 Vicente Dobroruka - Ex-libris
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Being fond of books as I am, I am also very much interested in ex-libris and have made one fior myself. This page is about my own bookplates (more as a reminder to myself about their development then for visitors - I do not think anyone would be particularly interested in them), and also about ex-libris in general.
The idea of having my own ex-libris came about in 1989, when the grandfather of a former girlfriend (Lucia de Almeida Abt) showed me his. Kurt Abt was the name of the owner, he lived in Teresópolis (a mountain resort near Rio) and he was quite a character, an irascible and yet lovely old man who insisted in driving his own DKW, cooking his own bread and shooting boys who tried to steal carps from his pond.
His own bookplate was not very attractive - too big, dark grey overall with the stylized mountains of the region and the legend "Ex Libris" and "Kurt Abt" in some italic, sans serif font in white and another one in a kind of non-aligned Gothic font.
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| The Kurt Abt original ex-libris (reproduced here by kind permission of Geraldo Abt, his son; please note that the original stamp is larger). |
But this gave me the idea of having my own, using the more practical expedient of electronic publishing and having livelier fonts set. I also intended to have a personal motif as the image, in the case a pipe (back then I was a heavy pipe smoker).
So I scanned a picture of a bent billiard pipe (my favourite shape, then as now) from Carlos Alberto de Ranieri's book, Sua excelência o cachimbo. The font selected for the first version was Old German and the job was done in a Macintosh Plus in the printing house where I worked at the time. It was completed in April 1990, the first batch lasting almost 3 years.
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| The first series (1A) was printed in high-quality A4 sheets, in a LaserWriter. They were stuck in position with Pritt glue. |
Series 1B was the same thing but just photocopied, since I had lost the original file by then.They were used between 1994-1995. |
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| In 1995 I decided it was time to have a new batch done, preferably in stickers. The font was Old English and I had to rescan the pipe (series 2A). |
A variation of 2A was 2B, with Old English replaced by Theodoric. By then finding the right font in other machines was becoming increasingly important. |
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| As an emergency measure came about series 2C, with plain Garamond typeface as a simplifying measure. Thankfully I used very few stamps of these, which had an unpleasant and makeshift look about them. |
In 2004 I decided it was time to get something decent. After much thought I returned to the original design, though with a pipe image more suited to laser printers and Frankenstein typeface (series 3). |
As one can see, the most hampering aspect of the whole design is the pipe. At first I scanned it better but still it was too much reticulated - but it did not appear very annoying 15 years ago. It got worse on series 2, done with resources relatively less sophisticated when compared to the Macs and in desperate urgency (it was the time when my library was growing the fastest).
I hope I have recaptured the spirit of series 1 with the new plates of series 3. They use a similar typeface but great care has been given to use an image that looks crisper, replacing the original scan. Just for the record, I tried to produce a series 3 tag using the old pipe, but the result was not satisfactory and only proofs on ordinary paper were done. These were never used on books.
I have opted to repeat the - now - traditional layout and themes because it would be strange to introduce a totally new print and knowing myself as much as I do, I would end up trying to replace all labels on every book...
Links to ex-libris pages
 Bookplate
MyOwnLabels.com
The Art of the Ex Libris
WebRing about ex-libris
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