great deal about them has been written since. Writing to _Notes and Queries_ in 1877, Dr. Jackson Howard, whose collection is now one of the largest in England, says that he began collecting forty years before that date, and that the nucleus of his own collection was one made by a Miss Jenkins at Bath in 1820. It is probably, therefore, to this lady that we should attribute the honour of being the first collector of book-plates, for their own sake. No doubt the collector of engravings admitted into his portfolios book-plates worthy a place there as interesting engravings, for stray examples are often found in such collections as that formed in the seventeenth century by John Bagford, the biblioclast, which is now in the British Museum. No doubt, too, heraldic painters or plate engravers collected book-plates as specimens of heraldry, but this was not collecting them as book-plates--viz. as illustrations of the custom of placing marks of ownership in books, which, I take it, was evidently Miss Jenkins's object.[1]