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This Week in Bookplates 3/2/2014

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Fellow Collector David Wilton has a new wood engraved bookplate by Andy English.


It is based on a William Kent mirror design.

I purchased this  Mayan bookplate last week because it appealed to me.
I've never seen it before, and it fits in with my threats and warnings collection


Here are two older postings about threats and warnings.


One thing that adds to my enjoyment of this peculiar hobby is learning about the owners of bookplates.
,In this instance it was a piece of cake.*
William Frederick and Elizebeth Smith Friedman were American cryptographers.
They also had an interest in Mayan glyphs.

"William Friedman was still an infant when his family immigrated to the United States; he studied genetics at Cornell University (B.S., 1914). Elizabeth Smith majored in English at Hillsdale (Michigan) College (B.A., 1915). They met at the Riverbank Laboratories (Geneva, Ill.), where they both eventually became involved in cryptology, working often for the government in decoding diplomatic messages. In 1917–18 William served in the U.S. Army, partly in France, analyzing German code books.
After the war, in 1921, the Friedmans (they had married in May 1917) moved to Washington, D.C., where, over the years, Elizebeth Friedman worked for several government departments, notably cracking the codes used by rumrunners and other smugglers, and where William Friedman, in the War Department, became the chief cryptoanalyst in the Signal Intelligence Service, notably leading the teams that broke various Japanese codes, including ultimately the Purple machine cipher initiated by Japan in 1939. After World War II, William Friedman worked awhile for the National Security Agency, and Elizebeth Friedman for the International Monetary Fund.
William Friedman wrote The Index of Coincidence and Its Applications in Cryptography (1922), one of the standard works in the nomenclature and classification of ciphers. Together, the Friedmans wrote The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined (1957), in which they denied Francis Bacon’s purported authorship of the William Shakespeare plays and sonnets"
   http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1345883/William-F-Friedman-and-Elizebeth-S-Friedman
*  Idioms are of interest to me . For some of you American English may be a second or third language.so this explanation may be in order.:
http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~zk32/clicheorigin.html

Dr.Wolfgang Rieger has a well illustrated  new catalog of German and Swiss bookplates for sale.

The Ephemera Society Meeting and and show will be here before you know it.


Fellow collector/dealer Tom Boss will devote most of his exhibit space to bookplates.,He is bringing thousands of bookplates including many popular items in   categories such as angling, famous people and
18th century American including some by Paul Revere.




Update on  mystery bookplates

Fellow bookplate enthusiast Alan Pendray sent me some additional information about two mystery bookplates in the style of Jessie M. King


Hi Lew,
Please find below my synopsis of the Cowenhoven bookplates,including the website link, for your blog,lets hope it generates additional leads:

Having read Colins Whites extensive article regarding the HENRIETTA COWENHOVEN BROWN bookplate mystery in the Autumn 2012 Bookplate Journal,imagine my surprise when Lew told me that he not only had an original copy but also had the identical copy with the name KATHERINE COWENHOVEN TAYLOR.
As Colin had not seen an original and could find no trace of a HENRIETTA COWENHOVEN BROWN,I decided to investigate further and found a website* that contained references to BOTH the names and it turned out that Henriette was an American heiress (1889-1962) who travelled to Europe and had a daughter , Katherine . Henrietta`s married name was in fact HENRIETTA COWENHOVEN BROWN TAYLOR.
I then forwarded this information to Colin White whose analysis is below;

I think Alan Pendray seems to have got to the heart of the matter. He’s done a fine bit of research into the Cowenhaven family. I think the summing up might well be that Henrietta saw the JMK illustration in the Studio and had the bookplate based on it made by some unknown (but talented) artist, perhaps using her own  image instead of JMK’s maiden. An artist clever enough to reproduce the intricacies of all the foliage would surely have been able to produce a better nymph than she did and I suspect that there is a portrait element there. Henrietta’s daughter, the Taylor girl, (Taylor by marriage and certainly no relation of E.A. Taylor) adapted her mother’s bookplate, possibly posthumously. I do believe that everything stems from the original drawing in Studio. JMK wouldn't ( couldn't) make such an close copy of her own work (and leave it unsigned) even if, by chance, Henrietta had met up with her in Paris in 1913.

*Website link

1.   Henrietta Cowenhoven Brown Taylor (1889 - 1962) - Find A Grave ...


www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=96068154


This has nothing to do with bookplates.
It's just a nice photo of my son and two grandsons.





See you again , next Sunday











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