A recent addition to the biblio-ephemera collection here at ZHQ is the bookplate of Karl Christian Moritz Woog (1684-1760), who was a German evangelical Minister who apparently devoted himself to scientific work, and more importantly for us, ‘collected a handsome library’ (Muller – General German Biography). The library, wonderfully named Bibliothecae Woogianae, was sold at auction in Dresden in 1755, and as you would expect was largely theological in content, though there were works on history, philosophy, economics and medicine – it can be viewed here

Our example is unfortunately slightly cropped, losing the name of the designer and engraver, there is a better image here which shows both names. The bookplate was designed by Wernerin (probably Anna Maria Werner) and engraved by C.F. Boetius. It is, unfairly in my view, described by Hardy as “perhaps the most gloomy book-plate that it ever entered into the mind of man to conceive. A skeleton sits upon a coffin, or a coffin-shaped tomb, holding in his right hand a pair of scales and in his left a scythe; in the lighter balance of the scales is a scroll, bearing the inscription; ‘Dan v.25, Mene Tekel;’ in the background we see monuments, Lombardy poplars or cypress trees, and a distant landscape. This uninviting picture is contained in a frame, inscribed, in a medallion above, ‘E. Bibliotheca Woogiana’, and below, Nominor a libra: liberatus ne levis unquam Inveniar, praesta pondere, Christe, tuo‘ – a motto in which the owner makes a play upon the derivation of his name from wage, the German for a weight or balance, and asks the bestowal of divine weight on the day of soul-weighing” (W.J. Hardy, Book-Plates, 1893, pages 95-96)