In the near future, when books are looked upon as objects of pure nostalgia, the concept of a bookplate might need a bit of explaining: Before the reign of e-books, streaming content, and information stored in a mythical “cloud,” people stockpiled hardcovered paper objects full of written words. Of those educated persons who maintained personal libraries of their favorite tomes, the more affluent sometimes commissioned unique, artist-designed bookplates, which were affixed inside the book’s cover to make its allegiances clear.

“I’m a rich person, this is my property, and you’d better not take it.”

Books aren’t quite an endangered species yet, and the Association of American Publishers reports that sales of physical books are actually on the rise. Nevertheless, many who consider themselves avid readers have still never seen a bookplate in person—which makes sense, considering the trend peaked around a century ago. In fact, the use of bookplates started much earlier, with the oldest known plates dating to mid-15th-century Germany.

Until the printing press came along, all books were rarified manuscripts filled with calligraphy and illumination, painstakingly crafted by hand, and only the elite had access to them. In Europe, monasteries were one of the few places that people could handle literature they did not own, and according to Lew Jaffe, a bookplate collector for over 30 years, this created the need for the first known bookplates. “In monasteries that had libraries, they attached chains to the books so they wouldn’t be taken,” Jaffe explains. “But they also created hand-illustrated plates to paste into these books that essentially said ‘this belongs to such-and-such monastery or such-and-such rich person,’ and would include their coat of arms. It was like a warning: ‘I’m a rich person, this is my property, and you’d better not take it.’”

Read the rest on the Collectors Weekly website and check out the images of some of the bookplates of the famous. I love Greta Garbo’s