Indeed, in his last article in “Le Livre Moderne” (No. 24, December, 1891), M. Octave Uzanne deplored the want of interest shown by the French authors in this important branch of bibliographical art. From amongst the hundreds of thousands of book-plates known to exist in public and private collections, there would, he said, be no difficulty in selecting sufficient representative examples to form a magnificent “Dictionnaire Illustré des Ex-Libris.” The task must, however, remain unperformed until an author is found possessing not only sufficient taste, skill, and leisure to undertake it, but also ample means to carry it out, for such a work would undoubtedly be costly, and not many publishers would be willing to undertake the risk of producing it. Hitherto no such collection has been published, either in Great Britain or in France; the nearest approach, in French, being the “Armorial du Bibliophile,” by Joannis Guigard, which deals only with the stamps on armorial bookbindings, and the splendid work on German Ex-Libris by Herr Frederic Warnecke, published in Berlin in 1890. M. A. Poulet-Malassis opens his work with the expression: “Pas un des dictionnaires de la langue française n’a admis le terme _ex-libris_, composé de deux mots latins qui signifient _des livres ... faisant partie des livres_. II est pourtant consacré par l’usage et se dit de toute marque de propriété appliquée à l’extérieur ou à l’intérieur d’un volume.” He could, however, no longer complain of the absence of the term _ex-libris_ from the dictionaries, as, since he wrote, M. Pierre Larousse has inserted the following definition in vol. vii. of “Le Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIX siècle” (Paris, 4to, 1866-1877): “EX-LIBRIS, mots latins qui signifient littéralement des livres, d’entre des livres, faisant partie des livres, avec le nom du propriétaire. Ces mots s’inscrivent ordinairement en tête de chaque volume d’une bibliothèque avec la signature du propriétaire. On connait ce trait d’ignorance d’un financier, homme d’ordre avant tout, qui avait ordonné à son chapelier de coller soigneusement au fond de son chapeau ‘Ex-Libris Vaudore.’” But what is still more singular than the omission of _ex-libris_ from their dictionaries, is that no word, or phrase, in their own pure and beautiful language has been set apart by our neighbours to define these interesting marks of book possession.