Creating a Bookplate

Before offering a free bookplate, you obviously have to create one. There are bookplates for sale, but they’re rather expensive, particularly if you have them personalized. With an ink jet printer it’s relatively easy to make your own.

Those with artistic abilities, or friends who have them, may want to draw or paint a bookplate. Computer-generated images can be used from your own photographs, but there are also images in the public domain that can be modified. My book cover was generated with Photo Shop Elements, using a public domain image, a Currier and Ives print I obtained online from the Library of Congress. I modified the book cover into a bookplate by simply removing the lower part of the cover (the part with my name on it), leaving the book title and the print image intact. This left enough space for a short inscription and my signature. You can see what it looks like above.

To print the bookplate, I used Picasa 3 which allows you to print four 3-1/2 X 5” bookplates on a single 8-1/2 X 11” sheet of peel-off, adhesive-backed mailing label stock. Any photo software will allow you to print multiple copies of an image on a single sheet. (Cutting the bookplates evenly is a lot easier of you have a paper cutter.)

The single-sheet mailing label stock is available from Office Depot in a box of 25 for just over $12.00. That means that you can print 100 bookplates for little more than twelve cents each, plus the cost of ink for your printer. Add forty-two cents postage and the price of an envelope, and the total cost of mailing the bookplate can be in the neighborhood of sixty cents..

That amount, in my opinion, is little enough for the author to assume if it means a book sale.

Jack McLaughlin