THE ELEPHANT TALKS TO GOD by Dale Estey

An Elephant - grazing - would be a wonderful bookplate.

$12.95

Paperback

But can I prove it's a book without its book plate?

Death of the Bookplate?By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER

Forget the death of the book. It turns out we have an even bigger problem: the death of the bookplate.

Alex Beam, writing in the Yale alumni magazine, flips through some gorgeous samples from the university’s collection and ponders a future without beautiful printed books to mark with your personalized stamp of possession and desire:

The physical book does not exist, and has no value. The digital book has no front or back covers; there is no place to assert ownership, and there is nothing to own. The “digital delivery module” is a piece of molded plastic made in China, encasing a few memory chips. That is not the book, that’s the “reader.” Wait, I thought I was the reader. Oh, never mind.

For a slideshow of bookplates from the Yale collection, click here.

http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/death-of-the-bookplate/