On vacation last week I went into a promising little used/antiquarian bookshop. Finding more Latin Teubners than a man has any right to expect of any store, I started checking for owner’s marks and discovered I’d been browsing the unwanted residue of an old professor’s personal library. This reminded me of the bookplate below, which I’d saved a few years back partly because I liked the spirit of the joke and partly because I knew it to be only half a joke. As I made room in my library this morning for new editions of Valerius Flaccus and Macrobius, the joke end of the scale seemed to lose weight.
Extracts 