The William Augustus Brewer Bookplate Collection :

Reverend William Augustus Brewer was an avid bookplate collector. His wife, Augusta LaMotte Brewer, bequeathed his collection to the University of Delaware Library after her husband’s death. The William Augustus Brewer Bookplate Collection comprises 12,680 printed bookplates dating mainly from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The collection includes bookplates from the libraries of John Carter Brown, Lewis Carroll, Samuel L. Clemens, Calvin Coolidge, Charles Dickens, Walt Disney, Edward Gibbon, Alexander Hamilton, Harry Houdini, Samuel Pepys, Howard Pyle, Paul Revere, Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Alfred Stieglitz and William Butler Yeats, as well as many others. The designers of the bookplates include Thomas Bewick, Edward Burne-Jones, Kate Greenaway, William Hogarth, Howard Pyle, Rudolf Ruzicka, and James A. M. Whistler. Subjects illustrated in the bookplates are varied, inclucing birds, death’s heads, medicine, music, rebuses, and portraits of historical and literary figures.

The William Augustus Brewer Digital Bookplate Collection currently contains 3,040 of these bookplates, with the remaining 10,000 to be added in 2011.

Viewing the Bookplates

Use the links above to access the ContentDM Search page, to view all the digitized bookplates in the collection, go to the CONTENTdm Browse page.

There are 3037 bookplates mounted on card stock. Most of the mats have a bookplate on one side containing a number in the upper right hand corner, this may be seen by clicking "Detailed View" once inside the record. These numbers are in order of Rev. Brewer's cataloging system, which is alphabetical. Many of the mats also contain information on the backside, which may be viewed by clicking "View Back" once inside the record.

Many of these bookplates are rich in detail that can be seen when the images are enlarged. Click on the "Detailed View" link to zoom in on selected areas.