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The Bookplates of Emil Doepler and Georg Otto (MS Gen 1746/1+3)

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Guest blog by Eilidh McAllan, a Junior Honours student on placement in Archives & Special Collections.

Books can be deeply personal items, to be looked after and adorned; hence, there is the urge to claim a book, to make your mark on it. Today, we might take a biro pen to it, scribbling our name and maybe today’s date on the contents page, but this is an aspect of ownership that has been traditional for centuries; most notably, in the form of the bookplate. The use of bookplates, as personalised labels, began in Germany at the end of the fifteenth century. Since then, bookplates have taken on a variety of forms and styles, fluctuating in popularity with the fashions of the period. Until the 1870s, by which point they had begun to see a decline in popularity, their designs reverted to a preference for a ‘high level of excellence’,1 leading to a period of imitating Renaissance and Rococo styles. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, we can begin to see the rise of ‘Jugendstil,’ a modern movement characterised by dynamic lines and unusual forms.

When I approached this project, I knew it would be a challenge. Little is known of the provenance of this book series, or the German artists that it carries (each of the four volumes is dedicated to one each). One book is dated to 1924 with ‘R. Gragert’ on the front cover; however, there are no references to this name in texts or online databases. I would argue this suggests R. Gragert was a private collector, bookplate collecting having become very popular in the second half of the nineteenth century.2 Therefore, the books concerned in this project are likely to be the work of an amateur enthusiast. Keeping this in mind, it possibly explains the wrong name on the front cover of the ‘Emil Doepler’ volume, where he is misnamed ‘Enrich’. Similarly, the bookplates themselves are glued into the books in a haphazard fashion, again suggesting that there was a lack of professional rigour.

Fig. 1 MS Gen 1746/1, pg. 4

I focused on two of the four artists, Emil Doepler and Georg Otto because they appear to have the most interesting points of style and design when compared. Doepler appeared to be the more well-known artist of the two, mainly because of his contribution to the design of the black eagle in the Weimar Republic’s Coat of Arms (a reoccurring symbol throughout much of his later bookplates). The evolution of Doepler’s style evolution is particularly interesting in that there is an obvious shift in approach by the turn of the century; one can see a dedication to ‘keeping in step with the times’ and an attempt to move away from the then Alt-Deutsch (‘Antique German’) style.3 Doepler’s work shifts from traditional historical armorial designs of the nineteenth century, to something more in keeping with the Jugendstil-Art Nouveau designs of the early twentieth.

This shift could have been facilitated by Doepler’s introduction to the new aesthetic via Elli Hirsch, a close collaborator and eventual partner. Their relationship appears to have had a significant impact on his style’s evolution given Hirsch’s own work was heavily influenced by Art Nouveau developments. Notably, at the beginning of his collection, the bookplate’s collector included a bookplate that Hirsch actually made for Doepler [Fig.1]. We can see within it the art nouveau influence, most notably in the curved lines, natural details and choice of font. However, Hirsch also includes the nude female form: in the early twentieth century, the nude form was used in bookplates as ‘markers of possession as voluptuous avatars of reading itself,’ and was a purely modern development in bookplate iconography.4 As if in response, Doepler designed a bookplate for Hirsch [Fig.2]; nowhere near as scandalous, but tinged with the art nouveau influence nonetheless, identifiable through the natural details like flowers and the recognisable curved font.

Fig. 2 MS Gen 1746/1, pg. 1

The details of Georg Otto’s life is more difficult to pinpoint. Otto’s bookplates were traditional and definitely in keeping with the classical revivalism of the nineteenth century, seeming to make few attempts to break away from this approach. Although Otto was more obscure than Doepler, he did work on some interesting projects; most notably, producing a bookplate for Disconto-Gesellschaft, one of the largest German banks before its 1929 merger with Deutsche Bank. It was particularly interesting to discover Otto was a pupil of Doepler. As a professor, Doepler taught the principles of pattern design and ornamentation with a view to ‘develop the students’ awareness of positive and negative form, as well as spatial organisation of repeated motifs’.5 Thus, it is striking to consider Otto’s lack of aesthetic development in comparison to the more experimental Doepler.

In comparison to Doepler’s bookplates, if we look at Otto’s we see a preference for depicting library interiors. Bookplates of library interiors became most popular in the eighteenth century, with a decline of the style into the nineteenth. These bookplates gave an accurate representation of a real library, emphasising the linking of book ownership to personal property ownership. This style was outdated: despite decline in popularity by the end of the eighteenth century, Otto’s interior was produced in 1893 [Fig. 3].

Fig. 3 MS Gen 1746/3, pg. 18
Fig. 4 MS Gen 1746/3, pg. 34

Additionally, if we turn to one Otto bookplate from 1905 [Fig.4], we again see few attempts to participate in the modern developments of the period; instead, an example of a landscape pictorial bookplate, another style that had reached its peak of popularity again by the late eighteenth century. Compared with Fig. 2, Doepler’s bookplate from that year, we find a piece of work that is arguably unrepresentative of the period it is contemporaneous to.

Nonetheless, there are some noteworthy attempts by Otto to participate in this modern style, such as a move towards art nouveau motifs like the nude female form [Fig. 5]. However, this is still an underdeveloped response to the growing movement.

Fig. 5 MS Gen 1746/3, pg. 23
Fig. 6 MS Gen 1746/1, penultimate pg.

We can see some of this in Doepler’s bookplates [Fig. 6]. However, it should be noted that in Doepler’s 1915 bookplate, we see a regression to the traditional gothic typeface and harsh lines typical of nineteenth-century design; arguably a response to the breakout of the First World War in 1914, where the work that was produced increasingly sublimated tog the growing nationalist demands of the period.

Through the work of Georg Otto and Emil Doepler’s bookplates, we can chart the changing styles and approaches to bookplate design from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century in Wilhelmine Germany. Previously, most bookplates reflected the historical styles of previous decades; however, towards the end of the 1900s, as in many other spheres of artistic pursuit, there was a movement away from imitation to the innovation of new styles, as with Jugendstil. Doepler and Otto help to illustrate this shift. There is so much still to be discovered about these artists, and despite the lack of biographical detail surrounding them (at least in English-language literature), it is clear there was a commitment to bringing the deep-rooted tradition of German bookplates into the tastes of the next century.

Footnotes

  1. Karl Emich Leiningen-Westerburg, German Bookplates: An Illustrated Handbook of German and Austrian Exlibris (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1901), 268. ↩︎
  2. David Pearson, Provenance Research in Book History: A Handbook (Oxford: Oak Knell Press with the Bodleian Library, 2019), 89-91. ↩︎
  3. H.W. Singer, “German Book-plates,” in Modern Book-plates & their Designers (London: The Studio, 1898), 63-68.   ↩︎
  4. Anna Sigridur Arnar, “The Sensuality and Modernity of Fin-de-Siecle Print Culture,” Print Quarterly 31, no. 4 (Dec 2014): 476. ↩︎
  5. Jeremy Aynsley, Graphic Design in Germany 1890-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 70. ↩︎
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